24th
The NYTBR has published a counterpoint, by Book Review editor Gregory Cowles, to Michiko Kakutani’s evisceration of Jonathan Lethem’s new novel Chronic City. Cowles writes approvingly, of a passage in the book, that it contains:
a wonderfully slippery list of references, at once dense and daft, as if Susan Sontag had written alternate lyrics to the R.E.M. song “It’s the End of the World as We Know It.” Werner Herzog, Monte Hellman, Norman Mailer, Frederick Exley! Birthday party, cheesecake, jelly bean, boom!
Indeed, it seems as though the very things that gall Kakutani—the novel’s pretentiousness, portentousness, and self-importance—are the things that Cowles loves about Chronic City. So then, I suppose, the question becomes, do I want to read Kakutani’s version of literature or Cowles’s? And I suspect, in this case at least, it’s Kakutani’s that I will find more fulfilling.
