Reliable – and Otherwise – Old Hands in the Penny Press!

When you read as many magazines as I do, you quickly learn to tell the players without a scorecard. There are always newcomers on the scene, but there’s also a fairly small cadre of old-hand regulars who turn up wherever the money (and the readership) is good. These old hands can be relied upon to present us with the best stuff we’re likely to find in any given issue of any newspaper or magazine.

Except when they don’t, of course. Civilians unfamiliar with the rigors of a regular deadline can have no clear conception of how it can warp even a strong writer. Our front-line book-reviewers have it the worst in this regard: they’re bombarded with new titles every week, and in place of the calm and sometimes lengthy deliberation necessary to assess these new titles, they have the princely allowance of four days – four days during which they must also deal with the daily demands of pretentious neighborhood delicatessens, sultry French mistresses, and YouTube cat videos. As a result, even the best of them has been known to praise Alice Munro – time was short, they’re only human, the Dark Side beckoned (when they’re advised – perhaps by a sexy friend – to simply read faster, their responses can be unkind).

Regular writers for the brainier magazines have less excuse. In their case, most of their ‘pitches’ are accepted in loose, almost conversational terms – they have time, in other words, to pause, to consider, before they write their 3000 words. This is why they can be so good – as in Adam Gopnik’s piece for the 4 November New Yorker (rumor has it, that is – I’m a subscriber, so I won’t actually see that issue until some time in the new year) about the 50^th anniversary of the JFK assassination. The piece is called “Closer Than That,” and it’s a gem of beautiful, gently argumentative writing on the nature of assassination conspiracy theories:

This constant cycle of sense and speculation is not about to end. Josiah Thompson, one of the most rational of the skeptics, wrote once that “you pull any single thread, any single fact, and you’re soon besiege with a tangle of subsidiary questions.” And this is true: any fact asserted can be met with a counter-fact – some of them plausible, many disputed, most creating contradictions that are unresolvable. But this is not a fact about conspiracies. It is a fact about facts.

But over in The New Republic (whose books & arts coverage is getting bigger and better literally with every new issue), we encounter a baleful example of an old hand – this time the ordinarily-delightful Adam Kirsch – badly letting the side down. He turns in a long and very eloquent piece, yes, but it’s a piece singing the praises of the black hole monstrosity of the season: FS&G’s immense hardcover publication of the Zibaldone of Giacomo Leopardi. Kirsch took this 5000-page thing home (in the mail it comes in a wooden crate, like a zoo animal) and curled up with it … he started reading and sifting through the notes and crackpot jottings that Leopardi did during one blessedly contained period in his life in which he decided to write down every single thought he had about anything, in the random order in which those thoughts occurred to him. Leopardi stopped generating the resulting manuscript – it is flat-out wrong to call it a ‘book’ in any sense that we understand the word, just as it would be wrong to call the Amazon rainforest a ‘garden’ – as soon as he regained his senses (he went on to become a critically important poet, although when Kirsch refers to him as “the greatest modern Italian poet,” he’s forgetting somebody), and a team of editors at FS&G undertook the unimaginable task of translating and annotating into English a four-foot-tall stack of pages Leopardi should have used as kindling for a few winters.

Such books create a necrid momentum toward being reviewed. Commissioning editors feel a silent whispering from them, and they begin casting around for likely reviewers. In this case, they tend to think the ideal reviewer should be a) a fast, strong reader, b) conversant in modern European history and literature, and c) if possible, able to read either the Italian in which the Zibaldone was written or the French in which its most important previous translated edition was written.

All of these things are wrong. The ideal reviewer for the Zibaldone is the one who refuses the job. This is not a book that can be reviewed, because this is not a book. It’s not even a notebook in any useful sense of that word, since typical published notebooks are characterized at least as much by their omissions as their concentrations. The Zibaldone omits nothing at all. It’s not a composition: it’s a weather front.

But when a reviewer commits the sheer amount of time necessary to plow through this new English-language edition and its longer-than-most-books Notes section, that reviewer practically volunteers to become Patty Hearst. The trusty search for patterns becomes, after hundreds of pages devoted to improperly parsed irregular Greek verbs, a squalid struggle for mere mental survival. Kirsch starts out valiantly asking “What, then, are the relations that bind together the many particulars treated in this vast composition?” But this isn’t a vast composition – it’s 466 vast compositions, none having any connection to the others. And there aren’t ‘many particulars’ here – there are millions of particulars, coming at the poor reviewer in batches that can stretch for a thousand pages at a time. Unless the critic is very, very careful (and regularly fortifies himself with Regency romances), Stockholm Syndrome sets in. This monstrosity can drive even the best of readers right to the edge of the madness that possessed Leopardi while he was writing it. Kirsch has clearly – although one must hope temporarily – succumbed when he mentions “the intellectual tension of the Zibaldone.”

Intellectual tension, in a miscellany that’s nearly 5000 pages long. We must pray that The New Republic’s Isaac Chotiner sends Kirsch on a long Caribbean cruise.