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Reviewing the Reviewer: Kakutani on My Life
By Chris Fara1
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Michiko Kakutani is a scribbler who writes about those rectangular things that people look at when they want to learn something. They’re called books, and she seems to have opinions about a lot of them. In her career at The New York Times, she has assaulted such hard covers as those written by Al Gore, Hillary Clinton, and not surprisingly, former President Clinton himself. Last week’s front page review of My Life hardly trumped the buzz on the streets, but it did spawn multiple pseudo-news stories around what was already indeed a pseudo-news story. According to Bob Somerby of The Daily Howler, Kakutani“never has shown any sign of knowing about the political issues involved in such books.” And while her latest piece was executed with precisely the amount of thought that one would expect from a writer with a 956 page memoir on their hands and a deadline, it’s not just her blatant skimming that makes her front page debut as intolerable as she claims to have found Clinton’s book.
In a day and age when The New York Times bounces between bipartisanship and bullshit, right-wingers and other stubborn critics still call out The Times for its lefty stance. But such slander can only be justly slung at the op-eds and book reviews. True blue southpaw partisan reporting is tough to find outside of these sections, regardless of what conservative commentators “prove” with their sound bytes and snippets. The truth is that the truth typically falls just left of the middle, and that many book reviewers and opportunity editorialists left the truth some time ago.
So on one hand it's odd to see Kakutani be so harsh with the most liberal president of the past 20 years. Then again, Kakutani is certainly known for helping The New York Times maintain its righteous and snobby reputation. It wouldn’t be right if all the news that’s fit to print didn’t bat some highbrows at its own readers every now and then. Kakutani wasted no time in her general condescension last week; she slipped the word “Pastiche” right into her headline. The rest of her piece is flooded with repetitive descriptions, and even another “pastiche,” which is NY Times language for “Even after reading this baloney you won’t know why she used this word.” Maybe it was featured on her desk calendar that Sunday.
Most people would agree that Bill Clinton is a cocky and confident fellow. That’s what a lot of Democrats love about him, and just about what all Republicans loathe about him. Michiko Kakutani has also found this to be true, not only of the man, but about the sections of his book that she cracked open. Ignoring the other name-calling that she engaged in, which is indeed appropriate if she really hated the thing, she did cater to Clinton clichés about eight times in her review. In case you didn’t know, certain things about Bill Clinton, and his book, are apparently, “self-conscious,” “self-indulgent,” “self-inflicted,” “self-serving,” “self-absorbed,” and “self-excavated,” while in the book itself “emerges a self-portrait that is not all that different a Bill Clinton from the one the public has already come to know.” Judging from Kakutani’s criticism, one might even come to the conclusion that he was writing an autobiography about himself.
Kakutani hits the literary newcomer with even more gripes about the content. She rips him for not discussing some newly pressing issues like the current growing terror threat, which is a matter that will hopefully be included in the ghost-written memoirs of George W. Bush. She doesn’t like it when he gets into presidential small-talk about things like “speeches” and “voters,” and even employs her best coffee shop rhetoric to attack the pages wasted on “small-bore initiatives like school uniforms and teenage smoking.” Fuck those kids and their doggone cigarettes.
Perhaps the most frustrating thing about the page-one appraisal is the lofty tone of the entire article. Kakutani writes, “of course” in the same tone that one could imagine Einstein saying, “of course E equals MC squared.” She doesn’t like that Clinton spent so much time “assailing right-wing enemies,” despite doing the same herself in several reviews of the moderate administration’s books.
My guess is that her review of My Life will turn as many people away from the bestseller as this article will from next Sunday’s New York Times. All she did was give insinuators and exaggerators like Tucker Carlson a chance to say that The Times hates Bill Clinton’s new book, which is obviously not the case since it’s doubtful that even one writer there has yet to read it cover to cover. Toward the beginning of her rant, Kakutani actually mentions that Bill Clinton wrote this book, “Not for the reader, but for himself.” Touche, Michiko, and I commend you on showing us all just how intellectual you are capable of being. I particularly enjoyed the reference to Virginia Kelly’s ten-year-old book, Leading With My Heart. Without that I would have surely missed what you were trying to say about Clinton - not to mention what you were saying about yourself.
It’s just like mom used to tell me: “If you have nothing good to say – then get a job at The New York Times Book Review." Between the hype, the relentless coverage, and the clichés surrounding the release of this book, it’s almost as if a reviewer didn’t have to read this one at all to come to her conclusions. Seems to me that with a degree, the right connections, the back cover of a book, and the type of bullshit that most kids master in high school, any one of us could spend a thousand words a week trashing what someone else put a lot of hard work into. Oh my God – I think I just did it myself.
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Chris FARA1 is a writer living in New York City. He can be reached at fara1andonly@netscape.net.
©
2004 Me Three