In this week's review of the New York Times Book Review, Intern Alexis has some itching questions for Jacob Weisberg on Tom Wolfe, burning confusion over Kinky Freidman's treatment of Jimmy Buffet, and overall discomfort with James Atlas' coverage of V.S. Naipaul. After the jump, her weekly guide to sounding like you know what a bookstore is.

I Am Charlotte Simmons By Tom Wolfe Reviewed by Jacob Weisberg

Mr. Weisberg pokes at, prods and ultimately cans Tom Wolfe s latest varmint on literature s manicured front lawn, I am Charlotte Simmons. Weisberg s review is witty and intelligent and his critiques of Wolfe are colorful and mean-spirited: But beyond revulsion at the vomit flecks on his spats, what comes through is mainly his familiar notion of social status, and the masculine quest for dominance, applied to the campus. Them s be fighting words. He ends the review with the flip-flopper statement: You may never put down a Tom Wolfe novel. But you never reread one either. And earlier on he also writes that the book grabs your interest at the outset and saps the desire to do anything else until you finish. If it s as awful as Weisberg claims, why can t he put it down? We don t get it. It s okay, though, Weisberg, we re not going to be too hard on you because you used the word cantilevered to describe sex and that s pretty ballsy. And we got that.

A Salty piece of Land
 By Jimmy Buffet
Reviewed by Kinky Friedman

Kinky Friedman opens the review: There is a fine line between fiction and nonfiction, and I believe Jimmy Buffet and I snorted it in 1976. We re not so sure that Kinky has ceased, um, snorting that line, though He goes on to compare Jimmy Buffet (Yes, Mr. I like mine with lettuce and tomato/Heinz 57 and French fried potatoes ) to both Robert Louis Stevenson and Herman Melville, both fine purveyors of their own Margaritaville epics. He goes so far as to hint that just as Moby Dick languished in the whaling sections of libraries before it achieved wide acclaim, perhaps A Salty Piece of Land will undergo a similar process .? What we loved most about Friedman s review was his elegant, understated prose. With lines like a tangy tale, at times turbulent and unpredictable as the ocean, at times as wistful as the whitecaps on the waves and What makes the incredible so credible to the reader, what makes the old lighthouse shine again, is the spiritual savvy Buffet has gleaned from the beach of life as he s wandered in the raw poetry of time, Ol Kinky has proved himself a master of subtlety. Capping this review off as one of the more absurd reviews we ve read recently is, yup, you guessed it the accompanying photo of Jimmy Buffet. His mouth wide open, hootin and hollerin , it looks like someone has just punched Mr. Buffet in the stomach. Some designer was like, um, how about we just use this ridiculously weird photo in the mock up until we find a normal photo? and his or her boss was like, Okay, fine, just remember to find a normal photo before we put this to bed and then they forgot to find a normal photo. And then they were fired. And then Seth Mnookin wrote a book about it.

Magic Seeds
 By V.S. Naipaul
Reviewed by James Atlas

We didn t think we d say ever say this, but bring Toni Bentley back! We were kind of grossed out by Zoe Heller s review of her anal sex-a-thon, but that was until James Atlas put the image of the 72 year-old Naipaul writing (and thinking) about anal sex in our innocent little heads. Fortunately, James Atlas is as equally repulsed as we are: The sex scenes are ghastly. It s not that Naipual can t or couldn t pull off this most challenging of literary feats Here it s just creepy Naipaul dwells in alarming detail on the precise anatomical convolutions Yuck, yuck and yuck.

Seconds of Pleasure: Stories
 By Neil LaBute
Reviewed by Jennifer Egan

We were pleased with Jennifer Egan s scathing review of Neil LaBute s collection of short stories (it makes our job easier). In addition to claiming (multiple times) that LaBute aint no John Updike, she writes: In In the Company of Men, the misogyny was stomach-turning. Here, it s dull. As with any literary tic, you begin tuning out, only to discover there s not much else holding these stories up. Ouch! But what we did not appreciate, though, Ms. Egan, was how you totally gave away the plot twists and endings of each story! We know you didn t like the book, but still. It s not like we read or anything, but what if!? What IF?


Letters
Kitty Kelley responds to Jonathan Bush s Nov. 7 letter to the editor condemning the NYTBR for reviewing her recent tell-all, The Family: The Real Story of the Bush Dynasty. Things were all well and good and we were all, You tell him, Kitty! until she got a little too self-righteous for us: Bush claims I defamed the memory of his parents, yet most readers admire the depiction of Prescott and Dorothy Bush in the book. Although Prescott, like his brother James Smith Bush, had a serious drinking problem, Jonathan Bush should understand that alcoholism is a disease, not a disgrace.