In her weekly study of the Times Book Review, Alexis finds herself relieved to see that the Letters finally say what she's been thinking all along: gossip, elitism, and books just don't mix. (Oh? Fuck.) After the jump, Alexis smacks down the Foer smackdown, picks up on the NYTBR's new embrace of Seth Cohenisms, and immerses herself in the wreckage that is the review.

Letters

It looks like Lawrence F. Povirk of Richmond, VA woke up on the very, very wrong side of the bed the day he wrote this letter to the editor explaining why he has chosen to cancel his subscription to the NYTBR, and instead subscribe — at twice the price — to the Times Literary Supplement. Apparently, he is not abandoning the Book Review; it has abandoned him. He hates on the flashy covers, the self indulgent Up Front column, the gossipy Inside the List feature, and the snobbish elitism that is the Letters page. Your publication has gradually become less like the Book Review and more like People magazine, he writes. What pushed him over the edge, though, has been the Review s insistence on running accompanying author photos with the reviews. You know that feeling you get when someone says something really mean that you were thinking all along and then you re a bit relieved because then you don t have to say it? That s sort of how we feel right now.


Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
 By Jonathan Safran Foer
Reviewed by Walter Kirn

About a month ago, we were having trouble sleeping, tossing, turning, all the while wondering WHAT on earth the NYTBR was gonna do with Jonathan Safran Foer s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. Well, NYTBR, instead of striking while it was hot, as it were, when we all had Foer Fever, you waited too long and, well, we re a bit Jonathan Safran 4 ed out, to tell you the truth. Yawn. [Tumbleweed rolls through the bedroom]. To top things off, Walter Kirn s review says little of anything about anything. For the most part, Kirn uses Foer s new book as a platform to make broad generalizations about those crrrazy book-writing kids:

To Foer and his peers (who can't really be called experimental, since their signature high jinks, distortions and addenda first came to market many decades back and now represent a popular mode that's no more controversial than pre-ripped bluejeans), a novel is an object composed of pages tattooable with an infinite variety of nonsentence-like signs and signifiers.

And:

Once they've cracked open this overstuffed fortune cookie and pondered the symmetries, allusions and truths on the tightly coiled strip of paper, it will dawn on some readers that today's neo-experimental novels are not necessarily any better suited to get inside, or around, today's realities than your average Hardy Boys mystery. The avant-garde tool kit, developed way back when to disassemble established attitudes and cut through rusty sentiments, has now become the best means, it seems, for restoring them and propping them up. No traditional story could put forward the tritenesses that Foer reshuffles, folds, cuts into strips, seals in seven separate envelopes and then, astonishingly, makes whole, causing the audience to ooh and aah over notions that used to make it groan.

Get down from your high horse, Kirn, and instead of generalizing about the state of neo-experimental writers, and instead of wishing that Foer was actually J.D. Salinger and that the book he wrote was actually The Catcher in the Rye, review the fucking book. We dare you. Don't just "crack open" that fortune cookie and read "the tightly coiled strip of paper" eat it!


The Confederate Battle Flag: America s Most Embattled Emblem
 By John Coski
Reviewed by Diane McWhorter

Oh, hahaha cute, we thought to ourselves when we saw that Diane McWhorter quoted a Drive-By Truckers song in her review of John Coski s history of the controversy surrounding the Confederate flag. She writes: But reason, it turns out, is unequal to the duality of the Southern thing as the dialectics of Southern identity is called by Drive-By-Truckers, contemporary rock s interpreters of Dixie. But, That s about enough of that, now, is what we thought to ourselves when she quoted them a second time: According to the Drive-By Truckers: We aint never gonna change./We ain t doing nothing wrong. It s very quaint that this Pulitzer-Prize winning writer is making like Seth Cohen and quoting indie rock bands. But one time is quite enough twice seems a bit mannered.


The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death, the Most Devestating Plague of All Time
 By John Kelly
Reviewed by Mark Lewis

First off, we looooved the headline to Lewis s review of John Kelly s Plague-o-rama The Great Mortality. No, no scratch that we lurved it! Read this and tell us you are not in love:

Plague to World: Drop Dead.

Our plea, to whomever wrote it: Can we marry you?

Secondly, in early March, when Michiko Kakutani reviewed this book for the Times, we noted that it was a bit early for Kakutani to start throwing around the tsunami as metaphor and we found this sentence a bit on the too-much-too-soon side: On the tsunami of other social changes wrought by the Black Death, Mr. Kelly is more persuasive — if decidedly derivative, echoing what many scholars before him have observed.

So we thought it was a little odd that Lewis opened his review in the NYTBR with: The tsunami that scoured the Bay of Bengal inevitably prompted speculation that it was nature s revenge against humanity for spoiling the earth. He then uses the recent tsunami to transition into a discussion of the Black Death. Are y all trying to rile us up? Mmm? Because we think it s actually kind of hot. Do it again.

Give Me (Songs for Lovers)
 By Irina Denezhinkina
Reviewed by Leisl Schillinger

It s fine to get carried away every once in a while with the symbolism we understand that hottie writer Irina Denezhkina appeals to, um, contemporary literary tastes and inspires literary flights of fancy — but Schillinger takes the cute pop-culture metaphor perhaps one step too far. She writes: The scenes Denezhkina paints are vividly hued, juicy and mouth-wateringly acid literary Sour Patch Kids. Hmm We tried sucking on that sentence and it stuck to the top of our mouth and began to turn our stomach like a Milk Dud!