Maslin Watch: Boys Life

The skirt-chasing jerk at the center of Kyle Smith's first novel is self-centered, cynical, royally obnoxious at some times and soggily sincere at others. Of course these attributes are actually selling points among commercial novels about the dating woes of hyperadorable young women. If men deserve equal time in this inch-deep genre, Mr. Smith earns his place with an unstoppable string of glib but hilarious wisecracks. He's a whole lot funnier than he deserves to be.

If he's "funnier than he deserves to be," can he really be said to have "earn[ed] his place"? Well, maybe he earned it by dint of hard labor, I suppose, but the two concepts still clunk together uncomfortably for my tastes. And perhaps somebody should explain to Janet that Kyle Smith isn't necessarily the "skate-chasing jerk" he writes about, so that the character could be a jerk but Smith could be a reasonably nice guy who deserves to be funny.

From that inauspicious lead, it's on to Janet's prize technique of reviewing by quoting a lot.

First she quotes from the book jacket, so she can compare Smith's bio to that of the protagonist, Tom, then from the novel itself in heavy dollops. (In my short time on the Maslin Watch, I've noticed she especially loves to do this with first-person narratives.) Then a cute trick--she quotes Tom as saying, "No one's ever going to accuse you of not having read the book if your review is a valentine," and proceeds from there:

Proof that Love Monkey has been read: this effervescent if occasionally sophomoric novel winds up curdling over one serious misjudgment. The story's time span includes Sept. 11, 2001, and has a cynicism-free account of journalists scrambling to make sense of what they've seen. But then a day or two passes, and Tom essentially forgets all about this. He's back to worrying about his career and his sex life, but it's not that easy. The book, thus sobered, never successfully gets back onto a lighthearted track.

Now, I haven't seen Love Monkey yet, though my friends at Morrow swear I'm going to love it. But it seems to me that it's entirely reasonable to not even try to get back on a lighthearted track after 9/11. After all, many of us, especially in New York, did quickly return to our usual worries about work and sex only with this not-so-vague existential dread hanging over our city lives. But whether that's what Smith was going for and Maslin missed it, or whether Maslin is correctly spotting a failed attempt to merge fictional plotlines with non-fictional events, well, I guess I'll find out later. The cute lead-in, with its attempt at snappy banter, doesn't particularly endear me to her interpretation, but maybe that's a gut reaction I need to get past.

At this point, though, she drops Kyle Smith abruptly, with just the flimsiest of transitions to her next target: "On a big expense account and a lucky day, Tom Farrell might make his way into City, the restaurant around which Kurt Wenzel's second novel, Gotham Tragic revolves."

After the City scene has been sufficiently set, we learn that Kyle, the writer-protagonist of Wenzel's first novel, Lit Life, is back in the center of things. (Brief digression: I wouldn't call Lit Life "extremely winning," as Maslin does, but I don't disagree with the overall sentiment; it was a great example of a social comedy that, by not overshooting itself, hit its targets squarely.) Then it's on to plot synopsis, this time with only a few quotes, and just a tiny sliver of outright opinion ("Mr. Wenzel's social satire isn't that acute, but he clearly knows whereof he speaks"). All of which culminates in another 9/11 reference, this one a fairly weak pun involving ice sculptures and meltdowns.

Now, if this is a harbinger of how the new, "improved" Times book coverage might handle fiction, I wouldn't automatically call it a bad thing. The books seem to have been given exactly the amount of attention, in terms of column inches, they deserve, and the thematic connection between the two would appear to justify the juxtaposition in a single review. The actual reviewing needs work, but there was at least a significant criticism of Love Monkey, snarky intro put aside for the moment. In retrospect, I'm actually a bit surprised Maslin's Monday review wasn't about Peter Robinson and Ian Rankin, given the amount of attention she ended up paying to Robinson under the pretense of reviewing Rankin. Anyway, we'll see if this trope continues with any sort of regularity...