This Review Reads Like a Slap in the Face
(Boy, I Love It When the Headlines Write Themselves)

Emily Eakin (NYTBR) takes on Stanley Crouch's The Artificial White Man, and though she acknowledges that "many of [its] ideas deserve serious consideration," she also complains, "It is frustrating that so frequently they must be extracted from writing that is sloppy, imprecise and crude." Or, to put it another way, "Unencumbered by conventions of logic and usage, he splatters the page with great gobs of vivid but impenetrable prose, awash in mixed metaphors and murky generalizations."

Eakin also suggests, "Crouch is too smart and too original a thinker not to be held to the same high standards for which he has relentlessly agitated." Every other review of The Artificial White Man (not that I found a lot) falls within a narrow spectrum defined by that last Eakin quote. The consensus seems to be, "Gee, Stanley's pretty clever; it's a shame he can't keep his shit together." Stefan Beck (New Criterion) takes the most positive tack, suggesting that "reading his essays is like having a cant-free conversation with a clever, passionate, albeit frustrating, friend." Anthony Walton (WaPo) thinks "the work and its rhetoric are by turns ferociously intelligent, homespun, hortatory and hectoring" and advises, "If he will keep his attention fixed on the whale, and not on demonstrating his skill with the harpoon, there is no telling what he might haul in." And Harry Siegel (Weekly Standard, reprinted in New Partisan) tags Crouch as a "minor celebrity and professional crank," but adds that "when he bothers he’s amongst our finest critics." Of the book, he writes, "Too often he comes unhinged, sounding weirdly like the thuggish rappers he lambastes." Crouch himself may have written in to complain about that one; if it's him, he seems to have learned how to conduct himself online since the time he might have dropped by to give me a piece of his mind...

Personally, I think Eakin's closer to the truth when she goes after Crouch for being "sloppy, imprecise and crude," and that his originality is overrated. If I didn't know better, I'd say he was getting an slightly bumpier version of the intentional walk Armstrong Williams got from Paul Begala and Robert Novak on Crossfire (as Frank Rich observed), with one or two strikes thrown just to make the game look lively. But that's too pat a solution--and so the truth must be that all these people find something in all that tortured prose. But what...and what keeps them from spotting it in books and articles by people who know how to write clear sentences?