Michiko Kakutani Gets Critiqued

Michiko Kakutani recently embarked on her 25th year as a New York Times book critic, and it's gotten to the point that when her name is mentioned in print, you can see the smoke rising from the page. The late Susan Sontag complained, "Her criticisms of my books are stupid and shallow and not to the point." Salman Rushdie referred to her as "a weird woman who seems to feel the need to alternately praise and spank." Most notoriously, last year Norman Mailer called Kakutani, who is of Japanese descent, a "one-woman kamikaze" and a "token" minority hire.

Those who rip her are usually authors she has ripped, and their indignation often muddies their logic. Certainly Mailer's insinuations, in addition to being boorish, are unsupportable. It should be clear to anyone who has read Kakutani's reviews that she has an estimable intelligence; she backs this up with what must be many real or virtual all-nighters in which she digests every word ever published by the writer under review. She takes books seriously, a valuable and ever-rarer trait. Furthermore, in my observation, she is more or less right in her judgments most of the time. (I slightly knew Kakutani when we were undergraduates at Yale about 30 years ago but have not spoken to her since.)

But the sour-grapes sniping from spurned authors should not obscure the fact that Kakutani is a profoundly uninteresting critic. Her main weakness is her evaluation fixation. This may seem an odd complaint—the job is called critic, after all—but in fact, whether a work is good or bad is just one of the many things to be said about it, and usually far from the most important or compelling. Great critics' bad calls are retrospectively forgiven or ignored: Pauline Kael is still read with pleasure even though no one still agrees (if anyone ever did) that Last Tango in Paris and Nashville are the cinematic equivalents of "The Rite of Spring" and Anna Karenina. Kakutani doesn't offer the stylistic flair, the wit, or the insight one gets from Kael and other first-rate critics; for her, the verdict is the only thing. One has the sense of her deciding roughly at Page 2 whether or not a book is worthy; reading the rest of it to gather evidence for her case; spending some quality time with the Thesaurus; and then taking a large blunt hammer and pounding the message home.

*****

The qualities most glaringly missing from Kakutani's work are humor and wit. Maybe in an attempt to compensate, she writes one or two parody reviews a year: of a book about swinging London in the voice of Austin Powers, of a Bridget Jones book in the voice of Ally McBeal, of Benjamin Kunkel's novel Indecision in the voice of Holden Caulfield, of Truman Capote's recently discovered novella in the voice of Holly Golightly. Talk about cringe-making. They are so awful, from start to finish, that you cannot avert your eyes, much as you would like to.