Defending the Hotties of Literary Criticism
So I was leafing through the NYTBR this weekend, and I was held up by the opening of Alex Kuczynski‘s review of A Model Summer, the debut novel from Paulina Porizkova:
“Most [books by supermodels] get bad reviews, either because they’re truly awful, like Naomi Campbell’s Swan, which won Seventeen magazine’s Super-Cheesy Award, or—call me a conspiracy theorist—because jealous book critics aren’t tall and gorgeous, so they try to wield their puny amount of power to establish some sort of moral order.”
Setting aside how this wounds me personally, I have to take that (much like Gawker did) as a challenge to the book reviewing community, many of whom are quite fabulous (although I have no idea how tall anybody is, really). I mean, this very issue of the Review has back-to-back contributions from Liesl Schillinger and Pamela Paul! (In the interest of gender equity, I’ll add that fellow contributor Christopher de Bellaigue is also pretty easy on the eyes, and though he’s not in this issue, it’s generally conceded at ‘Cat headquarters that poetry columnist David Orr is as cute as he is smart.) Who else do you know, especially outside New York City, that puts the lie to Kuczynski’s jocularly cruel generalization?
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