Malcolm Who? Blinking Point? What’s That?

Over at FishbowlNY, Aileen Gallagher points out the glaring problem with yesterday’s NYTBR: “How have we never heard of [Malcolm Gladwell] before?” And she’s right; just when you think the Review is finally getting the hang of its self-declared “news about the culture” agenda, and this week’s issue did give some reason for such thoughts, along comes a stunningly unfresh (though, as with most Rachel Donadio pieces, nevertheless spiffy) piece like this one…or Lee Siegel’s back-page parody of the letters publishers send with advance reading copies, which would’ve passed muster at Spy in 1986 if everybody else was out sick that day. (At least when the Styles section comes down with Jay McInerney nostalgia, it’s because he’s got a new book out right now…)

But I’m more interested in a disturbing trend in this week’s issue—reviewers’ sudden personal disclosures. To wit:

• Lucy Ellmann: “I should declare immediately that I resent and fear Christianity, not only for its sexism and incitement of violence but for its deadening effect on the imagintion.”

• Megan Marshall: “Like the narrator of Sigrid Nunez’s new novel, I was a scholarship student at an elite East Coast college during the Vietnam era, with a millionairess as my freshman roommate…”
• Toni Bentley: “I’m told—by my friends—that while I remain ageless, the rest of you are all rapidly aging.”
• Dave Itzkoff: “I can honestly admit I am scared as hell about the prospect of ever crossing paths with Stephen King.”
• Dick Teresi: “I heard the generator calling my name… Recently it has begun dispensing orders: ‘Kill, kill your publisher.’”

Amazingly, Pamela Paul doesn’t work any references to her startup marriage into her review of I Married My Mother-in-Law, considering that even Anthony Lewis slips a tiny first-person interlude into his front-cover look at At Canaan’s Edge. Of course, to give the Review its due, that Lewis piece is pretty damn brilliant, and there’s some good Supreme Court coverage inside, too, as well as Walter Isaacson’s game attempt at a provocative discussion of James Risen’s State of War. (Minor art criticism point, though: “Like an Impressionistic painting, it relies on dots of varying hues and intensity”? All pointillism may be Impressionist, but not all Impressionism is pointillist…) And if the Gladwell piece had run this time last year, it would have been something to crow about, too…but it didn’t.

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