Reviewing The Reviewers Essay, Research Paper

Jobs for the boys and girlsAn existential moment in the Spectator almost did for this week’s column. Sebastian Smee had taken on Reviewery, by Christopher Ricks, and was feeling anxious. “Placed in the somewhat invidious position of having to review a book of reviews entitled Reviewery – a book which includes, among other things, reviews of other people’s collections of reviews – one’s conscience forces one to ask at the outset, Why? What use, all this criticism, all these reviews?” Large questions indeed, but there it is, and plough on we must. Last week’s moment of consensus centred on nuns, and Mary Laven’s Virgins of Venice: Enclosed Lives and Broken Vows in the Renaissance Convent. The subtitle gives you the general idea, but Laven had done a superb job of elaborating, according to enthusiastic reviewers. Michele Roberts confidently asserted that it “will delight anyone who loves women, history and Venice. That probably means most of us.” For Kate Chisholm in the Sunday Telegraph, there were even wider implications: “The Liz Hurleys and Britney Spears’s of this world are missing a vital trick,” she wrote. “Long, rippling skirts and demure veils have an allure that no expanse of thigh or bosom can match.” In the Daily Telegraph, Artemis Cooper’s verdict was more straightforward: “in the way she writes with such profound empathy about their lives, Laven has released the voices of the nuns of Renaissance Venice.” Carol Ann Lee’s biography of Anne Frank’s father, The Hidden Life of Otto Frank, was almost as widely reviewed as Laven, and garnered some equally delighted readers. Linda Grant, in the Daily Telegraph, hailed Frank as “an ordinary husband, father and businessman who tried to live a good life, to do the best by and for everyone. In Yiddish, such a person is called a mensch, which simply means a human being. It is the highest accolade one Jew can give to another.” For Rachel Cooke, that accolade was slightly tempered. “He was a father first, and a father last, and not even the most determined biographer can change that,” she wrote in the Observer. It’s an interesting, if hardly startling, point that Venetian nuns were largely despatched to female reviewers. The business of heavyweight cultural criticism is a rather more masculine affair, and thus Will Self was summoned to pronounce on Michael Bracewell’s The Nineties: When Surface Was Depth for the New Statesman. His response was largely admiring, but he also lamented a missed trick in characteristically vivid terms. “There was a thesis on decadence pure and simple to be developed in the 90s,” he commented, “but Bracewell, I feel, has suckled too long at the tricksy teats of postmodernism, slurping down the infantilising formula of relativism, to be the one to write it.” And with that image in mind, on to Roger Scruton’s review of the two Nietzsche biographies in the Times. Rudiger Safranski’s Nietzsche: A Philosophical Biography got off quite lightly as “thorough, readable and respectable”, although adding “little to our understanding of Nietzsche’s thinking, and nothing to our understanding of the man”. But Scruton reacted less equably to Joachim Kohler’s attempts to prove “the glaringly obvious fact that Nietzsche was queer” in Zarathustra’s Secret. Not so glaringly obvious to Scruton. However, “inspired by Kohler, I have now entirely rewritten my biography of Kant, so ensuring that Critique Of Pure Reason, like Thus Spake Zarathustra, will be required reading on every course of gay studies”.