Coincidentally, on the morning of the funeral of beloved publisher Byron Preiss, who died in an accident so random, violent and horrific that it could have come from a John Irving novel, except that there was nothing at all funny about it, the New York Times published a review of Irving's new novel, UntilI Find You. It was a scathing attack by the Pulitzer Prize—winning critic Michiko Kakutani. The book, she said, is "bloated and lugubrious," "hideously overstuffed." It "feels as though it had been written on automatic pilot" and is full of "mind-numbing detail." Just in case you missed her point, Kakutani ended her review this way: the book is "a tedious, self-indulgent and cruelly eye-glazing read."
"It was an evisceration," one editor, not involved with the Irving project, suggested to me later that day. "Typical Michiko." (Paul Gray, writing in the subsequent Sunday NYTBR was no fonder of the book, but was somewhat gentler and far funnier.)
Kakutani, even her detractors will admit, is astonishingly well read. A 1976 Yale graduate (B.A., English), she has been at the Times since 1979, during which she earned a reputation for being iconoclastic, unpredictable and, on many occasions, nasty as principal daily book reviewer. She has lauded such relatively minor novels as Twelve by then 17-year-old Nick McDonell while trashing the works of such sacred cows as Philip Roth. Recently, she skewered Nick Hornby's A Long Way Down ("a cringe-making excuse for a novel") and Michael Cunningham's Specimen Days ("a clunky and precious literary exercise").
Never mind that the common publishing wisdom holds that reviews don't sell books; the type of high-end, literary titles Kakutani chooses are the opposite of review-proof. In fact, one executive recently admitted to me that his house embargoed an upmarket book precisely to keep it out of Kakutani's hands as long as possible. No wonder most publishers fear her, and that some even say—if off the record—that they "hate" her.
There's no doubt that Kakutani can be, to use her own kind of superlative, grotesquely nasty. (She can also be overly effusive in her praise, calling minor works "transcendent" and comparing writers like Donna Tartt to Euripides.) She often uses three vitriolic adjectives when one would do. Further, she appears to have undergone a humorectomy; there's rarely a whiff of wit in her putdowns, certainly nothing on the level of, say, Capote's take on Kerouac: "That's not writing, it's typewriting." Of course, publishers and, surely, authors, would prefer her to tone it down a bit, and, occasionally, to give everybody a break.
Still, it's not the job of the critic, in this or any other publishing climate, to prop up an ailing industry. And while Kakutani has racked up many, many enemies in the book world—and ruined the days, weeks, months and years of many an author—she is, in fact, what we all claim over and over the industry most needs: a passionate reader. And you know what they say about passionate readers: hell hath no fury like one of them scorned.
A disappointing book, in Kakutani's world, isn't just a dip in an author's creativity. It's a personal assault by a writer she trusted and admired, and maybe even previously praised. Like the 10-year-old boys who are meanest to the girls they like the best, Kakutani is a romantic, easily betrayed. And as the mothers of those 10-year old girls have been saying for generations, no one would say such mean things if they didn't really, really care.
