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CounterPunch
December
21, 2002
Celebrity Hunting:
The "Shorthand of Experience"
by ANIS SHIVANI
The Autograph Man.
By Zadie Smith.
Random House, 2002. 347 pages. $24.95.
Two years ago, Zadie Smith made one of the most
auspicious modern literary debuts for a young writer. At only
twenty-four, she came out with White
Teeth (Random House, 2000), a London compendium
of multicultural zaniness resolving itself in humor, harmony,
and hip conundrums. The fundamentalist terrorist plot in that
novel comes to nothing. It was Rushdie minus the terror, or
even fright. Readers loved it, although the Booker judges perhaps
felt that too much of this sumptuous multiculturalism gave the
appearance of having been painlessly tossed off. Events since
then have proved that two other books published around the same
time, Michel Houellebecq's apocalyptic Atomised (Heinemann,
2000) and Joe Eszterhas's blustery American
Rhapsody (Knopf, 2000), had a better grasp
of the shape of things to come in the new millennium. Now we
have Smith's second novel, subjected to the usual merciless lashings
about the sophomore jinx. Rather than the second novel failing
to live up to the ravenous potential of the first, what has actually
happened is that Smith has faithfully followed up on the first
one and met a dead-end. (She has accepted a fellowship at Radcliffe,
and denies any intention to write another novel.) The Autograph
Man suffers from the same weaknesses as White Teeth,
as great and entertaining as that first effort was. But not
having the saving graces of White Teeth's careening and
wildly looping plot, Smith's weaknesses are more evident to see
here.
There is no doubt that Smith is a great
and unusual talent. Her Dickensian capacity to capture the tones,
accents, and attitudes of different classes of people--particularly
the at-loss young and unmoored minorities--has been well-noted.
In The Autograph Man, she borrows from Nick Hornby's
immaculate rendering of the perpetually uncommitted young man,
to give it a different, well-meaning twist. (In both her books,
she almost seems more comfortable inhabiting the male mind and
body, rather than the female, although she is no slouch with
the female form either.) She gets popular culture, in
a way that only a young writer probably can. Her vast capacity
for comedy cannot but create enormous affection for her. If
the world ran according to Smith's sensibility, there would never
be war, let alone genocide. If Dickens saw class difference
as secondary to universal love, then Smith also commits herself
religiously to a love that knows no particularist difference.
As with Dickens, this is both her saving grace and fatal flaw.
Given these predilections of hers, and
given how the different cross-currents of multicultural expression
end in a higher synthesis in White Teeth, what might we
have expected for her second novel? It seems that Smith is naturally
resistant to a dark turn. In White Teeth sinister machinations
were shown up to be harmless, mindless protests against what
can ultimately be interpreted as the unconquerable, benevolent
republic of egotists. Having shown her hand--shown what she
can do to accomplish pleasant narrative closure even with the
dark twists of mind of the momentarily illiberal--it seems that
there is nowhere for Smith to go except iteration of the all-too-familiar
stylistic sense of benign atomized disorder. There is good cheer
all around, as much as in White Teeth, but in The Autograph
Man it becomes a bit too depressing to bear. In this suddenly
declinist era, both physical and perceptual, Smith has offered
a novel that brings us down because it works in getting us up!
We resent having to smile--if not laugh--repeatedly at the characters'
sense of wholeness in their present world and confidence in what's
to come.
This book is deeply at odds with present
reality, so much so that the postmodern scaffolding itself--almost
a gratuitous add-on--assumes an aura of imposition external to
the writer's deepest drives. She seems to have needed the postmodern
kinks for her own distraction while writing the book. The multiculturalist
linkages seem forced and necessitated, rather than innovative--they
assume the proportion of clichés. So do the kabbalistic
structural overlays introduced, it seems, to make the narrative
more complex than its content can withstand. The narrative germ
is so protean that much more could have been done with it--but
we get the sense that Smith is limiting herself, almost disdainfully
telling her critics and readers: See, I can be satisfied with
a less than superhuman effort! I can try to live myself down.
We wonder in the end if this book is not a pleasant appraisal
of her own youthful global celebrity. Alex-Li Tandem is the
hero of the book through whose prism Smith fails to fully reflect
the dark side of celebrity in the age of globalization. In the
end the problem is that Alex-Li is not enough "of this generation
who watch themselves."
We first meet twelve-year-old Alex--the
son of a Jewish mother and Chinese father--in the company of
what will be his lifelong friends, Adam Jacobs (a black Jew with
parents who came from Harlem) and Mark Rubinfine, who ends up
becoming a rabbi. They all live in the middle-class north London
suburb of Mountjoy. Alex's father, Li-Jin, is taking the children
to a wrestling match between Big Daddy and Giant Haystacks at
the Royal Albert Hall. Already, the children are making the
International Gestures for vomiting and masturbation. Smith
plays this gig all the way through the book, until we have a
veritable dictionary--or two--of International Gestures. This
gets tiresome, but Smith seems compulsive about it. The notion
of "gesture" and what that might symbolize in all its
different meanings in a culture of surface and imitation is repeatedly
introduced, but the full extent of its potency never explored.
We take our cues for all our actions--including our most profound
gestures, like falling in and out of love, having faith in God
and losing it--from a cultural apparatus that provides ready-made
symbols for our choosing. That's obvious enough, but it is mostly
presented as it is, without a sense of what might lie beyond
borrowed gestures. It is in that respect that the characters
fall apart, the more we get exposed to them.
Alex's father is at the moment of introduction
living his own gestural life. He is dying of a brain tumor (at
the age of thirty-six), but has chosen not to reveal this fact
to his family, so that he can enjoy the rest of his short time
with Alex without this dread coming between them. Two years
ago, a Chinese doctor in Soho has told him that he suffers from
the tumor because he loves his son too much: "Li-Jin was
loving Alex in a feminine way instead of a masculineThis had
caused the disturbance." This is no mere gratuitous remark.
This is a book of superficial opposites--the premise of multiculturalism
being, of course, that there are no real opposites, and that
even if there are superficial differences everything can be assimilated
into a life-giving whole. In Alex's case, it is as if his father
has to die--literally sacrifice himself--in order for Alex's
adult self to be redeemed. But here perhaps we give Smith too
much credit for conception. Alex's entire life is determined
by the events at the moment of climax in his first consummated
instance of celebrity hunting. As Alex and his company wind
their way through the crushing crowd to meet Big Daddy and get
his autograph, Alex's father suddenly collapses and dies. Before
that, however, Alex's father has taken under his wing another
Jewish kid named Joseph Klein, who is already an autograph hunter
of significance at his tender age.
When the prologue is over, we find Alex
at twenty-seven, a professional autograph man, living in a perpetual
Hornby-defined funk, having an off-and-on relationship with Adam's
sister Esther, often drunk or stoned, and generally being clueless
about where he has come from and where he is going. The child
collector prodigy Joseph has become an insurance man bored with
his job, while Alex--as if to earn his father's affection in
eternity--has taken over the mantle of celebrity hunting from
Joseph. Alex's biggest crush is on Kitty Alexander, an elusive,
second-grade Russian-Italian Hollywood actress of the 1950s,
whose film The Girl From Peking Alex considers the greatest
movie ever made. Alex has been writing weekly fan letters to
Kitty for thirteen years, without getting a single reply. Starting
with the standard fan request for an autograph, he proceeds to
inventing touching little vignettes of what Kitty might be feeling
and thinking, a steady flow of which he keeps up during his entire
adulthood (for example: "Dear Kitty, When behind a young
man on a bus, she finds herself staring at his neck. The urge
to touch it is almost overwhelming! And then he scratches it,
as if he knew."). Although Alex's mother Sarah is not in
the picture at all, Alex's friendships from childhood and his
environment from then are all completely intact. Nobody has
moved away or inward! Alex and his friends and professional
colleagues carry on pleasant banter throughout, and there is
nothing really violent or cataclysmic that ever happens (that's
for American culture and American novels). As in other comic
British novels, lots of people get very drunk, but it's all speedily
erased.
The crisis in Alex's life appears when
Kitty finally responds. As it happens, just at that time Alex
has been invited to the Autographicana Fair in New York, and
he chooses to go to this show, and possibly look up Kitty in
New York, instead of staying back in Mountjoy for Esther's pacemaker
replacement surgery. In the ensuing escapades, Alex will never
be able to get away from the feeling that all his gestures are
preconceived--borrowed from well-worn movies and television shows.
But before this happens, we are trained by Smith to accept as
natural Alex's diversionary dichotomizing tendency. This doesn't
present much difficulty, since we are already prone to view ourselves--when
we catch ourselves borrowing gestures from the products of spectacle--as
acceptably normal. Alex's Big Five List of fears is the first
one, and we notice that it consists entirely of frightening things
we're taught by TV and movies to be anxious about:
1. Cancer
2. AIDS
3. Poisoned Water System/London Underground Gas Attack
4. Permanent Neurological Damage (in youth, through misadventure)
5. Degenerative Brain Disease, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, Etc.
(in old age)
The fact that Alex should continue to
be so traumatized, above all by his father's death, well into
adulthood is a popular culture cliché of monumental proportions.
Smith could have used this idea to subvert popular culture's
presentation of what these traumas supposedly signify for our
mental health, but she chooses to remain within popular culture's
boundaries. Although the first part of the book, where we move
through Alex's desultory life as an autograph man before the
Kitty thunderbolt strikes, works its way upward in chapter headings
from the kabbalistic foundation of Shechinah or Presence to its
top at the Crown or Nothingness, we fail to see what this has
to do with the flatness of Alex's emotional state. Smith shows
she can have some fun with chapter headings, reminders of earlier
centuries' protocol, and one of the most entertaining exercises
is to go back at the end of chapters to see how the encapsulations
eccentrically correlate with the events of the individual chapters.
But this serves no discernible artistic purpose. The same with
the intersection of the tetragrammaton to separate narrative
sections in the prologue, in both Hebrew and English letters.
Smith's enfolding exercises are done for their own sake. The
entire book is an exercise in listing opposites--the dominant
key here being things that are supposed to be Jewish and Goyish--even
as their comic reconciliation is implied. Multiculturalism comes
off as just about as mystical as the kabbalah--and just as insubstantive.
Hornby's males obsessively list things, although not those consisting
of oppositions, to make the serious point to themselves about
their immaturity. Smith's males make lists of opposites as if
to laugh off their own insubstantiality, while bowing to the
lists' talismanic omnipotence.
Smith seems to have become insecure about
developing her own unique categorizations (Is this what multiculturalism
leads to in the end? How can we tell if this is Smith's smart
move to outmaneuver multiculturalism's imposed oppositions, or
her succumbing to it?). The extended epigraph preceding the
novel, by the comedian Lenny Bruce, goes like this:
Dig: I'm Jewish. Count Basie's Jewish.
Ray Charles is Jewish. Eddie Cantor's goyish. B'nai B'rith
is goyish; Hadassah, Jewish.
If you live in New York or any other
big city, you are Jewish. It doesn't even matter even if you're
Catholic; if you live in New York, you're Jewish. If you live
in Butte, Montana, you're going to be goyish even if you're Jewish.
Kool-Aid is goyish. Evaporated milk
is goyish even if the Jews invented it. Chocolate is Jewish
and fudge is goyish. Fruit salad is Jewish. Lime Jell-O is
goyish. Lime soda is very goyish.
All Drake's Cakes are goyish. Pumpernickel
is Jewish and, as you know, white bread is very goyish. Instant
potatoes, goyish. Black cherry soda's very Jewish, macaroons
are very Jewish.
Negroes are all Jews, Italians are all
Jews. Irishmen who have rejected their religion are Jews. Mouths
are very Jewish. And bosoms. Baton-twirling is very
goyish.
Underwear is definitely goyish. Balls
are goyish. Titties are Jewish.
Celebrate is a goyish word. Observe
is a Jewish word. Mr. and Mrs. Walsh are celebrating
Christmas with Major Thomas Moreland, USAF (ret.), while Mr.
and Mrs. Bromberg observed Hanukkah with Goldie and Arthur
Schindler from Kiamesha, New York.
Smith is able to do nothing funnier in the rest of the book.
Compare Lenny Bruce's jokes with Alex's later commentary:
Jewish books (often not written by Jews),
Goyish books (often not written by Goys); Jewish office items
(the stapler, the pen holder), Goyish office items (the paper
clip, the mouse pad); Jewish trees (sycamore, poplar, beech),
Goyish trees (oak, Sitka, horse chestnut); Jewish smells of the
seventeenth century (rose oil, sesame, orange zest), Goyish smells
of the seventeenth century (sandalwood, walnuts, wet forest floor).
As with the best of anything else in
popular culture, the original always seems to have inherent limits
of imitation. One-time exploration equals exhaustion. Smith
can keep making Jewish versus Goyish lists--Alex is writing a
book called Jewishness and Goyishness--and it won't add
anything to what we've quickly sensed, and laughed off. Perhaps
Smith is at a roadblock in her writing career--if we're to take
her at her word--because this sort of multiculturalist appropriation
only goes so far. She created a lot of inventive ethnic categories
in White Teeth, and she's borrowed a lot more in The
Autograph Man. What other weird combinations remain? And
if more can be come up with, what would be new about them?
Is there any advance in comic strategy?
On the surface, these Jewish-Goyish classifications make sense,
but if you think about it you could argue for any classification.
Alex's book on the subject is in crisis because he's suddenly
come to the realization that "Judaism itself[is] the most
goyish of monotheisms." And then, of course, you could
argue its opposite, depending on what symbols you choose to study.
You could fill the slots of the kabbalah, or your autograph-hunting
network, with any names and ideas that you choose. And it would
all make sense within its own zones of observance.
The use of the kabbalah as structuring
device is similarly hackneyed--to the extent that Harold Bloom
in his most recent book, Genius, has abused it. The frontispiece
of The Autograph Man is the "Kabbalah of Alex-Li
Tandem," which has Alex-Li Tandem for Presence, Muhammad
Ali for Foundation, Bette Davis for Eternity, John Lennon for
Splendour, Jimmy Stewart for Beauty, Fats Waller for Love, Franz
Kafka for Power, Virginia Woolf for Wisdom, Ludwig Wittgenstein
for Understanding, and the Crown blank. To sympathize with Jews
by borrowing the kabbalah, their least offensive and particularistic
religious contribution, has become an academic exercise now,
a clichéd writerly International Gesture to show affiliation
with the most multiculturally abused people of the twentieth
century. The kabbalah as strategy to declare hipness has just
become too banal.
Smith's comments about Jewishness and
the kabbalah come off as book knowledge--a small amount of research
will unmask these blank observations gloating as insider insights.
Anyone having grown up in the Jewish tradition would not speak
as Alex, Adam, Joseph, and Mark do. The episode about the four
rabbis in paradise ("One gazed and died, one became demented,
one cut the plants, and only one, Rabbi Akiva, survived unharmed")
is so well-known to anyone approaching even an introductory kabbalah
text that it strains credulity to think that it would be an item
of interest to Alex's friends. For a wonder-seeking multiculturalism,
every additional fact is a revelation. It is to establish one's
compassionate bona fides that one assumes the identity of a Jew
today.
Particularly if there is nothing at all
distinctly Jewish about the character. It is understandable
that Smith would choose as protagonist someone not with a traditional
career, since popular culture has a hard time dealing with this
reality. And to make the character conscious of his own irrelevancy
in the larger scheme of things frees us of the need to feel superior--about
the only emotional demand that popular culture makes of us.
Alex ponders about his smallness:
He was twenty-seven years old. He was
emotionally undeveloped, he supposed, like most Western kids.
He was probably in denial of death. He was certainly suspicious
of enlightenment. Above all, he liked to be entertained. He
was in the habit of mouthing his own personality traits to himself
like this while putting his coat on; he suspected that farm boys
and people from the Third World never did this, that they were
less self-conscious. He was still, still slightly thrilled by
the idea of receiving post addressed to him and not to his mother.
We all--at least the males--think like
this a lot of the time, and there's nothing to it. It's how
we live now. It's how we pretend not to be superior to anyone
else, especially those so remote that we can never see them.
If we get to the bottom of our identities (so pervasively defined
by popular culture), we might find nothing there--just as the
beautiful actress at the other end of the autograph-chasing letter,
or the actual content of the rule-making Jehovah, if hunted down
beyond its invisibility, might equally well disappoint.
Smith indiscriminately adores cultural
aphorisms of every sort, including Rabbi Rubinfine's Talmudic
riddles. This promiscuous affection holds back her growth as
a novelist able to reckon with things that cannot be listed as
mysteries. For Alex, equally indiscriminate in his affections,
we know the conundrum from the beginning of the book: Will Kitty,
once the inevitable encounter occurs, be able to make a man out
of him? The answer, it turns out, is not really. This is because
the essence of fame is to distance oneself from heedless fans.
When the distance between mortal and immortal gets bridged--occasionally--the
shock consists in seeing, for the first time, that even celebrity
is not beyond the compulsion to classify things into their well-known
opposites, beyond list-making to articulate disorders before
they have occurred, or beyond stating preferences to enjoy without
experience. Smith has shown in White Teeth that she doesn't
need to borrow from anyone to be riotously funny; but The
Autograph Man's secondhand feel doesn't take us beyond the
"desire network, historical flotsam" that autographs,
and writing that is theologically appreciative of pop culture
trivia, both signify. The vocabulary of the desire network,
when it infects personal relationships, has been explored with
a much sharper edge by other writers. To Esther's demand for
commitment, "Alex rolled a cigarette and listened as she
spoke the careful discourse of modern relationships--time apart,
reevaluation, my needs, your needs." Smith adds nothing
new to what we already understand about our borrowed discourse
in the most intimate of settings.
If Smith weren't to settle for taking
inspiration from the silencing language of postmodern non-choice,
she could escalate her prose from fine but indiscriminate description
to tragic inward opposition. Notice the subterranean pleasure
of roughness in so trivial a bit of description as an Italian
waiter making a run for Alex and Adam's table as soon as the
two are seated in their favorite cake shop because "[p]eople
in the center of the city were known to be callous and impatient."
Smith needs to build on this. We've known for a while that
"everything's a symbol of everything else." Alex knows
it too at a verbal level, but can't really let it get through
to his consciousness: "It is all a sort of horrible betrayal
of himself, of his whole life. Life is not just symbol, Jewish
or goyish. Life is more than just a Chinese puzzle. Not everything
fits. Not every road leads to epiphany. This isn't TV, Alex,
this isn't TV." As soon as he says that, however, Alex
realizes that he's "having an epiphany about the importance
of not having epiphanies." Except that what he's experienced
is so trivial--for a twenty-seven-year-old--that it's not in
the category of epiphany but an idea from TV.
Smith ultimately fails to deal with the
most powerful illusion of celebrity culture--that "famousness[can]
cheat Death of its satisfaction: obscurity." Her novelistic
manifesto can be deduced from Rubinfine's observations:
In his own small way he had wanted to
carry things forward. Like the continuity man on a film set.
At the time, this was an analogy that had not satisfied Adam,
who thought the call to the rabbinate should be entirely pure,
a discussion a man has with God. But God had never spoken to
Rubinfine, really. Rubinfine was simply, and honestly, a fan
of the people he had come from. He loved and admired them.
The books they wrote, the films they made, the songs they had
sung, the things they had discovered, the jokes they told. This
was the only way he had ever found to show it, that affection.
His childhood therapy had pinpointed the Rubinfine problem;
personal relationships were not his strength. He was always
happiest dealing with a crowd. The people of Mountjoy! The
people! He never expected to add anything to them, to the people,
never imagined he could offer any great rabbinical insight--he
hoped only to carry them for a short time. Between the rabbi
who came before him and the one who would come after.
These sentiments could easily have been
uttered by Alex too. And it is how Smith views her own novelistic
project. One possibility not explored by Smith is that if the
trivial obsessions gifted by popular culture were to be taken
away, more massive, dangerous, debilitating obsessions might
well take hold. And then, would it be a physical war of all
against all? In one sense, Alex's not growing out of his small
obsessions is a sign of growth--the only kind of growth that
postmodernist culture offers. The narrator's remark that "all
fandom is a form of tunnel vision: warm and dark and infinite
in one direction" stands alone, not making any demands on
the reader, as is the banal observation that "[t]he collector
is the savior of objects that might otherwise be lost."
The chapters of the section where Alex
visits New York and finds Kitty are labeled according to Zen
categories, not kabbalah: true multicultural harmony. Perhaps
it's only that Smith has run out of sefirot attributes for chapter
headings. The sense of living in a movie escalates in the New
York section, but it hardly bothers us. Smith hints funnily
at what might be the real motivation of the community of autograph
seekers (as of other virtual communities):
People Alex had met only virtually appeared
before him now in hideous material form: Freek Ullman from Philadelphia,
Albie Gottelmeyer from Denmark, Pip Thomas from Maine, Richard
Young from Birmingham. All these people now had their bodies,
their faces. He traded with them all, listened to them. They
needed to talk. Maybe the business itself was simply an excuse
for this need. Alex learnt of the dissatisfactions of wives
in towns he had never visited and never wanted to. The grade
averages of various children passed under review. Richard Young
told him he could never truly love a flat-chested woman, no matter
how kind she might be to him. A stranger called Ernie Popper
told him that most days he wished he were dead.
If you've ever experienced the surprise
of virtual community members sharing intimacies with near strangers,
rather than with family and neighbors, you can relate to this.
Again, however, this insight doesn't add up to, link up with,
anything. Like Rushdie's recent failed attempt to imagine New
York after living there, Smith seems to falter in the shoals
of American pop culture. Perhaps the only way to get it right
is if you've internalized it to the extent that it is neither
an object of affection nor derision. It becomes so much a frame
of mental reference that it dissolves into greater possibilities
without so much as notice.
In New York, Alex is supposed to meet
Honey Richardson, who's really Honey Smith, and resembles the
prostitute Hugh Grant was scandalously associated with, for an
autograph trade. Making no demands on Alex, Honey helps him
find Kitty. It turns out that Max Krauser--Kitty's fan club
gate-keeper, and as it turns out one-time short-lived husband,
although he is homosexual--has never shown Kitty any of the letters
Alex has written to her. Alex has heard from Kitty and got two
autographs in the mail a few days before his arrival in New York
only because Kitty has just then, for the first time, come across
some of his letters stashed away in Krauser's apartment. Alex
and Honey don't give up on the hunt for Kitty when Krauser obstructs,
and happen to bump into her during their frantic search in Brooklyn.
So now we're finally ready to meet Kitty. She is still beautiful,
but she tells Alex, "I am such a fan of yours," because
of the touching letters of his that she's read. As Kitty says,
"I am not so grand to ignore so many letters." Once
the celebrity admits mortal feelings of this kind, the charm
goes away. As with all other objects of worship, only distance
lends wonder. It is true that the fan gets turned off by the
knowledge that the celebrity is just as needy as the fan, but
at another level this insight is false. The fan can never have
the acclaim of a star.
Once the celebrity is removed from her
arena of performance, she becomes apparently equal to the spectators.
Kitty says about Alex's letters, "They are nothing of movies.
Nothing about that. They are just a woman, walking in the world.
This is beautiful." Kitty herself is laid-back about her
celebrity (but again, this has layers of mystery about it, since
it is easy to be cavalier about something that is irrevocably
in one's possession). Kitty says she hates the very word fan,
although her greatest fan of all--even greater than Alex--is
Krauser, who is so compulsive about having her all for himself
that he's started sending her stalking letters to keep her isolated,
but whom Kitty still doesn't want to let go. Had Kitty been
able to read Alex's letters from the beginning, Alex's obsession
wouldn't have developed to the extent that it does. Is the greatest
favor of the celebrity, then, to remain at a distance, in order
to provide her fans with the motivating obsession? The kernel
of truth in this irony undermines anything but a comic perspective
in Smith's handling of the whole subject of celebrity. When
Alex revisits Kitty his last night in town, without Honey, they
end up spending a chaste but charged night watching TV, just
as Alex has spent his one night together with Honey watching
TV: the "channel of history[where] the only history is
the history of Hitler," "the channel of entertainment,"
and the "channel of nostalgia."
Dependency becomes a contingent, two-way
street, when celebrity comes into direct contact with fan. Kitty
good-heartedly--and almost too readily--agrees to let Alex rescue
her from her financial difficulties by auctioning off her signed
memorabilia. Alex takes Kitty with her to England for a week,
succeeding in pulling in 150,000 pounds, thanks in part to a
false news report--probably coming from Max, of Kitty's death
on the day of the auction--that dramatically boosts the value
of the merchandise. Alex goes through dramatics (getting hopelessly
drunk, and being forgiven quickly by friends), afraid that Kitty
will take her own obituary poorly. But Kitty doesn't really
mind. Alex goes through dramatics again while fretting about
reciting the Kaddish on his father's Yahrzeit in front of everyone
he knows. But if there's one thing popular culture teaches us--both
celebrities and fans--it is how to handle performance anxiety.
Alex does well.
Smith has chosen a great subject, but
fails to explore its explosive implications. The meaning of
gestures in a culture of spectacle is merely stated, not ironically
extended and embellished. A more intelligent Nick Hornby is
occasionally in sight, but never pursued to his lair. The zone
of reality outside TV gestures, TV consolations, intimations
of TV love-making and breaking-up, remains the exclusive and
unseen purview of the writer at work. Perfunctoriness just doesn't
seem to be too much of a tragedy in the end for Smith. Her own
vision is distinctly goyish (comic) as she ostensibly talks about
Jewishness (tragedy). To Alex, the "distinctions between
coach and business class seemedworldly manifestations of the
goyish conception of heaven." The trouble is, Smith's own
vision of the world is a perfect goyish heaven, where nobody
clashes with anybody else's inviolable feelings. Gestures add
some style, but they are not really a betrayal. That's a pretty
bizarre conclusion for a hip writer of the twenty-first century
to own up to. In a way, Smith has succeeded only too well in
capturing the aura of fame, come so close to it in appreciative
terms that her value as unsentimental writer is compromised.
As they say to put you down, Smith has lately been watching
too many films.
Anis Shivani
studied economics at Harvard, and is the author of two novels,
The Age of Critics and Memoirs of a Terrorist. He welcomes comments
at: Anis_Shivani_ab92@post.harvard.edu
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December 10,
2002
Carol Norris
Help Wanted:
US Government Looking for a Few Qualified Applicants
Tom Gorman
With Liberators
Like These, Who Needs Conquerors?
Linda Heard
Spies,
Snitches and Eyes in the Sky
Josh Ruebner
Striking
with Impunity
Joanne Mariner
You Have
No Right to Remain Silent
December 9,
2002
Adam Engel
Great Expectations:
an Immodest Proposal
Roldan Tomasz
Suárez
What Really
Happened in Altamira Plaza?
Robert Jensen
Bob Woodward's
Bush Hagiography
William Hughes
Berrigan's
Final Warning
Uri Avnery
Why Does
the Leopard Change His Spots?
Netanyahu and Likud
Gary Leupp
Religious
Intolerance Then and Now
Hammond Guthrie
In a
Moment's Time
(for Philip Berrigan)
Resources:
100s of Links
About 9/11
CounterPunch:
Complete
Coverage of 9/11 and Its Aftermath
Five
Days That
Shook The World:
Seattle and Beyond
By
Alexander Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
Photos by Allan Sekula
(Click Here to Order from CounterPunch
Online at 20% Off Amazon.com's price!)
Read
Whiteout and Find Out
How the CIA's Backing of the Mujahideen Created the World's Most
Robust Heroin Market and Helped to Finance the Rise of the Taliban
and Osama bin Laden
Whiteout:
CIA, Drugs & the
Press
by Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
|