Michiko Kakutani is Ignorant

Cartoon by Mark Stivers

The New Yorker, The Atlantic, among others, fell all over themselves two years ago to heap praise on the New York Times book reviewer -- they actually referred to her as a "book critic" -- after her 38-year sojourn on the book page of the newspaper. To which I say: why didn't she leave earlier? Like practically every other regular writer for the Times, she was a predictable bore. Really, there should be term limits for these reviewers. Has any reader really profited from a review by Michiko Kakutani? I stopped reading her about twenty-five years ago (along with the Times itself). Well, today more evidence for her mediocrity.

A friend of mine subscribes to the New York Times and regularly gives me a pile of the Sunday book review (also a pathetic publication). So, today I went through the pile and found in the July 15 issue an interview with Kakutani, one of those front-of-the-publication features in which the first thing we learn is what books are currently on the interviewed's nightstand. When asked her opinion on "disappointing, overrated, just not good books," she replied: "I am hoping English department curriculums have changed since I was in college. I couldn't make it through Spenser's The Faerie Queene or Samuel Richardson's Clarissa."

A couple of comments. Kakutani is so out of it that she doesn't know that practically no English department, probably not even at an ivy league institution like Yale, where she went to school (40 years ago), includes either of those novels in its course offerings. Indeed, it is possible to get a graduate degree in English literature today without reading them. But what a breathtaking show of ignorance for a supposed "book critic." To be  critic means to be familiar with the history of literature. And in support of my contention that she is an ignoramus, another summer issue of the book review featured a book of essays by William Giraldi, American Audacity: In Defense of Literary Daring. The reviewer (Nathaniel Rich) speaks of Giraldi as an enthusiast for high standards. He quotes Giraldi responding to Fifty Shades of Gray: "Do I really expect Americans to sit down with Adam Bede or Clarissa after all the professional and domestic hurly-burly of their day? Pardon me, but yes, I do."

Well, put me down as not insisting on such reading for those contending with full-time jobs and domestic life, but for the "book critic" of the New York Times one would expect a bit more. A "book critic" is familiar with the history of literature, knows (as Nathaniel Rich writes) that "for a book to outlast its first breath, it must contend with all that has come before." Kakutani always struck me as being trapped by the time in which she lives.

What really brought home Kakutani's irrelevance is her new book, The Death of Truth: Notes on Falsehood in the Age of Trump. The Guardian, not impressed by the book, calls it "an account of the mental malaise that made Trump possible, [in which Kakutani] explains him as a postmodern phenomenon, a product of the deconstructionist assault on absolutes that raged through American universities in the 1980s." Excuse me, Ms. Kakukani, did you not know what was going on back in the universities in those days? Why did not the New York Times "book critic extraordinaire" use her pulpit to excoriate this phenomenon back when it might have counted for something? Like the New York Times, Kakutani is totally irrelevant.

My criticism of her is impartial. I have not published a book that she might have reviewed, though I am happy to add here a few nuggets from published writers (this from Slate) who also agree on her ignorance: The late Susan Sontag complained, "Her criticisms of my books are stupid and shallow and not to the point." Salman Rushdie referred to her as "a weird woman who seems to feel the need to alternately praise and spank."  Norman Mailer called Kakutani, who is of Japanese descent, a "one-woman kamikaze" and a "token" minority hire.