PLUS: The year in books By Dwight Garner Hands were wrung, insults were flung and the future of publishing was fretted over in what turned out to be a grand year for books, after all T A B L E+T A L K Wishing you could get your $25 and 6 hours back? Join the Table Talk discussion on the worst or most overrated new books of 1997. R E V I E W S FOR SHAME: The Loss of Common Decency in American Culture An inquiry into "the loss of common decency in American culture," from an author known for his critique of advertising (12/24/97) R E C E N T L Y Were the '60s a fraud? By Gary Kamiya (12/22/97) Save these books! By Dwight Garner (12/04/97) The art of life By Jay Parini (11/19/97) The Gospel according to Paul By Mark Hertsgaard (11/12/97) The Salon interview: Doris Lessing By Dwight Garner (11/11/97) - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Browse the Books feature archive As Though I Had Wings: The Lost Memoir The Mansion on the Hill The Alamo Hand to Mouth Dewey Defeats Truman Resentment Literature Lost: Social Agendas and the Corruption of the Humanities The Royals Underworld The Confession of O. J. Simpson: A Work of Fiction Hapworth 16, 1924 The Kiss Tetherballs of Bougainville Alfred Kinsey: A Public/Private Life The Day After Roswell The Other Woman: My Life With O. J. Simpson My Brother Life and Death: Unapologetic Writings on the Continuing War Against Women Release 2.0: A Design for Living in the Digital Age All Over but the Shoutin'		The worst books of 1997 page 3 of 3 - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Laura Green WORST: Each year some aspect of higher education must undergo ritual abuse. In this year's attack, "Literature Lost: Social Agendas and the Corruption of the Humanities" (Yale University Press), John M. Ellis, a German professor at the University of California at Santa Cruz, argues that the study of literature is going straight to hell. More precisely, it is being sent there by a cabal of Usual Suspects: feminists, Marxists, lesbians, anti-racists and other practitioners of what Ellis calls "race-class-gender" scholarship. It's not surprising that I, a "race-class-gender" scholar myself, disagree with Ellis' polemic; but it's a "worst book" on its own demerits -- inelegant, loosely argued and intellectually ungenerous. Ellis' fantasy of professors' lives before the arrival of the "race-gender-class" scholars does have a musty charm: "They could spend much of their working lives reading and discussing great writers ... Excellence was their watchword, and they kept company with an elite group of the greatest minds our civilization has produced." Certainly, those days of cakes and ale are past. The mundane tasks of teaching often leave professors of literature with as little time for discussing Shakespeare and Goethe as we have -- pace Ellis -- for plotting the overthrow of Western civilization. MOST OVERRATED: It took me a while to notice that Kitty Kelley's "The Royals" (Warner Books) is overrated, since in literary circles it doesn't rate at all. But then a secretly royal-obsessed friend confessed her disappointment. The book failed, she said, to live up even to the shoddy promise presumably responsible for its nine weeks on the Times bestseller list -- that Kelley would weave a series of disconnected items of gossip into a racy, revealing narrative. Indeed, the Windsors' inability to sin interestingly is matched only by Kelley's inability to dish interestingly. I am trying to imagine the reader who would be startled or fascinated to learn that Princess Margaret left "Schindler's List" halfway through, declaring that she didn't "want to hear another word about Jews or the Holocaust." Each anecdote combines unlikely dialogue, leaden narration and over-the-top irrelevance: "When Elizabeth became patrol leader for her own troop of Girl Guides, she spared no-one, including her chatterbox sister. 'Here,' she told Margaret, 'I am not your sister, and I'll permit no slackness.' Margaret stuck out her tongue, not at all intimidated by her future sovereign." As a compendium of implausible and uninteresting non-fact, however, "The Royals" does achieve a kind of poetic justice: It is an overrated book about the world's most overrated family. Laura Green is an assistant professor of English at Yale University and a frequent contributor to Salon. Laura Miller WORST: Undoubtedly the dullest pages I've slogged through this year were those between the covers of Esther Dyson's "Release 2.0." But nipping at Dyson's heels in that contest, and roundly outstripping her in the Moral Turpitude heat, was Dominick Dunne, whose "Another City, Not My Own" managed to shock and bore me at the same time, no small feat. Surrounded, as a Bay Area journalist usually is, by thoughtful people of liberal and leftish inclination -- and by those who know, at the very least, that they ought to genuflect before the altar of multicultural understanding whether they mean it or not -- I'd grown complacent. I have to admit that it took Dunne's celebrity-obsessed O.J. "novel" to make me realize just how shallow, selfish and willfully blinkered rich white people can be -- even when America's racial schism is screaming right in their faces. Yet another lecture from an African-American "community spokesperson" couldn't have delivered a more effective wake-up call, so I suppose I owe Dunne a back-handed thank you for this one. MOST OVERRATED: Gulp. I know I'm not alone in thinking that much of the reverent fuss over Don DeLillo's "Underworld" seems reflexive, and I know this because so many people have whispered to me that they share my own reservations about this unquestionably brilliant but strangely lifeless shot at the Great American Novel: Postwar Division. Sure, "Underworld" teems with the stuff that critics love to chew on -- big themes, multilayered metaphors, webs of correspondences -- but it's frustratingly lacking in humanity. It's also become the occasion for some of the most puffed-up, tedious tribute reviews I've ever read, in which the prose styles of various accomplished critics suddenly became as stiff and solemn as a 13-year-old boy stuffed into a tuxedo for his brother's wedding. - - - > Salon's essay about "Another City, Not My Own" David L. Ulin WORST: David Bender's "The Confession of O. J. Simpson: A Work of Fiction" (Berkeley) is a book so bad it doesn't even work as camp. In other words, it's no literary "Plan 9 from Outer Space." Rather, it is a calculated piece of pure exploitation, an attempt to cash in on the public's lingering O.J.-mania, complete with wooden dialogue, two-dimensional characters and a plot -- in which O. J. confesses as a way of out-maneuvering Fred Goldman, who has offered to forgo his share of the civil settlement in return for the truth about his son's death -- that wouldn't add up to a credible movie-of-the-week. On its own, this might not be anything but forgettable, but what makes "The Confession of O. J. Simpson" truly offensive is the earnestness with which Bender tries to justify his work. It's one thing, after all, to take advantage of a situation, but another to suggest you're doing it to "provide some measure of resolution to those who continue to obsess about this case." I don't know about you, but if I were after resolution, the last place I'd look would be a novel like this. MOST OVERRATED: "Hapworth 16, 1924" by J. D. Salinger (Orchises Press). This was the subject of much conjecture early in the year when it was revealed that Salinger had decided to break his 32-year silence and issue this 20,000-word novella with Orchises Press of Alexandria, Va. Then, the book's release was delayed, first from March to June, then until December. It still hasn't come out. For that alone, it would deserve the title of 1997's most overrated book, but more to the point -- and although any publication by Salinger would be a literary event -- "Hapworth" is hardly the new work it appears to be. It is, in fact, Salinger's last published effort, having run in the New Yorker on June 19, 1965. There's something ironic about "Hapworth" marking Salinger's "re-emergence," since for years cultists have combed the text for clues about his withdrawal from public life. In the end, however, this may be all it's good for. The story itself, constructed as a letter by 7-year-old Seymour Glass, lacks the charm and character of Salinger's best fiction, relying on a contrived precociousness that is most astonishing for how false it sounds. David L. Ulin lives in Los Angeles. He is at work on a book about Jack Kerouac. Rob Spillman WORST: "The Alamo: An Epic," by Michael Lind (Houghton Mifflin). The perfect stocking stuffer for that special militia member holed up in a snowbound cabin. Three hundred fifty-one pages of rhymed couplets about a bunch of yahoos who defied orders to make a futile stand against vastly superior forces. Lind, a reformed right-wing nut, managed to steal time from penning his political ramblings for the New Yorker to earnestly grunt forth endless streams of stentorian twaddle. I imagine he wrote the book by screaming through a bull horn to a horrified page taking dictation in sandals and a toga. "The two would never gallop through mesquite/together, chasing Lapin or Camanch." After perpetrating a million other lines just as painful to the eyes and ears, Lind includes a turgid afterward in defense of writing a poetic epic. Next up for Lind: "Operation Desert Storm: A Tone Poem." MOST OVERRATED: "The Kiss," by Kathryn Harrison (Random House). A courageous, heartfelt memoir by a gifted young novelist. A cynical publishing move by a struggling mid-list writer rehashing her old fiction. Should be defended on feminist grounds as a liberating document. Should be trashed as the epitome of sensational navel-gazing. The Olympic-sized swimming pool of spilled ink, both pro and con, has finally dried up; what remains is the text and the text is profoundly boring. Written in the shell-shocked prose of a recent victim with no distance or profound insights into what she has been through, "The Kiss" is a remarkably uncompelling read. Where's the beef? The bad taste of easy, tabloid-chasing sensationalism lingers, but after the book's initial titillation (and subsequent elevation to prude litmus test), "The Kiss" is now simply a tepid little turd of a book, a blip on the cultural EKG chart that will be forgotten like a case of mild indigestion. Rob Spillman, whose work has appeared in Details and the New York Times Book Review, is a regular contributor to Salon. Albert Mobilio WORST: Mark Leyner's "Tetherballs of Bougainville" (Harmony). Leyner turns on his irony super-collider and tries to smash big, bad America to teeny-tiny bits. And I guess he does -- the yucks are genuine. But eventually the laughs wither under a head-banging, hit-and-miss schtick assault so relentless you can hear Buddy Hackett's gurgling as Leyner drowns in flop-sweat. It's all in the timing, but this novel only has jokes all the time. MOST OVERRATED: Alain De Botton's "How Proust Can Change Your Life" (Pantheon). De Botton's conceit -- "In Search of Lost Time" as self-help book -- is cute and certainly a relief from grim scholarship, but, at bottom, this book is really an honors-class Cliffs Notes for would-be Proustians whose attention spans, as well as leisure hours, aren't quite up to snuff. Sure, it's got moments, and if that's all you've got to spare this is the Great Book for you -- to be read during the commercial breaks. Albert Mobilio has written for Harpers, the Village Voice and Newsday, as well as Salon. - - - > Salon's review of "Tetherballs of Bougainville" - - - > Salon's review of "How Proust Can Change Your Life" Scott McLemee WORST: The worst book I read in 1997 also turned out to be the most fun to review: "Alfred Kinsey: A Public/Private Life" by James H. Jones (Norton). This 900-page volume was actually written by the biographer's note-taking software, which was programmed to throw in the occasional, très '90s turn of cliché, like "pushing the envelope." Jones' PC was also very fond of "ironically." (That word, in contemporary American parlance, means "pertaining to a situation involving no irony whatsoever.") For example: "Ironically, the man who loved to dish out criticism had little appetite for taking it." I read every paragraph and footnote, and now wonder if book reviewing might be one of the activities a dominatrix requires her clients to perform. If not, it should be. MOST OVERRATED: Strictly speaking, the autobiography of Philip J. Corso, a member of Eisenhower's National Security Council and the former head of the Foreign Technology Desk at the U.S. Army's Research and Development department, was not the most overrated title of the year. But it did get a lot of hype. "The Day After Roswell" (Pocket Books) arrived during the 50th anniversary of whatever it was that happened in New Mexico. There was a little flap in the press over the introduction, signed by Strom Thurmond. The senator finally admitted that he had not actually read the book, though he did admire Corso himself. The memoir revealed that several major inventions of recent decades -- such as fiber optics and the microchip -- were "backward engineered" from technology found in UFO wreckage. Corso saw the little bodies of the alien pilots, too. The author, it should be noted, was once in charge of nuclear warheads. Some might find that troubling. No less so, however, is the possibility that the military-industrial complex has bioengineered longevity drugs from alien tissue samples. I think Sen. Thurmond owes us all a few more details about his relationship with the general. Scott McLemee, a contributing editor at Lingua Franca, writes regularly for Salon - - - > Scott McLemee's Salon article about "Alfred Kinsey: A Public/Private Life" SALON | Dec. 24, 1997 Wishing you could get your $25 and 6 hours back? Join the Table Talk discussion on the worst or most overrated new books of 1997. A L S O+T O D A Y The year in books By Dwight Garner Hands were wrung, insults were flung and the future of publishing was fretted over in what turned out to be a grand year for books, after all