In this week's edition of her unwavering Times Book Review coverage, Intern Alexis discovers that Mnookin, the surname of Hard News author Sethelah, is a verb. To mnookin someone, we learn, is to charmingly crush one's self-esteem and, if executed properly, said victim's will to live, with a deft move of the mnookiner's stiletto. After the jump, exemplary mnooking on reviewer Nora Krug, modern language rapes the memory of Queen Isabella, and we all take a trip to over-hyphenation station.

Letters to the Editor

Seth Mnookin mnookins the shit out of Nora Krug in his letter to the editor regarding her recent essay on accuracy in books. "What a delightful way to miss the point," he writes, daintily crushing Krug with the heel of his stiletto, in reference to her discussion of his corrections section in the paperback edition of his book, "Hard News." He then goes on to write: "In her 1,200-word essay, one error had to be corrected before the Book Review even hit the streets (Krug misidentified the imprint of a falsified memoir). In comparison, I had 10 errors in a 90,000-word manuscript. But who's counting? It's the principle that really matters." Yowzzza! That's so bitchy!

As it so happens, to the right of this letter, the New York Times prints a correction to Krug's essay: "An essay on Sept. 25, "The Corrections," omitted a word from the subtitle of "The Peabody Sisters," by Megan Marshall. It is "Three Women Who Ignited American Romanticism," not "Ignited Romanticism." Now that's a sly, backwards low-five to Mnookin if we've ever seen one.


New Art City
 By John Updike

Funnily enough, at the end of his review of Walter Kirn's new novel, "Mission to America," Paul Gray notes: "'Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea,' John Updike once observed." The reason this is funny is because Updike WRITES CRITICISM in this week's NYTBR, and has the cover review! Quelle coincidence. We're not sure what Updike's relationship to the shore is in his review of Jed Perl's survey of Abstract Expressionism, "New Art City," but we don't think he's hugging it. Or anything for that matter. We do know, however, that he goes on a crazyish tirade against compound adjectives:

In his commendable desire to stretch the language of visual perception and philosophical understanding, Perl coins compound adjectives as if hyphens were snowing upon his word processor. We have: "the individual's at-an-angle relationship with society," "go-with-the-flow neighbors," "an increasingly knit-together, everything-is-one-thing, homogenous character," "knock-you-in-your-teeth actualities," "the wacky-bleak fascination of a play by Samuel Beckett," "this everything-becoming-something-else moment," "more-than-material yet grounded in the materials of art," "the whatever-happens-happens nihilism," "Ashbery's go-with-what-amuses-you attitude," and "the stark, nobody-knows-you-when-you're-down-and-out decrepitude." Some of these Germanic compounds, like "at-an-angle" and "go-with-the-flow," are handy enough to be used more than once, but they are, along with stretch adverbs like "amazingly," "infinitely" and "immensely," and such tenuous concepts as "everydayness," "brownishness" and an "ordinariness" that "melts into the silveriness of the images," symptomatic of the stresses placed on the vocabulary of those who would write about art.

As the review goes on, Updike continues to drop and poo-poo the compound adjectives that Perl uses throughout his book. We don't want to say anything negative about Updike, or his writing, but this seems like a-not-very-important-thing-to-devote-so-much-space-to, that's all.


The River of Doubt
 By Candice Millard
Reviewed by Bruce Barcott

We enjoyed Barcott's review of Candice Millard's tale of Teddy Roosevelt's 1909 trip through the Amazon, as we like to consider ourselves armchair colonialists. What we didn't enjoy, however, was the Al Gore jabbing at the end! " 'The River of Doubt' would be an exhilarating story even if an ex-president weren't involved. The fact that one was must heighten our admiration for Roosevelt, especially looking back from an era in which a failed presidential candidate is able to make news simply by growing a beard." Yes, Teddy Roosevelt used to read books standing on one foot like a flamingo, but Al Gore has done a little bit more than grow a beard post-election-loss HELLOOO, Bruce, Current TV!?!?!?


Queen Isabella
 By Alison Weir
Reviewed by Alida Becker

While reading Becker's review, we had some serious 'Nam-like flashbacks to two weeks ago, when Geoffrey Wolff, in his review of Ron Powers's biography of Mark Twain, wrote:

Occasionally, Powers, excited by demotic idiom, is tempted into slangy silliness. He writes of "kicking some major Britannia butt"; reports that Mark Twain "was ready to rock." It's jarring to read that Twain "tried to get some shut-eye" or "partied hearty" with Nathaniel Hawthorne's daughter or "hung with" a friend or "tried his luck at hanging 10" during a Hawaiian "surfin' safari."

This week, Becker writes, "Add to this the occasional jarring note of present-day jargon ("Isabella played a more proactive part against Gaveston") and some platitudinous throat-clearing ("There was good and bad news from beyond England's borders"), and "Queen Isabella" faces a narrative impediment almost as formidable as all those centuries of bad press.") You know what? So what if writers use modern-day lingo when writing about the olden times. Who the fuck cares? Yeah, put that jarring jargon in your pipes and smoke it.