In her weekly examination of the Times Book Review, Intern Alexis has made a stunning discovery: writers are lazy. Yes, it's true — even writers for the Book Review are prone to making repetitive over-generalizations in lieu of writing something original! Aside from this ground-breaking realization, Alexis also falls prey to the trickery of reviewer Jennifer Egan; meanwhile, the Bernard-Henri Levy/Garrison Keiller slap-a-thon continues. After the jump, your essential guide to sounding like you didn't sleep through lit-crit 101.

Eat, Pray, Love
 By Elizabeth Gilbert
Reviewed by Jennifer Egan

From the first two paragraphs featured on the cover of this week's Review, we were ready for a positive review of Elizabeth Gilbert's "travelogue of spiritual seeking." Egan writes, "If a more likable writer than Gilbert is currently in print, I haven't found him or her Gilbert's prose is fueled by a mix of intelligence, wit and colloquial exuberance that is close to irresistible " But when we turned, as instructed, to page 11, we were confronted with a review that was not very positive at all!

Egan writes:

What's missing are the textures and confusion and unfinished business of real life, as if Gilbert were pushing these out of sight so as not to come off as dull or equivocal or downbeat. When, after too much lovemaking, she is stricken with a urinary tract infection, she forgoes antibiotics and allows her friend, a Balinese healer, to treat the infection with noxious herbs. "I suffered it down," Gilbert writes. "Well, we all know how the story ends. In less than two hours I was fine, totally healed." The same could be said about "Eat, Pray, Love": we know how the story ends pretty much from the beginning.

After such a nice opening, this paragraph reminded us a little bit of a urinary tract infection. Pass the cranberry juice, please!



 Inside the List

In his weekly "Inside the List" column, Dwight Garner asks the age-old question: "is it better to get a memorably negative review in the New York Times Book Review or is it better to get no review at all?" To help answer the question, Garner calls up Garrison Keillor's soiled pair of underpants, Bernard-Henri Levy, who says: "I've always thought controversy was the best thing that can happen well, one of the best things." In his amused-but-firm letter to the editor last week, BHL challenged Garrison Keillor to a duel of sorts. This week he passive aggressively jabs GK in the gut:

Back in France, L vy sometimes reviews books. "But like Garrison Keillor," he said, "I am not a professional reviewer.' Has he panned many writers? "I try to speak about books I like," he said, "more than books I don't."

This is all well and good, but where's the motherfucking walk off!!?


Next stop, Generalization Station...

As we wrote last March, "Ugh. If there is one thing that gets our panties in a twist, it's when book reviewers are so full of themselves and pompous that they feel like they can make broad generalizations about literary genres as a way to look smart and cleverly transition into their book reviews." We'll stand by those words. And what irks us even more is when it happens two weeks in a row, and to the same genres!

Last week:
From the opening of Laura Miller's review of Stephen Wright's "The Amalgamation Polka":

History is a comfy subject for fiction. We already know what happened, and we usually know what to think about it This makes historical fiction a safe, even conservative genre, attractive to writers who aren't looking to go out on a limb.

This week:
From the opening of Pete Hamill's review of Kevin Baker's "Strivers Row":

Historical novels are primarily works of the imagination, not history or its imperfect relative, journalism. History can inspire the workings of the imagination and journalism provide tools to help the novelist see the imagined past through its surviving remnants.

Last week:
From the opening of Bruce Barcott's review of Steven Heighton's
"Afterlands":

Why do readers keep returning to the poles? Here we are, 97 years from Robert Peary's spiking of the North, 95 years from Roald Amundsens' dash to the South, and we still can't get enough of those grim men and their frozen beards.

This week:
From the opening of Florence Williams' review of Joanna Kavenna's "The Ice Museum: In the Lost Land of Thule":

What is it about the polar North that has enraptured imaginations from the mariners of ancient Greece to the Romantic poets to modern tourists?

OK, OK, both Barcott and Williams are contributing editors for "Outside" magazine, so we understand why their ledes are almost exactly the same, but Hamill and Miller won't get off as easily! No more genre-generalizing in the first paragraph, boys and girls, or we'll cut you with a rusty butter knife!