A View of the Absurd
That's not writing, that's kvetching
. JACK ENGELHARD Special to the Jewish Times

The best part of writing is the writing itself. After that comes the publishing and if the writer survives that, here come the reviews.

Book reviews are supposed to be about the book, not the author, but too often reviewers can't help themselves.

Some reviews are so mean-spirited it's a wonder that the suicide rate among writers isn't even higher.

I'd hate to have been in Martin Amis' slippers when he woke up to find, in the New York Times, what Michiko Kakutani said about him in her review of his latest book, "The Second Plane." She finished off her review, and of him, with this: Amis "has thoroughly discredited himself with these essays as any sort of political or social commentator."

Why go on living, or writing, after that sort of judgment? Perhaps Kakutani woke up on the wrong side of the bed, or perhaps Amis got up on the wrong side of political correctness. The difference between a good review and a bad review often depends on whether the reviewer did or did not have a toothache when he or she read the book; it can be that arbitrary.

Or maybe the reviewer got to her desk right after a parking ticket or a flat tire just when deadline approached to get the review done. Pity, then, the author.

Sometimes, or too often, a book is assessed not by its content but by the political views of the reviewer - and have we ever lived in times more politically divisive than today? We've taken sides and woe to the author who dares to depart from the prevailing orthodoxy, which, by any measure, leans leftward.

[You might expect me to be favorable to fellow Jewish novelists like Saul Bellow and Philip Roth and yet I am not enthused about either one, especially Roth, who has written no more than one book under separate titles. Roth's writing reminds me of sitting on the stoop in Montreal and listening to the elders complain about their rheumatism. That's not writing. That's kvetching!]

Our culture has already gone beyond political correctness. We're onto political road rage. Hate mail happens. Try writing a book or op-ed in favor of conservatism, or in disfavor of radical Islam, and see what you get! Amis did something like that in "The Second Plane" and that's where Kakutani was urged to go after not just the book, but the author. Is this just?

In fact, most of Kakutani's damning conclusions were not about the book, but about comments Amis had made earlier in the Times of London, where, after a thwarted terrorist attack, Amis suggested that "the Muslim community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order." He even proposed deportation, all of it within the context of a man speaking impulsively, honestly and painfully within the moment.

Is it fair to bring up yesterday when we should be talking about the writer today? Is it fair to deconstruct the man rather than the book?

If you say that Amis was wrong, fine. If you say that Amis wrongly blamed all of Islam for the sins of a few, go for it; excellent.

But let's give the man his space and give the man his democratic rights to speak his mind without getting personal and hateful, to the point where we're asked to dismiss him about everything he ever had to say. A book, especially from a writer as highly regarded as Amis, ought to be judged on its literary merits. We learn nothing of this from Kakutani's review.

I may disagree with everything Amis says in "The Second Plane," but give me a chance. Or give me a review that does not impose the reviewer's partialities and pieties.

Given an earlier attack in London that turned deadly, can Amis be forgiven his outrage? Are we now to self-censor not only our words, but even our emotions?

If our politicians are afraid to name the enemy, isn't it up to our writers to fill in the blanks? That's what writers are for, to think, to engage, to challenge, otherwise we've learned nothing from Socrates who refused to bow to his nation's ancestral gods.

These days we have our own ancestral gods. We bow to political correctness.

A month before he was assassinated, John F. Kennedy paid tribute to Robert Frost at Amherst College where he, JFK, spoke of the artist as a solitary figure and as the last champion of the individual mind, adding: "If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set him free to follow his vision wherever it takes him."

Jack Engelhard's latest novel, "The Bathsheba Deadline," now available in paperback, places journalism at the center of our war on terror. Engelhard wrote the international bestselling novel "Indecent Proposal" that was translated into more than 22 languages and turned into a Paramount motion picture starring Robert Redford and Demi Moore. He can be reached at viewopinion@aol.com.