Hilarious yet heartbreaking: The Reviewerspeak Award results for May 2010

Yield for Cliche-Watch

Like Sisyphus straining to push the Boulder of Book Review Prose up and over the Eternal Mountain of Cliché, only to see it, once again, careen down into the Valley of deeply felt, brutally frank, and achingly beautiful Despair, here I am with the results of yet another rollicking Reviewerspeak Award cliché-watch.

And what a watch it is -- I observe the reviewers who are observing the authors, who, arguably, are the only ones in this food chain writing something worth reading. As Mr. Graydon Carter said in his New York Times review of Mr. Martin Amis' The Pregnant Widow:

Writing, remember, is the only art in which the creator is publicly judged by people who do precisely the same thing, but as a rule less well.

The Irony Police have been alerted.

Cast your eye on the Reviewerspeak Award Rules and Regulations, here. Have a laugh at the winning reviewers and publications in the April installment of the Awards, here. And, if you think I'm a silly lass for wasting my time chasing stirrings and provocatives and effervescent prose across the length and breadth of the Internet, peruse my arguments in favor of the Awards, here.

Let's roll, straight into a startlingly entertaining, larger-than-life, perfect storm of roller coaster cliché fun. You will brave the rigors of the Axis of Evil -- lyrical, luminous, and lucid -- to discover what it means to be human. You will laugh; you will cry; you will be guessing until the final sentence.

I've bowed to popular demand (by which I mean Publishers Weekly reviewers cutting up rough over PW always sitting pretty on top of the Total Number of Clichés per Publication graph) and moved the Average Number of Clichés per 100 Words graph to top billing. This month's eminently readable victor was -- ta da! -- NPR, with a disturbingly impressive 1.70 clichés for every 100 review words: nearly a two-clichés-per-every-hundred-word rate. Congratulations, NPR, the Most Clichéd Publication of May!

 

How do these averages compare to last month's achievements in cliché excellence? Observe:

 

 

 

NPR, never one to lag behind, managed to pull together the biggest gain, heroically leaping upward in cliché-usage by 0.82 clichés per 100 words.

For those still intrigued by the raw number counts of the total clichés in each publication per month, this is for you:

 

Last month, fascinating tied with vivid/vividly for top honors as the most used cliché. In May, however, vivid/vividly kicked it up a notch and emerged as the lone occupant of First Place in the Top 20 Clichés of May. Remarkable, sharp/sharply, absorbing, elegant, accessible, and profound/profoundly -- all favorites in April -- dropped in favor with reviewers remarkably sharply. Their slots were replaced by satisfying, delightful, thoughtful, witty, deft/deftly, colorful, and -- one of my personal favorites -- coming of age.

 

Notice how all of these clichés are breathlessly, exhilaratingly praiseworthy? The reviewers of May lavishly heaped compliments on in ever higher and higher monuments of giddiness, perhaps in an attempt to prove George Orwell was right when he wrote that it is "almost impossible to mention books in bulk without grossly overpraising the great majority of them."

Publishers Weekly falls prey to this tendency rather often. It is brimming with books that are all an "exhilarating debut," or "addictively readable" or a  "stunning masterpiece." The most fascinating of the lot is the review of Mr. John Gilstrap's Hostage Zero, a book described as marrying "a breakneck pace to a complex, multilayered plot" and featuring "a roller-coaster ride of adrenaline-inducing plot twists" that "leads to a riveting and highly satisfying conclusion." The reviewer threw in "exceptional characterization," "intricate, flawlessly crafted story line," and those golden words, "absolute must read."

After reading this review, I felt like a diminished human being for not leaping up instantly from the computer and running, half-clad, out the door to immediately purchase and read what, clearly, is the greatest novel in the history of novels. (Oh, and if you think that won the Most Clichéd Review of the Month, you're wrong. Greater delights than this await, I promise.)

But, to be fair, PW isn't the only one gushing like a broken oil pipe in the Gulf of Mexico. Washington Post reviewers Mr. Jonathan Yardley and Mr. Michael Dirda are fond of dressing up that old work horse "entertaining" with progressively excitable adverbs. "Wildly entertaining" shouts one review. "Scandalously entertaining" giggles another. What can possibly be next? Apocalyptically entertaining? Meth-rush entertaining? Infinity to the infinitieth power entertaining?

Reviewers felt sweetly nostalgic in May and pulled all sorts of Retro Review Phrases out of storage. Situations spiraled out of control; characters hung on by a thread; lovers dealt with matters of the heart; writing rang true; plots thickened.

              Resistance is futile -- be assimilated and use solipsistic or die

It's odd how certain words arrive on the reviewing scene out of nowhere. Like prodigal sons, they're AWOL for months, then suddenly they return all in a rush, as if directed by the Borg hive-mind.

Solipsistic, for example. I blame this on Mr. Stieg Larsson since it was routinely used to describe Lisbeth Salander. (Mr. Michael Newman from Slate broke with the pack and said she'd fit in with the Tea Party, but Mr. Richard Schickel from the LA Times went even farther and described Ms. Salander as both solipsistic AND a possible Tea Party member.) One solipsistic did manage to break free from The Girl Who is Constantly Irritating Me and wandered, improbably, into the Publishers Weekly review for Mr. Gert Jonke's The Distant Sound.

All manner of riff species emerged: singular riffs (Mr. Jeff Vandermeer's New York Times review of The Dream of Perpetual Motion), free-form riffs (Publishers Weekly review of Talking to Girls About Duran Duran), and a "goofy, grisly fourth riff" in the form of Mr. Dean Koontz's Frankenstein: Lost Souls (also Publishers Weekly).

Likewise, bracing blew like a bracing wind through reviews by Mr. Ron Charles (The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ), Mr. Dwight Garner (Flight of the Intellectuals), and Mr. Graydon Carter (The Pregnant Widow).

Meta proved to be a highly useful prefix. Tack it on and you've got all sorts of great meta-mutations -- meta-play (Ms.Meehan Crist, LA Times), meta-fictional (Publishers Weekly, the LA Times' Mr. Jim Ruland, Time Out New York's Mr. Drew Toal), meta-narrative (Publishers Weekly), meta-elegy (Mr. Sam Anderson, New York Magazine).

          Warning: Reading may result in a tingling spine

But the most troubling was the tendency of May reviewers to grotesquely predict the physical consequences certain books would have on readers.

There is no human organ system safe from the perils of the literary world. Books will wreak havoc on your nervous system ("spine-tingling," "worth cracking the spine," "break-neck"), your cardiovascular system ("heartbreaking," "heartrending," "heartwarming," "pulse-pounding," "anemic"), your respiratory system ("breathtaking"), and your digestive system ("gut-wrenching"). Reviewers warn about books that will make your eyeballs pop out of your head and books that will cause you to grip your chair with white knuckles. Some will make you cold ("chilling"), some will cause hair trouble ("hair-raising"), and some will make you develop eczema on your scalp ("this book will leave readers scratching their heads").

Publishers Weekly even diagnosed the author of Citrus County, Mr. John Brandon, with cardiomegaly during the course of their review: "Brandon's dry wit, dark imagination, and surprisingly big heart combine to reveal...."

Clearly, reading is a dangerous occupation; these books should come with a Surgeon General warning. I call for Congressional Hearings on the subject.

There is no I in Team, but there is an I in Review and I would be remiss if I did not recognize individual reviewers for outstanding achievements in cliché usage.

May's Most Clichéd Review Award goes to the Publishers Weekly review of Mr. Terry Dowling's Amberjack (I'd link to it directly but PW has helpfully made it impossible to see old reviews without registering and getting a 666 tattooed on your forehead. You can sign up for both, here). At 9 clichés in a mere 128 words -- a rate of 7 clichés for every 100 words -- this is truly one of the most impressive reviews I've ever seen. It damn near brought me to tears. (Whether of grief or laughter I'll leave to your judgement.)

The Award for Repeated Clichés in a Single Review goes to Mr. Oscar Villalon's LA Times review of The Slap, which featured these back-to-back gems:

Think Tom Wolfe meets Philip Roth. Or The Sopranos meets The Real Housewives of Orange County.

The Most Annoying Cliché of the Month is always a hotly contested category. Should it go to Ms. Janet Maslin's "hilarious yet heartbreaking" from her New York Times review of The Imperfectionists? Mr. Jeff Vandermeer's review of The Dream of Perpetual Motion, also in the New York Times, for insisting the book is full of "essential stories"? (Essential in what way? Will I die if I don't read it? Will I be attacked by rabid wolves? Will my eyes start bleeding?) Or possibly even to the Publishers Weekly nails-on-the-chalkboard annoying "achingly personal" from the review of Ms. Karen Tei Yamashita's I Hotel?

In the end, I had to go with not one, but two clichés tucked into the final paragraph of NPR's Sixty to Zero: An Inside Look at the Collapse of General Motors -- and the Detroit Auto Industry review: "pedal to the metal" and "leave competitors in the dust." Cutesy cliché use should be punishable by firing squad, or at the very least, by a waterboarding session with Mr. Cheney.

Now, for the Michiko Kakutani Limn Watch (if you've no idea what I'm talking about, go here and scoll down for an explanation) -- about which I have completely nothing to report. Ms. Kakutani has succeeded in making it through another month without the use of her limns. She's made my line graph flat-line:

 

Come on, Ms. Kakutani, throw me a bone here.

It's time for yet another writer to join the ranks of Reviewers Who Will Spend Eternity Watching My Career with Interest and Schadenfreude -- the Most Clichéd Reviewer of the Month Award goes to Mr. Michael Schaub for his May NPR reviews. Congratulations, sir!

Mr. Schaub is one enthusiastic gentleman. Not for him are the lukewarm clichés that flow so naturally from other reviewers -- tepid, interesting, readable, gentle, enjoyable. No, I suspect Mr. Schaub has rigged his computer up with a Book Critic version of Quick-Quotes Quill software to protect against such milquetoastiness. If he ever accidentally types "interesting" it is instantly changed to "breathtaking"; "enjoyable" becomes "crushingly poignant"; "readable" becomes "fascinating."

The books he reads are bold and ambitious and startlingly sad and deeply funny and dryly funny and deeply felt and breathless and unfaltering and lyrical and enchanting. When he finds a work charming, he'll tell you -- twice, in the same review.  When he likes an author's writing, he'll call it smart -- twice, in the same paragraph.

 

I devoted one whole page of notes to the delights of Mr. Schaub's three -- yes, all this for a mere THREE -- May NPR reviews. Look, there's the page, on the left.

It was pretty much the most fun I've had note-taking in a very long time. Mr. Schaub, I wish I had but half of your verve and enthusiasm, though I think it would fatigue me greatly.

Enough of this cliché-yap -- what about the finest and most unclichéd reviews and reviewers of the month?

The undisputed winner of the May award for the Most Unclichéd Reviewer goes to Mr. William S. Niederkorn for his review of Mr. James Shapiro's Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare?, an odd piece first published in The Brooklyn Rail but reproduced on the National Book Critics Circle website.

I say the review is "odd" only because it's less a review and more of a shortish book. Mr. Niederkorn clearly has many and strong ideas on the subject of who wrote Shakespeare and, in 4,980 words, leaves no phrase unexamined, no comment of Mr. Shapiro's unremarked, no Will uncontested. It is scholarly and crazily intelligent and completely cliché-free and can double as an insomnia cure. Congratulations, Mr. Niederkorn! You not only win the honor of Most Unclichéd Reviewer of May, you've convinced me that you have a cerebral cortex that is roughly double the size of mine.

A flock of other reviewers tied for the runner-up slot. Mr. Sam Anderson's review of Mr. Martin Amis' The Pregnant Widow was 1,131 words of pure cliché-free loveliness and I was consumed with bitter jealousy after reading it. I can only hope that Mr. Anderson ends up with one of those books that makes his eyes pop out or one that will wrench his guts (or, alternatively, one that will attack his ankle -- he was Dipped in the River Styx, after all) so that he will be distracted for a time and drop in a few compellings or unputdownables in June. Or something.

Out of all the 263,419 words worth of reviews I read from May, those written by Mr. Dwight Garner (Mr. Anderson's fellow winner of the Finest and Most Unclichéd Reviewer Award from last month) were the most consistently excellent. Almost annoyingly so. In his review of Flight of the Intellectuals, he describes the author, Mr. Paul Berman as "alternatively emotive and pedantic, an emo-wonk." He made me laugh out loud with this description of Ms. Annie Cohen-Solal's writing quirks in Leo & His Circle:

Ms. Cohen-Solal also has a jarring passion -- in this translation, at least -- for exclamation points. They leap at you out of nowhere, like cats in a horror film.

And he uses a word in his Operation Mincemeat review that I will not be able to rest comfortably until I can find a way to throw into an article at some point in my life: geekerati.

But, of course, I assume all this is small potatoes when you're only half mortal. Mr. Garner probably spends the majority of his time driving the sun across the sky or wrestling Cerberus and just dashes these reviews off in some spare moment.

There are two Washington Post reviewers who also deserve special mention: Ms. Diana McLellan, for her review of Mr. Christopher Hitchens' Hitch-22, the Single Most Entertaining Review I read all month, and Mr. Ron Charles, whose nasty little piece on The Pregnant Widow contained a sentence of such pith and glorious economy, it would make both Strunk and White weep with joy:

The setting is exotic, the subject is erotic, but the story is necrotic.

(Incidentally, Mr. Charles and Mr. Anderson seemed to feel as differently about The Pregnant Widow as is possible for two reviewers to feel about the same book, assuming one wasn't sent a galley with the wrong cover on it. How I'd love to see them go at each other over it. The ANKLE, Mr. Charles -- go for the ANKLE.)

My sisyphean task for May is finally complete and, already, I see the boulder rolling off down the mountain. Come back next month to ponder the Reviewerspeak Award results for June. (And for more of these absurd mythological allusions. Maybe I'll compare the pain of slogging through all of these reviews to having my liver eaten out monthly by an eagle. Or not.)

Rants? Death threats? Snarkily worded thoughts about my writing/basic intelligence? Air them below, in the Comments section (at your own peril), or send them along to my eagerly waiting Inbox, here.

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