i know it’s not a good look to take a spraycan out to the overpass to defend your friend’s honor when he doesn’t really need your help, but then, i haven’t been on the receiving end of a whole lot of good looks. model them for me.
joshua cohen, on the other hand, has both received and written reviews for the new york times and still thinks he gets to rep all steppenwolf (“…consider one of our books the Jewish novel you’ll never begin…”).
but i’m jumping ahead.
let me start by saying that, while i’m glad no one seems to think joshua cohen’s review of adam levin’s the instructions is any good, i disagree with pretty much everyone about the reasons.
first, i think it’s ridiculous for anyone to suggest that there was a conflict of interest in tanenhaus’s assigning the review to cohen. or that it was wrong of cohen to accept it. or that it was wrong of cohen to write a negative review. sure there’s a bit of an angle there (i guess — two young jewish guys who wrote big books), maybe even the chance for some conflict, but the only editorial mistake tanenhaus seems to have made was running a review that’s completely fucking idiotic.
cohen, i suspect, didn’t make any mistakes, in that it looks to me like he accomplished exactly what he set out to do. i say this, because it seems like everyone is focused on the tackiness of his opening. it’s a tacky opening, but –
i didn’t pay much attention to cohen before the witz blitz, but i’ve been aware of him for probably as long as he’s been out there. with the first few books i assumed he was just another one of those kids at the slumber party who likes to save up farts in his sleeping bag (my metaphor for “experimental” writers who are happy to be identified as experimental) (i’m aware that no one else thinks this is a good metaphor). after witz, i couldn’t decide if he was only a kid who liked the smell of his own farts or that plus something else.
remember that observer article where he said something about when he started writing witz he wanted to fuck foer’s wife but when he finished he wanted to fuck his (foer’s) mom? if you do, do you remember what you thought it was supposed to mean? (if yes, please email me.) my first image was of joshua cohen in a trenchcoat staring at himself in the mirror at home and saying that line in the voice of christian slater from heathers. then i just thought it would have been funnier if he’d said when he started writing witz he wanted to fuck foer’s wife, but when he finished he wanted to fuck foer.
jonathan safran foer’s wife is nicole krauss. pretty sure she outsells both foer and cohen combined.
also remember the review he wrote about tao lin? i thought that one was pretty insightful, but remember how it started out with him pitching some tao lin-esque antics to tao lin? was i the only one who thought maybe cohen was trying to be, like, a less funny, even-less-money-making tao?
tao lin rejected the antics and took his beating.
so the levin review. sure, sure, the lede’s tacky: 1. because it’s generally a weak-ass advertisement for witz; 2. because it’s particularly a weak-ass advertisement for witz, “whose title translates to “joke,” though it’s no laughing matter”; and c. because frankly i can’t imagine at this point anyone’s not seeing right through him because no one could say that above line with a straight face because g. going around explaining your title when nobody asked is tantamount to saying you ain’t a good enough writer to handle your business, and 3. no grown man would add “though it’s no laughing matter” to anything but an arnold schwarzenegger script, and 0. am i the only person left with the ability to contextualize things?
check it:
there's such a thing as standards.
cohen was betting there was no one left with the ability to contextualize things. maybe the lede worked as an advertisement to a few dummies who are now looking forward to curling up in their snuggies and spending some time with witz, but otherwise it was more like a sacrifice bunt.
he starts to prove it with the last line of the paragraph. not the part about “the Jewish novel you’ll never begin” (he’s a loner, dotty) (and he thinks you’re stupid) (or, let’s be honest, he wants to convince you that you’re stupid if you admit it, and it seems to have worked in a lot of cases), but the part about “the Jewish novel you’ll never finish.”
that joke leading up to that line — it’s an old one. but didn’t foer use one just like it in everything is illuminated?
anyway, who is this “you” who will never finish the instructions?
i don’t think it’s the same “you” that’s been raving about it pretty much spontaneously all over the internet (some of those “yous” aren’t even writers!). i think it’s the “you” who is credulous enough to assume that, because joshua cohen makes a tacky move at the beginning of his review, he doesn’t have enough guile to spend the rest of the review typing out the side of his mouth.
i think cohen thinks the same thing, because look –
- he gets a little loose with the facts in lines like: “Gurion’s your typical Midwestern prodigy, with multilingual fluency and superhuman strength…” (yes, gurion would certainly have to be some kind of prodigy; it’s the premise of the novel) (sure he has multilingual fluency; but some kids who go to hebrew school really take to it) (i don’t recall any mention of super-human strength; he just likes to fight, and there are cases where he doesn’t win).
- cohen quotes only a couple of fairly pedestrian lines, in one case indicating, without any evidence that it’s among the best.
- he calls the book “univocal,” though there are demonstrably many different narrators within the text and dozens of distinct voices (though it’s true they are held together by gurion, and gurion’s voice dominates).
- let me not get into the “tutelary goy” thing with a guy who aimed for finnegans wake and hit kerouac on livejournal.
- he takes some of the least interesting parts of the amazing slang levin has invented (“If an idea is “mental,” as in “crazy,” to Gurion it’s “dental.” Snot and spit, which saturate these sentences, are “gooze.” If one does or says a thing very “kaufman,” that means it’s kooky”) and concludes that “I’m not sure Andy would have approved.”
i’m pretty sure, by the way, that kaufman would have approved. do i have the authority?
“chomsky” is better anyway. (chomsky would probably not approve.)
but my point with that last, and with all of the above examples really, is that cohen has not just exagerrated them, but removed them from their context to try to make them look bad. it’s almost as though, when jonathan safran foer didn’t take him up on the offer of a fuck, cohen decided to name his left hand adam levin.
sinister.
see, i can make multilingual puns too. maybe i should have written witz.
isn’t that what’s going on when you break it down? levin didn’t write witz?
but that’s where this review gets a little scary, not for levin’s career, but just as a reminder that cohen’s thinking passes for intellectualism. take when he suggests that levin could have developed “Gurion’s holiness into a genuine teenage theology wherein the popular kids are divinities and the outcasts the demons; or he could have exploited the metaphor of the inmates of the Cage as modern Israelis, presenting Zionism as a symptom of their immaturity.”
the whole conflict of the book comes from the fact that things are more complicated than that. in the instructions, it’s not just popular kids versus outcasts or the cage against the arrangement. he wasn’t trying to write the jewish pilgrim’s progress.
if you ignore that, if you insist that levin didn’t know what he was doing, you might conclude that the instructions, which i personally think might be the most tautly plotted “meganovel” ever published, “makes for a very long joke: a setup that lacks a punch line.” but only if you ignore it. only if you’re a bad reader.
i think cohen is a willfully bad reader. i think he imagines himself a provacateur. worse, i think he imagines himself some kind of trickster or clown. the thing is, a real clown doesn’t use the opportunity given to him by the establishment to attack someone who is making good art; he uses it to attack the establishment.
now cohen could have tried to make the case, based on anything in the actual text, that levin is the “establishment,” that he represents what cohen claims to hate about contemporary fiction, and jewish fiction in particular. i admit to having agreed with cohen’s take on kitsch in one of the profiles i mentioned above.
he could have made a real case against the use of the precocious boy archetype; he could have pointed out that a huge portion of the theology levin references is esoteric and not at all mainstream; he could have shown that the instructions is very much rooted in adolescent fantasy.
with regard to the first (precocious children): sure the cute kids have become a little much, but levin confronts that directly.
as for the second (weird theology): ain’t no getting around it, but levin hasn’t claimed he’s trying to start a religion.
the third (adolescent fantasy): totally true, but even gurion as a character is aware of the fact.
cohen is also embodying an adolescent fantasy. the only difference being he doesn’t know it, or at least he’s not tipping his hand. he’s the outsider who works for the man, the author you’ll never start reading, the last jew on earth. and that’s no laughing matter.
to borrow from levin’s slang: tch.
