Good and Bad Reviews

Since we've been discussing Decca Aitkenhead's interview with Christopher Hitchens, I thought of posting some links to reviews of Hitch-22. (I only read the print Weekend FT review today, and realised that reviews would be being published.) However, although they're all different - they focus on different aspects of a quite long (352 pages according to Amazon; 448 according to the FT ?!) book - they seem to share a certain diffidence or ambivalence. I've not seen a red-blooded endorsement by a professional reviewer yet.[1]

So, to provide some contrast, here's very positive review of Ayann Hirsi Ali's Nomad by Tunku Varadarajan.

I had cause to recall this ugly episode [The writer had asked a New York cabbie what he thought of Ms Hirsi Ali, to be told, "We think she is a bitch. We hate her."] when I read this week—in just one sitting, it is so brilliant—Hirsi Ali’s new book, Nomad: From Islam to America. (It is subtitled, with a very un-PC tip of the hat to Samuel Huntington, “A Personal Journey Through the Clash of Civilizations.”) If I had my way, and the resources to pull off the idea, I would commission translations of the book into Arabic, Urdu, Somali, Farsi, Turkish, Pashto, Kurdish, Bengali, and Bahasa, and air-drop thousands of copies into the Muslim lands (and arrondissements) where these languages are spoken. And with any luck, these books would find their way into the hands of some of the immiserated women who live there.

I think he liked it. Against that, the reception of Hitch-22 is -- well, diplomatic might be a good word. My feeling is that even if reviewers found Hitchens charming at essay length or an amusing speaker or otherwise lauded his virtues, 400 pages (plus or minus 48) of Hitchens writing about himself had an effect closer to tea laced with bromide than Jack Daniels over ice.

To begin, one of the strangest reviews I have ever read: Trading Places: ‘Famous Amis’ Runs Into ‘Hitch-22’ By Brendan Bernhard, Special to the [New York] Sun.

Mr. Amis plays a prominent role in it, just as Mr. Hitchens himself is granted a hefty cameo in “The Pregnant Widow.”

Mr Bernhard doesn't commit himself to a personal opinion, yet he implies that Amis's fiction is far more revealing that Hitchens' memoir.

Edward Luce in the FT (link above) strains to find at least a redeeming compliment:

Such is Hitchens’ intellectual journey. From one certainty to the next, he has leapt across the stepping stones of life, only rarely dipping a toe into the murky waters of doubt. Hitch-22 has its redeeming qualities – perhaps most vividly in Hitchens’ telling of his mother’s quiet determination to turn him into an English gentleman. Yet the book mostly fails to accentuate whatever redeeming qualities its author has. Indeed, the further it progresses, the harder it is to escape the feeling that its subject deserves a much more nuanced biographer than this.

I'm not even sure that John Crace of the Guardian has even read the book. Funny if you think Hitchens is a blowhard with an ego the size of Mount Rushmore. Probably not, if you don't.

In the Times (I'm not sure how much longer this will be available) Joan Bakewell calls it a rollercoaster ride across the political spectrum. Ms Bakewell ends on a high (and with a very different opinion to Edward Luce):

His final insight is that because he loves an argument he will often protract one simply for its own sake rather than concede even a small point. Within this book we learn why: it displays the best of his persuasive skills, the sharpness of his dismissive put-downs and something else too: self-knowledge.

His mother, however, "is the only woman he refers to with tenderness in the book." My personal favourite bit is this:

They would visit a brothel together as research for Amis’s novel Money. We learn, almost by accident, that Hitchens is married and has three children.

[1] Amazon's sole review, presumably there were two, contains this gem:

Christopher Hitchens' memoir, Hitch-22, will not be released for another week. As a simple consumer with no ties whatsoever to the publishing industry, I have not read it yet. Therefore, it may seem stupid that I am writing a review of the book, and giving it a five-star rating no less, but this brief diatribe is essentially a rebuttal to the blitherings of Neil McGowan, who wrote amazonUK's first review of Hitch-22 and gave it one star, lowest rating, despite having not read it himself, as far as I can gather from his pathetic review.

There's more in that vein, if you like that sort of thing, and I do.