One thing that Naipaul and Sontag share, besides a certain haughty austerity, is that they both came from humble beginnings to conquer their respective fields.  Perhaps when you must go against the grain and against tradition, you can’t afford the luxury of the slightest sympathy for the also-ran, lest you allow yourself to become one.  Certainly Sontag would believe so, that one must will oneself to greatness and anything that weakens one’s willpower, any acceptance of softness or mediocrity within oneself, dooms one to obscurity as a minor artist.

In criticism, Seligman claims that provocation and exaggeration are more important than truth and honesty, which goes some way to explaining how he misapprehends Sontag, who might sometimes practice the former but only in service to the latter.  He also writes that critics must narrow their vision to the art about which they write, but the magic of criticism is that reading the criticism may be as heady and rewarding an experience as seeing the art it describes.  Perhaps he is right, although he is too unthoughtful (or considers it a waste of his time) to explain how that might happen, how criticism can aspire to that level of greatness.  Instead, he merely asserts that Kael was a superior stylist, whose skill “deepen[ed]” with age but whose early work was even more rewarding and “human” in its “strain[ing],” to Sontag, whose writing is “narrow” and “constrained” if still “masterful.”

Again, we see that Seligman stacks his deck in order to raise up Kael, even for her shortcomings, while he pushes down Sontag, despite her virtures.  His entire conception of criticism and how it might transcend its subject matter serves to elevate Kael from the station of a reviewer of movies through a film critic to a great writer and critic.  He wants her to be great so he defines greatness in a way that flatters her.  He doesn’t dare argue against Sontag’s greatness, instead he spends his time denigrating her fiction, arguing that in her fiction she is not great.  Only in her criticism can she lay claim to greatness.

Many of his readers, having been “educated” by Flaubert and other modern novelists, knew that autobiography was a form of fiction and that a confessional writer could never be taken at his word. But artifice is also a means of self-discovery. Even in its skillful distortions of biographical fact, Afloat is a voyage into the writer’s mind.

—from the NYRB review of a recent reissue of Guy de Maupassant’s novel Afloat.

When the object of your love is a film critic rather than a film, however, that danger is real, and that is the danger that Craig Seligman faces but never confesses in his book Sontag & Kael.  Seligman is a great lover of Pauline Kael, the once-formidable film critic for the New Yorker who retired in 1991 and died a decade later, but while Kael and her criticism will always be important to those who knew her, as Seligman did, and those who read it as part of their introduction to film as a form, her influence will continue to wane as the years pass and those who knew her and can extol her pass into history.   Kael may have been the most influential movie critic that ever lived but that is a relatively minor accolade since movie critics just aren’t that influential.

What galls Seligman is how much more respect Susan Sontag gets than Kael.  Sontag, almost everyone agrees, will be read for some time and remain one of the great critical voices of this age.  She will be read and admired, if seldom loved, for generations.  While this assessment could turn out to be wrong, Seligman simply can’t understand or abide the disparity between Sontag’s stature and Kael’s.  This book is his attempt to rectify this disparity, and he tries to accomplish it as much by tearing Sontag down as he does by raising Kael up.

The book is organized into four lengthy sections, two of which primarily focus on Sontag and two primarily on Kael, with each section making forays into the opposite character for effect and comparison.  How he chooses to compare them makes his project clear:  he compares Sontag to Kael when he wants to show how strident, joyless, or lacking in sympathy Sontag is, but he compares Kael to Sontag when he he wants to show how Kael is every bit as engaged or accomplished as Sontag.  He uses Kael to make Sontag look bad, but uses Sontag to illuminate and elevate Kael.

At the books midpoint, just before he turns his primary focus away from Sontag and toward Kael, he quotes one of his early readers in an attempt to shut off and prevent this line of criticism.  He friend asked, “Why are you devoting half your book to a writer you hate?” and it’s a good question because it gets at the hidden, probably unconscious, agenda of the book.  Seligman protests that he doesn’t hate Sontag, and I believe him, but he never asks himself why he would write about her so unsympathetically.  He thinks she’s just exasperating so that’s enough.

Sontag is universally admired and respected if never loved (and seldom even liked), while Kael is much beloved by all who know her if often dismissed as mere reviewer by the wider culture.  The question raised by his first reader, and that likely will occur to all readers, can be answered simply by noting this fact and appreciating how devastating it is for Seligman, who so loves his Pauline.

Even so, most movies, especially movies that are well received, are terrible, for reasons that the Oscars make routinely obvious, both by what films they omit and of course select.

Although I appreciate Mason’s principled defense of literature and of criticism and of realism & lyricism in literature on this blog, I just don’t think I want to waste my time reading a critic who would so quickly and easily dismiss the vast majority of film, as if the form itself were tainted.  I imagine Mason would claim that he is a great lover of film just not Hollywood drivel, but another of his vices as a critic is hiding behind the sanctity of artistic achievement, which allows him to sneer at lesser writers, forms, works.  This is just the last straw for me.

A few days later when I tried the same thing with the much-heralded Netherland by Joseph O’Neill, the words clotted together in my mouth as if I were speaking through salt-water taffy.  The baby quickly lost interest and crawled away to play among the bric-a-brac sloughed from the shelf in the bedroom’s brooding corner.

If you find the above comparison unfair and overwrought, you’re right.  I shouldn’t expect journeyman novelist Joseph O’Neill to measure up to a Nobel laureate like Naipaul.  And my overheated parody poorly approximates O’Neill’s own portentous style.  The significance of the experiment is simply this: while so many others have praised the language of this book, I found it infelicitous and clumsy because it tries too hard.  And it must try so hard because the story itself is so slight.

The manner in which the story unfolds also annoyed me.  O’Neill dives into the consciousness of his principle character, the Dutch financial analyst Hans van den Broek, following his thoughts from one association to another even when those associations have only marginal relevance to the present time of the narrative.  Perhaps another kind of reader would find these diversions entrancing, but I too frequently asked myself where this story was going and too seldom did a satisfactory answer appear.

Zadie Smith, in her incisive review for the NYRB, compared Netherland unfavorably with Remainder by Tom McCarthy, a decidedly more experimental novel.  She argues that these two novels present quite contrasting views of what the novel is about and what is possible in the form.  Surprisingly, despite its negative tone, her evaluation is what finally spurred me to begin reading Netherland.  I can’t say exactly why, but her description made me think that his novel, while more conventional, was also more richly-written and (possibly) as vaster in scope.

Turns out I misunderstood her (or she lied to me).  Very early on, I noted that none of the critics bothered to mention how boring the book was, with its languid descriptions of insignificant things and meandering reminiscences that lead nowhere.  I almost gave up.  Eventually I returned to finish the book, wondering if it would perhaps end in such a way that the whole enterprise would be redeemed (as some have suggested), but no.  The final scene is as conventional and forced as every other one.  The ending left me not only unmoved but slightly miffed that all this symbolic hullabaloo could culminate in so little, as if the minor, entirely-obvious epiphany so characteristic of a certain species of sterile ”New Yorker“ short story might be enough to sustain and justify an entire novel.

I have no doubt that a certain kind of reader might very well enjoy this book.  But I am not of that sort.