Customer Reviews

When the Kissing Had to Stop: Cult Studs, Khmer Newts, Langley Spooks, Techno-Greeks, Video Drones, Author Gods, Serial Killers, Vampire Media, Allen Sperm-Suckers, Satanic therapi

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

John Leonard has been making me get up early on Sunday mornings so that I may watch his reviews of T.V. and media on CBS's "Sunday Morning". From those early morning encounters, I was prepared for the pacing and precision of his sentences. But now, after sampling this fine collection of essays, what a pleasure it is to savor his words on the page, like hard candy.

I found this book to be one of the more unusual things I've ever read. It had multiple personalities; Entertaining, Enlightening, Humbling, Compelling, Strange, Compelling, and I'm sure I'm missing a few. The vocabulary is unbelievable. Don't touch this book without a dictionary in-hand. However, the writing is captivating. It alone is worth the price of reading about writers and works you've never heard of, with attendant feelings of functional illiteracy. I put this book down often. But, I always picked it back up. It was a unique read.

It's not a word I use lightly, but there's no better way to describe John Leonard than to say he's a genius. He certainly won't appeal to everyone's taste, but if you like essays written by a man whose mind ranges over the whole course of human history and knowledge, and who isn't afraid to bring all that knowledge together in a single sentence, then here's the guy for you. Not only is he a genius, but he's also terribly witty, and you don't get that from a lot of geniuses.

But you won't like Leonard if all you want from an essay about a book is an answer to the question, "Should I read it?" or if you are a fan of such folks as Newt Gingrich, Ronald Reagan, or Attila the Hun. (But don't think Leonard's leftism is knee-jerk; there's a wonderful essay in here about smoking, in which he confesses, "I stick burning leaves in my foodhole," and goes on to explore his life as a social pariah among all of his purer-than-thou lefty friends.)

Every page herein is suffused with a stunning literacy, and Leonard drops titles the way most of us shed skin. I would love to spy on him for a day, because I don't know how he has crammed so much knowledge into himself. He writes brilliantly about the whole history of cyberpunk, then goes on to fine surveys of African literature, Israeli literature, and everything that ever hit a page in the USA. But Leonard knows more than books, for he seems to have seen at least one episode of every television show ever created and made it to all of the major movies of the past fifty years or so. He's got a good grasp of American political history, and he seems to have some sort of social life. He's even got time for AA meetings.

I don't know how he does it, but thank whatever deity you can imagine for him. He's a wizard with words, an encyclopedia of everything, but more than that he's got vision, scruples, morality. And he wants to find the same in other people. He writes, "I like to be reminded that once there were writers for whom the convulsions of our time were a revelation, an insult or a wound, instead of a thesis topic cross-linked in a Nexis search to syndicate a rant."

Sure, Leonard's references sometimes cross themselves into a feedback loop, and he's got a love of paragraph-long lists, and he has a tendency to recycle himself from previous books and articles (having read all of Leonard's collections of essays over the years, I've heard that satire means "never having to say you're sorry", as does arch-conservatism, while standard liberalism means "always having to say you're sorry", but the phrase is so great I don't mind Leonard's apparent determination to keep it in perpetual print). His indulgences and habits are a part of his charm, and I wouldn't want him to lose any of it. There is not and has never been a critic like John Leonard -- perhaps there has never even been any sort of writer like him. But I haven't read quite enough to speak authoritatively on every writer who ever lived; Leonard has, though, so I'll defer to him.

I'll respectfuly disagree with Kirkus Reviews. There is a theme on which Leonard's book hangs together. Starting with his discussion of Utopias, through the essay on Glyn Hughes <cite>The Rape of the Rose</cite> he's angry that we've replaced criticism that delt with the real world with a ghost world of Postmodernist buzzwords, and that by chasing those ghosts, the academic left have abandoned their mission of commenting on the real world.

John Leonard is a left-winger. Fine, so am I. The trouble is, he thinks that this is a daring and remarkable thing to be. Every few pages he lets us in on his leftism and (more subtly, though subtlety has never been his thing) how incredibly proud of himself he is for being leftist. You get the sense that he wishes there were some real and imminent peril in praising Toni Morrison, but there isn't--and he KNOWS it--and therefore his tough-boy declarations are not only repetitive but repulsive. Does he care about the left's constituency, or does he just want to be seen caring in order to get chummy reviews from the Village Voice? Also, has anyone noticed that his prose is more often than not borderline incoherent?

I agree 100% with the reader who writes that Leonard's prose is borderline incoherent. Borderline is too nice! It's vulgar mania dressed up to look like a real literary style. What rubbish! I'm less offended by Leonard's tiresome, slack, unexercised, undemanding leftism (though anyone who can call Giuliani's reign in New York "Mussolini meantime", as Leonard does in his Grace Paly piece, is not only being morally offesnive, but shows that he simply doesan't respect the weight and actual meaning of words: in itself, a disqualification for a man who poses as a critic.) No, it's not the politics so much that offends me as the vulgar literary sensibility, whipping itself up into hysterias, so that readers are fooled into thinking that here is a journalistic Thomas Pynchon. The prose is truly crass, tin-eared, clumsy, and exhibitionist. What this man thinks of a "poetry" is just the kind of foolish, bumbling-but-apparently-flashy language that rock stars put on the backs of records, and that rock journalists use in publications like NME. God help us that this man has set himself up as a critic. (But then, this is someone who thinks that Barbara Kingsolver is "our very own Gordimer or Lessing": q.e.d., not a literary mind.)