What's Going On At The New York Review Of Books?



(image via arjay)

Once upon a time The New York Review of Books was a grand institution of bareknuckled intellectual combat. Now, not so much. Recently there has been this disturbing trend of incest.

All The Corsair to explain that a little bit.

It kind of creeped us the fuck out out that in the November 20, 2008 edition of TNYRB they published Reuel Wilson's account of his parents' sexual congress. But we thought: maybe we are just being uptight. Bourgois. Un-camp, as Sontag might say. These are, you know, bohemian intellectuals. Unfettered by the bounds of common morality, even if it might appear to the jejeune eye that their behavior reeks of intellectual decadence. Even an intellectual super-heavyweight like Vladimir Nabokov novelized, at labyrinthine length, the subject of keeping-it-in-the-family (Exaggerated cough suggesting feigned detachment).

Still, it didn't quite sit right. Being a Ugandan-born writer raised Catholic, the parental bedroom is, you know, a door that ought to remain closed to progeny. And Reuel's parent-erotica seemed anything but, despite the overwrought clinical prose of the pinkish Edmund Wilson in his bloated sexual prime ("...the shoulder-straps down so as to leave her breast bare, I kissed her wide red fleshy and rather amiable mouth"). Mary McCarthy was, in her day, a delicious-looking woman (and, more importantly, brilliant); Edmund Wilson was a powerful, choleric, hyper-intelligent man and probably the finest literary critic in the history of the United States. Why is their son now editing Daddy's gooey mash-books?

And in another instance of the creepy, The New York Review of Books returns to the subject of incest in reviewing David Reiff's Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947–1963 on the life of his mother, the late Susan Sontag. From the review by Deborah Eisenberg:

"The diaries contain (among plenty of other sorts of things) passages that concern Sontag's—largely anguished—love affairs with several women, her abrupt and painful seven-year marriage to the scholar and cultural critic Philip Rieff, and, inevitably, their son. The experience of reading the diaries, even for a disinterested party, is intense as well as anxiously voyeuristic; small wonder that the tone of Rieff's introduction is sometimes that of someone who has been on hand to witness a terrain-altering meteorological event.

"But even from the earliest, less intimate entries, we feel that we've broken the lock on the little book. The young author's assiduous excavations into, and evaluations of, the characteristics, capacities, and potentialities that she finds to be hers put us in almost claustrophobically close proximity to her."

Even more claustrophobic when the passages of love affairs in the little book with the broken lock is brought to us by the author's son. Way overshare, David Reiff, "editor (Averted Gaze)."