It's been hard to find the time to post anything other than the merest squibs of late. But I would like to gesture in the direction of thought concerning a couple of recent events in Reviewland -- one teensy, one more resonant. As usual, I bring to the subject little except the underappreciated virtue of belatedness: the buzz-bloom is nowhere to be found on these topics. My johnny-come-lateliness should, I hope, allow me not just the wisdom of perspective, but the satisfaction of having the last word, if only because the rest of the panel and the entire audience have adjourned for cocktails and serious flirting.

The small matter is what led me into this: reading Virginia Heffernan's slam of the recent Masterpiece Theatre adaptation of Zadie Smith's novel White Teeth. I had seen the first installment, and liked it well enough, and, stumbling upon the review, was curious to know what Heffernan made of it. (Caveat here: I've read other reviews by this writer and thought them insightful and well-written. I'm dealing only with this particular short essay).

Heffernan resoundingly booed MT's version of White Teeth; however, her beef wasn't just with the adaptation, but with the source material. Here's her opener:

"This is good, this is good, I don't like it, this is good. If I remember right, those were my thoughts as I turned the pages of Zadie Smith's novel White Teeth a few years ago."

Heffernan spends the rest of her first paragraph delineating Smith's accomplishments, but her first sentence has telegraphed the punch coming in paragraph 2: "But I didn't like it. It was not absorbing. The characters kept flitting around, and I never got a chance to see the world their way. I never felt the relaxed, half-drowned sensation of helpless submission that a novel can produce."

This is pretty unsatisfying in a review -- especially of a filmed adaptation of the book thus dismissed, since it raises the question "why did you care about the adaptation?" -- but things get worse, and in an instructive way. Heffernan concludes her dismissal of White Teeth: "Good, bright, inventive, but I didn't like it. Too much homework. But I pushed through the book's nearly 500 pages—and until now all I've ever said or even thought about White Teeth is, 'It's good!' "

Shooting, apparently, for a breezy honesty about her dislike of White Teeth, she winds up conceding both that her negative judgement is hard to articulate except in the most general and subjective of ways, and that for reasons unspecified, she pretended to herself and others that she liked the book, even though she did not. Both of these concessions might have made good fodder for an essay -- what do we do as essayists when we can't analyze our response to a work of art? -- what crimes of self-deception do we routinely commit in order to stay with the crowd in terms of our literary opinions?

But Heffernan doesn't seem to be interested in talking about either of these things. Rather, she wants to dismiss the book without explaining why, and to obliquely suggest that praise of White Teeth has been dutiful and required, like homework.

The negative review of the film itself seems an afterthought: Heffernan wraps up with a stunningly bitchy diss of the book via the film: "White Teeth, which represents a nice risk for Masterpiece Theatre and perhaps the final canonization of Zadie Smith, is ultimately a smart, good-looking, and dull movie. It captures the spirit of the novel woefully well." The final canonization of Zadie Smith? Who has written precisely two novels, the second of which didn't get great reviews? There's a lot of bile packed into that little fig-bar of sarcasm, all of which has to do with the politics of literary stardom (and nothing to do with the book). Her closing line makes all too plain the finality of the reviewer's judgement about the source material -- leading one once again to the question, why the review? What did Heffernan bring to viewing the adaptation that she hadn't already decided in advance?

I'll end this segment of a multi-part post by noting that this review was no big event, and won't, I suspect, cause Zadie Smith any sleepless nights. But it made me think about an essay that I'd heard much about back in March and read the first bit of before getting distracted, probably by something shiny. When a friend sent me a link to a recent Q & A with the author/editor, I decided it was time to catch up with the recent manifesto against the very kind of review I was fuming over.

Tomorrow: Crisis of Belief