Ben Yagoda, author of a book I'm currently enjoying, The Sound on the Page, a defense of writing "style," has recently written a critique of book critic Michiko Kakutani in Slate. He highlights some of her weaknesses as a critic:
"For Kakutani, there is no middle ground: a list of deficiencies, and a bit of plot summary, are all she has for us, and, lacking any other ideas or themes, she (characteristically) exaggerates the novel's faults. In her world, books tend to be masterpieces or rubbish; in the real one, they're almost always somewhere in between."
He goes on to point out that Kakutani is somewhat of a philistine when it comes to language:
"Virtually every word or phrase is a cliché, or at best shopworn and lifeless, and evidence of Kakutani's solid tin ear. (She has justly been called out for her near-obsessive use of "lugubrious" and "limn," words that probably have never been said aloud in the history of English.) That's what can happen to a writer when she merely praises and merely blames. Kakutani appears incapable of engaging with language, either playfully or seriously, which puts her at a painful disadvantage when she is supposed to be evaluating writers who can and do. Here, she tries to energize the prose with lapel-grabbing intensifiers like utterly and wonderfully and superfluous adjectives like savvy and embarrassing, but they just make her look like she's protesting too much."
A convincing writer, Yagoda has made me feel abased, but for the better, for having relied on Kakutani as my literary bible for the last twenty years.
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