There’s nothing quite so satisfying as an all-knives-out book review, and in her tenure as the lead literary critic for the New York Times, Michiko Kakutani has consistently dished them up. Martin Amis’s new book, The Second Plane, was dismissed as ‘a weak, risible” volume; Nick Hornby’s A Long Way Down was condemned as a ‘maudlin bit of tripe”; and Jonathan Franzen’s memoir, The Discomfort Zone, was reviled as ‘an odious self-portrait of the artist as a young jackass”.
And this approach, while delicious for readers, has naturally won Kakutani enemies. Earlier this week, a Harvard student newspaper reported that Franzen had said that ‘the stupidest person in New York City is currently the lead reviewer of fiction for the New York Times”. Salman Rushdie has described Kakutani as ‘a weird woman”, while Nicholson Baker said that one of her reviews ‘was like having my liver taken out without anaesthesia”.
Rather than blunting her criticism, these counter-attacks have made Kakutani one of the world’s most influential book reviewers. In her early Fifties, she has worked at the New York Times since 1979 and despite being described as ‘reclusive” — avoiding literary parties and interviews — her prominence is such that she once featured as a plot device in an episode of Sex and the City. Little is known about her other than that she is a Yale graduate, her father was a mathematician, she likes the New York Yankees and may well be friends with New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd.
What’s significant is the criticism. In 1998, Kakutani was awarded the Pulitzer for her ‘fearless and authoritative” journalism and her work has been described as being required reading for literary types. Of all the authors who have bitten back, the most offensive was the late Norman Mailer, who described Kakutani as ‘a one-woman kamikaze” in 2005 and said he didn’t know what had ‘put the hair up her immortal Japanese ass”.
He went on to add that the only reason the Times didn’t fire her was because she was ‘a twofer”, being ‘Asiatic” and ‘feminist”. Why Mailer thought the Times would want to fire someone with the guts to describe one of his late books as ‘silly, self-important and at times inadvertently comical” is beyond me. Other authors take note. Attack Kakutani, and only one person ends up looking stupid: you.–