How Beautiful It Is and How Easily It Can Be Broken.

"Daniel Mendelsohn brightens the dour New York Review of Books like few other contributors," writes David Haglund, reviewing How Beautiful It Is and How Easily It Can Be Broken for the New York Observer. "This is partly thanks to his subject matter: neither Iraq nor climate change but literature, theater and the movies. It's also thanks to his - not style, exactly; Mr Mendelsohn's a gifted writer, but the prose of his essays is less lyrical than that of his books, The Lost (2006) and The Elusive Embrace (1999). What distinguishes his criticism, rather, is a willingness to address not just the arts but their reception. He writes reviews as cultural commentary, and he's more or less mastered the form."

In the San Francisco Bay Guardian, Jason Shimai finds the book "excellent. But it lacks something I can't help wanting from the criticism I read, no matter how often some denunciation tries to shame the desire out of me. One of Mendelsohn's pieces even takes novelist and literary critic Dale Peck's 2005 review collection, Hatchet Jobs to task for indulging in the very thing I look for: bitchiness."

"He has stimulating things to say about Noël Coward, Oscar Wilde, Truman Capote, Pedro Almodóvar and Ted Hughes's adaptation of Euripides's Alcestis, among many others," writes Richard Eder in the Los Angeles Times. "One of the strongest pieces disputes the universal judgment that Brokeback Mountain is about love in general, and not just gay love. Mendelsohn, gay himself, argues that on the contrary, it is precisely a gay tragedy. To believe that the 'normality' of the two main characters takes them beyond their gayness is to imply that gayness makes them something other than normal. Through all the variety, one theme recurs: the tendency of our interpreters to soften history and the art of the past by bending it to contemporary concerns."

"Mendelsohn often begins his essays with examples from the Greek classics - Homer, Aristotle, Aristophanes - that accessibly illuminate the virtues and flaws of contemporary art," notes Craig Morgan Teicher in Time Out New York. "From there, he eases into masterful takedowns of puffed-up novels (The Lovely Bones and Middlesex); ambitious but ultimately failed films (Marie Antoinette and Troy); and overvalued, overconfident or overplayed writers (Truman Capote, Dale Peck and Philip Roth, respectively)."

"This is an uncommon reader, on account of who and what he is and of what he knows," writes Martin Rubin in the San Francisco Chronicle. "To say Mendelsohn is steeped in the classic literatures of Greek and Latin is an understatement. He writes that he pursued his graduate studies in classics with 'an eye to a career in academia; instead I became a journalist.' It is a measure of our times that the academy, host to so much mediocrity, could have let such a genuinely inspired critic slip through its hands."

Posted by dwhudson at August 20, 2008 6:22 AM