A Great Gift for Rich Reference

John Leonard deserves better than this:

Whenever you hear a child question whether journalistic criticism can sing with deep thought and high art, brandish a copy of John Leonard’s Reading for My Life and resist the urge to spank him with this canonical document. Take the humanistic approach instead. Open the volume at random and read aloud. If the child does not respond favorably to the pure music of this performance, then the child is uneducable, and it’s time for drastic action.

The book picks up 50 pieces of the amazing mind of the late John Leonard, who wrote with a great gift for rich reference; who peered through books with X-ray laser eyes; who read politics with clarity and passion, like the last principled urban liberal, as opposed to the wayward Third Way type; who ranks as the great critic of television—of the signal medium of the American experiment—precisely because he had read all the great books and most of the bad ones and that background helps to place both Twin Peaks and the ash heaps of cable news in high relief.

That lede is just bizarre, but “who peered through books with X-ray laser eyes”? Seriously?

It’s when you read things like Troy Patterson’s review of John Leonard’s Reading for My Life from the new Slate Book Review section that you really have to ask yourself if anyone gives a damn any more. Surely anyone with a high school diploma could come up with something better than X-ray laser eyes, and any editor worth her red pen would never let something like that stand. Alas, I fear that Patterson and his editor knew better but just didn’t care enough to do anything about prose this awful:

Finding ideas in translation, he makes profitable trips to Palestine and Israel, to Egypt and South Africa, to magic realism as practiced behind the Iron Curtain and under a Fatwa. It is telling that the collection devotes little space to British writers—almost as if Julian Barnes and his friends never happened. The implication is that those chaps can look after themselves; this author was an American spirit.

For God’s sake, your critical prose should not resemble publicity copy—and sound worse by the comparison.

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