NYT Sunday (Academic) Book Review; or, Thomas Mallon, we Hardy knew ye

My apologies to those who kept checking in this past week only to see my ursine shout out to friends back in Chicago. It was a busy week here at the Kingston office: in addition to teaching (my students and I read Francis Bacon this week), I had job talks to go to (our department is hiring); and on Friday, I subbed in a graduate seminar on the topic of "close reading."

While the weekend couldn't come fast enough, how dismaying it was to turn to this Sunday's Times Book Review, to read yet another surge of anti-academic sentiment in the Gray Lady.

In this week's prefatory editorial column, titled "Up Front", the Editors introduce, indeed valorize, the critic Thomas Mallon in the following terms:

“The only really bold thing I’ve ever done,” Thomas Mallon insisted in a recent telephone conversation, “was to give up tenure at Vassar and start trying, in my mid-30s, to live the kind of life I might have had in my 20s.” Although his aim was to be a novelist (his first, “Arts and Sciences,” was published in 1988; his seventh, “Fellow Travelers,” is due in May), it was literary journalism, not novel-writing, that set him free from the constraints of academic prose. Mallon’s informed but accessible style, evident in his cover review of Claire Tomalin’s biography of Thomas Hardy, has been a feature of his contributions to the Book Review, The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly and other publications for the past 20 years — and in “Doubting Thomas,” the column he wrote for GQ magazine through much of the 1990s.

Because, you know, we literary scholars are just a bunch of uninformed, inaccessible cowards, cleaving to the "constraints of academic prose," if not the shackles of tenure, and living unfree, unfulfilled lives. So much for liberal education, eh?

But you know who's really bold and free? Claire Tomalin. In Mallon's review of Tomalin's biography of Thomas Hardy, Tomalin receives the following ringing endorsement:

Tomalin herself examines the novels with the confident judgments of a critic, not the hedged and sometimes overawed appraisals of a scholar. Appreciative of Hardy’s genius, she still finds his body of fiction “exceptionally uneven.” “Tess,” the novel that made him rich, remains by Tomalin’s measure an awkward production in spots, and yet it “glows with the intensity” of Hardy’s imagination. In a fine example of biography’s usefulness to criticism, Tomalin notes that what Hardy called Tess’s “invincible instinct towards self-delight” was a quality the novelist “himself possessed in very small measure,” and thus, perhaps, judged all the more laudable in his heroine. “Jude the Obscure,” written when he was in his mid-50s, reprised Hardy’s earliest “theme of a penniless young man with ambitions and radical ideas.” But so inexhaustible were his feelings on the subject that even today, as Tomalin puts it, “reading ‘Jude’ is like being hit in the face over and over again. ... It was Job retold for a godless world that offers no final consolation or redress.”

Mallon concludes his review on the following note:

[Tomalin] has visited each important locale of Hardy’s life, noticing the large and seemingly simple things academic scholars often miss: “Most of his characters are prodigious walkers. Tess and Jude both walk themselves through the crises in their lives, and Jude effectively kills himself by walking in the rain.” This is an observation that helps readers to square the circle of recognitions, to remember Hardy as a writer whose books they would once finish with the sudden need to get up from the chair and out of the house, to walk, alone, filled with the ancient surefire feelings of pity and fear.

Those of you who followed the post-MLA "academic blog" debates may recall that I had mused whether blogging might help intervene in discourses such as these. I'm still thinking about that topic, as Carrie Shanafelt awaits a long-overdue response from me over at the Valve; and I have much to say here, about Mallon's claims here, and the Times' claims for him, and what they imply and assume about our work.

For once, I am going to resist the urge to be overly didactic, however, or to perform a "close reading" of these passages, and instead put the questions the Book Review raises out to my readers. . . is there no such thing as bad press, when the press misrepresents scholarly work to the general readership, indeed our own consumer base? What do you think of Mallon's claims and assumptions here -- in what ways are they valid, in what ways unmerited? Do we turn the other cheek, take it lying down?