Editor’s Choice
Burn This Book edited by Toni Morrison (HarperStudio, 119 pages, $16.99). It’s natural to think that few things could be drearier than a convocation of writers giving vent to the requisite narcissism and paranoia of their trade. On the other hand, the first task of any self-respecting tyranny is to oppress individuality, curtail freedom and stifle anything that might possibly function as genuine creativity (and always, at its self-righteous worst, for the creative sort’s own “good”).
So you really can’t think of this slender essay collection as just the shop talk of a paranoid profession (even if a good argument could be made that all of philosophy, say, is merely the “shop talk” of the mind). So what if it was born of a Toni Morrison speech at a PEN dinner—one in which Morrison concluded that “a writer’s life and work are not a gift to mankind; they are its necessity”? Before she was launched on a Nobel trajectory, Morrison supported herself as a more than creditable book editor at a publishing house.
What you’ve got here, then, is a superb, wildly disparate collection of writers being brilliant about the beleaguering of their own profession—everyone from John Updike, Salman Rushdie, Orhan Pamuk, Russell Banks, Paul Auster and Nadine Gordimer to Pico Iyer, Francine Prose and former Buffalonian Ed Park (walking in tall cotton). Its intention is to call attention to all oppressed writers everywhere (which explains its three Nobellists and one and a half Nobel candidates).
On one page (80), you’ve got Salman Rushdie writing “the hush of reverence is inappropriate for literature; great writing makes a great noise in the mind, the heart. There are those who believe that persecution is good for writers. That is false.” Five pages later, you’ve got Ed Park, self-described “38- year old Asian male” clutching a copy of the once-banned “I Am the Cheese” the title written “all caps, letters the color of cheddar” and showing “a teenager on a bike. . . He looks like a cross between Edward Norton and Ryan from ‘The O. C.’ ”
In a clever essay, that turns out to be smarter than it is merely clever and not really funny at all.
—Jeff Simon
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