Deja Reviews:
Florence King All Over Again
USI Books, 345 pages, $24.95
This is the most presumptuous thing I’ve ever done. I’m actually
reviewing a book of book reviews by Florence King, the master of
reviewing. (OK, your objection is noted. But “mistress of
reviewing” just sounds odd. And she’s tougher than any male
reviewer I can think of.)
The designations “unique” and “one of a kind” are overworked
here in what Miss King refers to as “The Republic of Nice.” They’re
promiscuously applied to people with modest talents or only mildly
diverting personalities. But Florence King is the real deal. Not
only is there no one else like her, there’s no one else even
remotely like her. (As much as I like her work, perhaps this is for
the best. How would the rest of us cope with more than one of
her?)
A fan of the grand old game, Miss King calls herself a baseball
spinster rather than a soccer mom and prefers her Baltimore Orioles
warm-up jacket to designer duds. Appropriate. She really knows how
to work inside.
Sticking with the baseball comparison, Florence King is a
five-tool writer, and every one of those tools is razor sharp, as
readers will see when going through these essays. (And as regular
readers of TAS know — these reviews and columns all
appeared in The American Spectator and National
Review.) In them you always get the gospel according to FK, a
take on the world that is intellectually penetrating and often
savagely funny. While making her own points in her unfailingly
entertaining way, she always does what a good book reviewer should,
to wit: tell potential buyers what a book is about and how well it
accomplishes what it sets out to do. In other words, is it any
good?
In the foreword to Deja, Paul Greenberg makes the point
that Miss King’s work is beyond polemical. Just so. Florence King
gets in her licks from the right side of the culture war, though
she’s hardly an off-the-rack conservative, calling herself a
royalist in politics. She parses the truly idiotic from the merely
foolish or the downright pathetic. (She dubbed oh-so-sensitive
Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen “Butterfly
Dundee.”). But regular readers will see that there is also much of
the universal in her writing. This is high-protein stuff.
Strategically, Florence King prefers the frontal assault. No
pussy-footing around with literary stool softeners (La King’s term
for euphemisms). She eviscerates fools and foolish ideas. Sacred
cows, watch your udder. She’s not only willing to say that the
emperor is wearing no clothes, but that he and the whole pack of
suck-up courtiers around him are bloody fools and capons into the
bargain. She’s at her best reviewing bad books, or competently
written books whooping up bad ideas. She has great fun at the
expense of geek-branch feminists, anti-smoking health Nazis,
wussifed men, enviro-wackos, and other cultural ear mites and
toxicities. She goes through humbuggery like Sherman went through
Georgia.
A Deja sampler:
* A review of a shallow and whiney book by Kelly Flinn, the Air
Force’s first woman B-52 pilot who was cashiered for boffing an
enlisted man, begins: “Most of Kelly Flinn’s book reads like an
adolescent adventure series, ‘The Cosmo Girls Go to War.’” Later,
“She’s the type America turns out in droves: the ‘natural leader,’
student council junkies who lead where everyone else is going,
bowing to every cultural ukase along the way while cherishing a
fantasy of independence instilled in them by half-baked teachers
who hate original thinkers.”
* On a book of Cato’s letters. “The letters are bracingly
masculine, free of the equivocations of today’s tepid op-eds. Cato
‘feels’ not, he thinks; neither does he ‘tend.’ The febrile
primness of American ‘values’ is alien to him.”
* On a book by Michael Kinsley, “If Michael Kinsley were a
Dickens character his name would be Barnaby Sneerly.”
* On a book on the “men’s movement” humbug Robert Bly, she says
his mummery calls for …”campfires, animal skins, reverence for
the tribal elder (Bly), and enough spears for round-the-clock
performance of Aida in the major opera houses of the
world.”
* In a review of a book on John Quincy Adams, she refers to
feminist icon Abigail Adams as “America’s founding scold,” and
says, “Her specialty was long distance nagging.”
* On a memoir by Doris Kearns Goodwin we read, “Like many aging
Democrats, Goodwin tends to wax nostalgic about the things that
liberalism has ruined.”
* On a political book there’s this aside, “The growing
feminization of America has turned journalism into a cat fight. The
media’s favorite buzzword, ‘mean-spirited,’ has a definite hiss to
it and cannot be uttered without an accompanying sniff. Girlish
double emphasis flies as reporters demand to know what the
President really said and what he really meant. The ubiquitous
figure of our time, ‘a highly placed administration official who
spoke on condition of anonymity,’ suggest a beldame in britches
hanging over the back fences of government whispering, ‘Don’t you
dare tell a soul.’”
* On a political novel, “Powertown is being hyped as
another Bonfire of the Vanities, but in fact it’s a cast
of thousands looking for a novel. If they ever find it, they can
call it a gas leak of the incongruities.”
* On a book about the Spanish-American War, “Anyone who is
disgusted with Pat Schroeder’s politically correct navy will get a
thrill up the spine and a lump in the throat reading these
descriptions of a time when America’s sailing men were
wind-whipped, not pussy-whipped, and morale was in the
stratosphere.”
* On a ghosted book about a former Congressperson’s career,
“Susan Molinari is so bereft of self-knowledge and introspective
power that one is tempted to read this book through spread fingers
like a queasy juror looks at autopsy photos.”
If these examples don’t make you eager for the book, then you
delight not in man (nor woman neither), and surely your sense of
humor was shot off in the war.
Buy the book. (Click here to order.)
You’ll have fun reading it. And when you’re done it will sit nicely
on your book shelf next to the well-thumbed copy of STET
Damnit!, King’s collection of “The Misanthrope’s Corner”
columns written for National Review. You do have
that one, don’t you?
