The Limits of Sex and Siegel

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Lee Siegel clears the bar he sets for himself. “The critic,” he writes in “Falling Upwards: Essays in Defense of the Imagination” (Basic Books, 337 pages, $25),”should not produce essays consisting of two paragraphs of opinion at the beginning, then twenty-eight paragraphs of synopsis … followed by two resoundingly final paragraphs of opinion at the end.” No, the critic should not. And no, Mr. Siegel does not. But then, the bar isn’t at world-record height. Mr. Siegel’s loftier ambition, however, is to serve the “ambitions of the true artist struggling to break through all the travesties, inversions, and deformations of his calling to a rich, unfettered imaginative place.”With the bar at this height, Mr. Siegel clears it only intermittently. When he does not, it’s not because his intellect is afraid of heights. It’s rather because the likes of Carrie Bradshaw and Barbara Kingsolver won’t let it leave the ground.

Mr. Siegel is much praised for his “tremendous range” and this collection amply demonstrates it. Harry Potter, CNN, and “Sex and the City” share time with Chekhov, Dante and D. H. Lawrence. His breadth is impressive, distributed as it is across media that make very different demands on our sensory and imaginative faculties. Painting, it seems, is the only medium that Mr. Siegel has yet to master. Not for lack of trying. Three essays — on Russian realism, the Nabis, and the avant-garde—take up painting but each reads like a cross between an encyclopedia entry and gossip column.

The best essay in the collection, drawn from Mr. Siegel’s recent writing for the New Republic, Harper’s, and the Nation, is his justly famous Harper’s review of James Atlas’s Saul Bellow biography. Mr. Atlas had spent a lot of time cutting Bellow down to size — for his misogyny, racism, and narcissism — and Mr. Siegel does some cutting of his own. With Mr. Atlas flayed, Mr. Siegel gets down to what matters: those Bellovian heroes “so consumed with desire” that “they burn life away with the intensity of their wanting, feeling, thinking.”They “leap away from disappointing reality into ideas, and then away from insufficient ideas into sex, and away from sex into fantasy, and back to culture, and then back to experience … in an infinite regression of distancing from the episodes in life that fall short of life’s promise.” This sentence, with its roiling energy, both tips its cap to Bellow and helps us see how sex and the intellect electrify the axial lines of Bellow’s fiction.

On Mr. Siegel’s reading, J. K. Rowling, the creator of the Harry Potter series, is like Bellow without the sex. She, says Mr. Siegel, “has near total confidence in her imagined world” and, best of all, “does not use the archness, and the worldliness, and the knowingness to protect herself or to promote herself, to remind us that she is too sophisticated to be taken in by her own fictions.”This sets her apart from magic — and, Mr. Siegel might have added, hysterical — realists, “who pretend that fantastic occurrences are continuous with reality” and, in so doing, deny readers the opportunity “to believe the unbelievable against all the evidence of reality.”And David Foster Wallace wonders why he always got picked last for Quidditch.

Barbara Kingsolver isn’t so much bad at Quidditch as she is just plain bad. “Under the guise of a strong political stance,” Mr. Siegel writes, Kingsolver fails to deliver a single sentiment “that you could not express in an exchange with a stranger at a convention, or during a job interview, or on a first date.” “Sex and the City” Mr. Siegel finds entertaining enough, but he scolds it for having something rotten at its core. “Who is Carrie Bradshaw Really Dating?” asks the title of one essay, a question Carrie Bradshaw had herself answered: “I’m dating the city,”she says in one episode. Wrong, says Mr. Siegel. Carrie is “dating her television” and, what’s worse, “this relationship — between a person and an appliance that projects the illusion of other people without exacting from the ego a price for being with other people” — is “the only relationship in which this series’ creators … actually believe.”

This is very well said. In fact, it’s pretty much all there is to be said about Carrie Bradshaw or Barbara Kingsolver. And yet Mr. Siegel lets them each have it for nearly 30 pages without ever stopping to ask whether the imagination needs this much defending. Is it really that weak? What we want, and what Mr. Siegel fails to gives us, is a proportionate response. One expertly placed stab would have kept the imagination safe against these two. But Mr. Siegel treats them like a couple of zombies that just won’t die. And, like most zombie movies, this does the imagination a disservice.

Mr. Siegel’s rule, strangely, looks to involve a response inversely proportional to the complexity of a work. Thus, for instance, the scant 10 pages for Chekhov — the last 10 pages of the book, no less. “Reflecting on Chekhov,” says Mr. Siegel,”you find yourself using words like ‘sadness,’ and ‘longing,’ and ‘disappointment,’ and ‘love,’ and ‘kindness,’ and ‘hate’ — you feel, inexorably, a sudden desire to talk not about literature, not about the conventions and strategies of fiction, but about life itself, as if Chekhov had not so much invented his stories as discovered them in a field, or inside a broken bottle.” To my ears, this is beautiful. It’s a pity there isn’t more of it.

The critic need not so much decipher the work of art as invite us to return to it. But no one needs to — or should — return to much of what’s included in this collection. It turns out that “tremendous range” isn’t such a virtue after all. What, then, is the proper response to “Sex and the City”? Mr. Siegel might take guidance from the quiet restraint evoked in the final lines of “Herzog,”which he cites in his review of Atlas. Tempted to call down to a neighbor below, Herzog checks himself. “At this time he had no messages for anyone. Nothing. Not a single word.”

Mr. Boyle last wrote in these pages on the battle of Thermopylae.


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