Speaking Of...

I first heard of Denby (see update to post below) last summer when I read his 1997 book Great Books, about re-reading...well...great books while auditing a couple of Columbia Univ. courses. By the end of his book, I was unimpressed by his critical abilities. In general, I very much like Roger Ebert's movie-reviewing style; one of his guiding ideas is that movies aren't about what they are about so much as how they are about it. That, then, leads to interesting questions about why a movie is how it is (why was Birth of a Nation so popular at its debut, but so offensive now?). One might say the same about books. But Denby seemed to wish that literary criticism were restricted to a book's internal construction; and it seems to me that, at a certain point, there's just not much more to be said about that. Should lit-crit limit itself to things within the bound of the author's intentions?

Shortly after 11 Sept., I saw a bit in a newspaper by a mother whose young daughter had said some of the images were pretty. Of course, mother scolded daughter. But daughter had a point: if you ignore what the images represent, if you just look at form and texture and color and such, some of them are pretty. One (in)famous one, of someone who had jumped from one of the towers, had many of the qualities of artsy photography. And yet, I doubt Denby would argue that those images should be considered in a vacuum. So why, then, would he think books should be any different? Or does "great book" status entitle a work to kid-glove treatment? And all of this, of course, begs the question of how "great book" status is recognized.

So, anyway, I'm impressed by Denby's perception of Crash.