CRITICS AND BITTEROSITY.

CRITICS AND BITTEROSITY. This harsh review (link via Arts and Letters Daily) took me aback because I think Adam Gopnik is one of the best essayists writing today. The reviewer clearly thinks that Gopnik’s new book about his children is not sufficiently grown up (the review builds to the last line, “You kids go play elsewhere”). I understand that not everyone is as happy as I am to hear stories about other people’s children. But there is more going in the review than a dislike for the subject. There is a sentence in the review that changed my reading of the entire review. Gopnik tells a story about his daughter saying that one of her imaginary playmates, in fact the fiancee of Charlie Ravioli, had died of a “disease called Bitterosity.” (Charlie Ravioli is the famous imaginary playmate whose schedule is so full that he doesn’t have time to get together with Gopnik’s daughter.) The reviewer summarizes Gopnik’s riff on Bitterosity as bitterness “born of….jealousy and resentment.” Then comes the riveting sentence: “The gnawing resentment of creative talents who never achieved what they desired or never received the breaks they felt they were due is a rich, stubbly grown-up subject that deserves better than the gentle spray of ironies that Gopnik employs whenever a fanciful notion dials his number.” This sentence seems to explain the tone of the review, its condemnation (out of the blue) of Malcolm Gladwell as a “slickster trickster”, its characterization of Gopnik as “an earnest little eager beaver whose twitchy aura of neediness makes him hard to dislike until the preciosity simply becomes too much”, the reviewer’s reaction when the New Yorker’s editor says, “Adam is adorable.” (“A damning compliment, fit for a performing flea.”). I wound up with a certain embarrassment for the reviewer’s inadvertent (or perhaps intentional?) self-revelation and a certain sympathy for his pain.