Review of Reviews: Henry's Morning Reading

• Is it the headband? One view of how David Foster Wallace has become a hipster hashtag:

“Just a penis with a thesaurus”: so went the standard withering dismissal of John Updike that David Foster Wallace quoted in a 1997 review. Wallace was describing the scorn that readers his age felt for the mid-century writers he called “Great Male Narcissists” — Norman Mailer and Philip Roth, too, but John Updike in particular. Updike was the one who inspired real disdain; he was shorthand for literary male chauvinism, for all the hoary tomfoolery that might lead an enlightened reader of the '90s to roll her eyes. Wallace claimed to be something of an Updike fan (or, at least, not a total hater), but he was ultimately sympathetic to this attitude.

How strange, then, that Wallace, too, has become lit-bro shorthand. This occurred to me last week, after listening to a friend discuss the foibles of a bookish male acquaintance with a man-bun. “That guy,” she said. “I just feel like he’s first in line to see the David Foster Wallace movie.”

• In The University Bookman, Helen Andrews starts her review of Ta-Nehisi Coates’ new book with an intriguing comparison with the late James Baldwin:

When he set out to interview James Baldwin for his oral history of the civil rights movement, Who Speaks for the Negro? (1965), Robert Penn Warren knew that the challenge would be to get any straightforward answers out of him. “In general, in Baldwin’s utterances, written or spoken,” he explained, “there is a tendency to pull away from the specific issue which might provoke analysis, toward one more general … toward the absolute, the eschatological.” Forewarned is forearmed, but in this case it was not enough: Baldwin’s pivot maneuver was invincible. “For example, when I asked him about the obligation of the Negro, he countered by saying he wasn’t sure what a Negro is. What is a Negro?” With quiet amusement, Warren admitted, “That is, indeed, a more charged and fascinating question than the one I had asked.”

That Ta-Nehisi Coates has the same ultra-macroscopic tendency as his hero can be seen in the highly recognizable style of conclusion with which he often ends his blog posts at The Atlantic: short, sweeping, indefinite, ponderous.

Things kind of go downill from there, as Andrews makes her case that Coates is just a  retro Angry Negro From the Seventies Out to Take Your Stuff.

• The Scotsman is all over crime books this week.

• The distinguished law professor Charles Fried- Solicitor General of the United States under President Reagan- reviews a book on how a Nazi judge grappled with morality in an immoral legal system. It’s a relevant discussion when we see in the papers today that a Kentucky county clerk is defying a federal court order to issue same-sex marriage licenses because it offends her beliefs. Fried states the problem:

Law speaks the language of obligation. These obligations very often come as the conclusion of sometimes quite complex systems of rules.   These systems of rules are part of practices and institutions that make possible human coordination of every degree of intricacy.  Our social life through and through is constituted and enabled by legal rules.   But do these rules, does the law have a moral claim on us?  The law says we must or may not do this or that, but must we really?  We may be legally obligated, but are we morally obligated?  The connection between legal and moral obligation is the signature issue of legal philosophy. At one extreme one might say that the two are just two unrelated normative systems that happen to share (some) common vocabulary.   At the other extreme one might say that they are isomorphic:  to be legally obligated just is for that reason alone to be morally obligated as well. Very few people take up one or the other of these extremes, although the latter comes closer to a common, natural, and unreflecting point of view. I say it is only closer, because there must be something about the legal system that connects us to it, beyond just the fact that a particular system exists.  What student of the system of classical Roman law feels morally bound to its precepts just because it is a system—and an intricately elaborated one at that, indeed one by which centuries ago many millions governed their conduct?  

Usually disputes such as these seem abstract and remote from real dilemmas of ordinary life.  We may reasonably ignore them and go about our daily lives as if they did not matter.  Every once in awhile a concrete set of circumstances makes their resolution vividly urgent.

• In LARB, Aliza Solario reviews two new books by brothers who lost brothers.