S. Irene Virbila's Review of Blue Coral, a Restaurant

Restaurants in large markets, those catering to the most sensitive critics, are defined nearly as much by location and aesthetic as they are by the food they serve. Assuming that as truth, the first paragraph of Virbila’s review seems pretty damning. It places Blue Coral “past Macy’s, past Neiman Marcus, past all the usual anchors of every upscale shopping center in the country.” Of course, this might not detract from the experience for Virbila, who combines awkward rapping-with-the-teens talk with couture pretension, not unlike a particularly chic mall. Alongside passing references to ‘Louboutins’ (shoes?), we get Virbila’s assessment of Blue Coral’s bar: “Cool. Definitely cool.”

The food doesn’t enter the picture until the eighth of twelve paragraphs. Yellowtail sashimi with blood orange juice and slices of “freaking hot Serrano chile” yields little by way of descriptive help. It “makes a bold – and delicious – statement.” The writing is amateurish, embarrassingly so. She tells us that “the wine list merits some studying,” but that misses the point that she ought to be judging the quality of that list for us. Her description of the waiters as “perky and clueless” is lazy and hypocritical – at least she ought to use a different conjunction so that we know if she thinks being perky is a fault.

The writing is consistently lousy (not, you’ll note, consistent andlousy), as in this typical sentence: “Main courses read as very up-to-date, but some are too tricked up and/or tricky to execute.” Even though she begins the review by describing her frustrations about valet parking at a restaurant in a shopping center, she doesn’t ever return to that theme.

I’m a fan of good reviews of bad restaurants because the best ones will make me root for the critic and empathize with her suffering. Virbila’s write-up of Blue Coral, however, is so flippant that I found myself doubting its accuracy and thinking that, if I ever have the occasion to visit Newport Beach, CA, I might dine at Blue Coral out of spite.

Original Review

Michiko Kakutani's Review of The Shakespeare Wars, by Ron Rosenbaum

Kakutani giveth while Kakutani taketh away.

In the same breath, Michiko Kakutani builds up solely for the purposes of tearing down, a literary slumlord evicting once-promising tenants from her house of favor.

The review begins with so much praise for Rosenbaum’s previous effort, Explaining Hitler, that one suspects more than a dash of hyperbole – she can’t be so effusive for the entire review – and all so that the inevitable fall comes from still greater heights, a Goliath toppling a previously ballyhooed David. She calls the 1998 book “the very model of cultural history-writing at its most insightful and provocative.”

To my mind, she takes things too far, relishing the hunt in spite of the prey being unaware of the chase. “Surely,” Kakutani speculates, “the author, an ardent student of Shakespeare will…shed new light on the playwright’s work; perhaps he will show what current thinking about Shakespeare says about our larger cultural assumptions.” The reader knows where she’s going, and the effect is that of watching a spider approach a fly that’s already struggling, caught in a web of inevitability and spun silk. She even lets Rosenbaum’s words become his poison, quoting his foreword thus: “He hoped in this book to serve as ‘a kind of guide – leading the reader, like Virgil in Dante, down into the scholarly inferno.’” Comparing himself to Virgil? The cliff grows even taller, awaiting Kakutani’s push.

The verdict is delivered in eviscerating fashion. The Shakespeare Wars is “a convoluted, self-indulgent and nearly impenetrable tome.” Kakutani uses twenty-one insults to pelt Rosenbaum, including “windy” twice. She charges that, in focusing on bard-related arguments and feuds, Rosenbaum is distancing himself both from an honest analysis of Shakespeare the Man and from his readers, who are likely unaware and uninterested in such trivialities.

The problem with the review is that Kakutani makes herself out to be a great scholar on the topic, dishing the details of the aforementioned tete-a-tetes as though they’re old hat. I daresay that many readers, weaned on People magazine and Entertainment Tonight would find academic spats to be more fascinating than actual engagement with the text of Shakespeare’s plays. In the end, she embodies the blowhard intellectualism that she disdains in Rosenbaum, saying of his attempt at examining the cobwebs of Shakespeare scholarship that his efforts “belong on a Shakespeare blog, not between the covers of a book.” But if Rosenbaum is writing for actual readers instead of stodgy professors and enigmatic critics, the populist feel of a blog might not be so bad.

Michiko’s Vocabulary Builder of the Day: Perspicuity



Original Review