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Mailer v. Kakutani

Jill

Sounds like somebody’s scurred.

And he deals with it by launching ridiculous insults at Michiko Kakutani, one of the New York Times’ best book reviewers. Long-time misogynist Norman Mailer tells a Rolling Stone interviewer:

Kakutani is a one-woman kamikaze. She disdains white male authors, and I’m her number-one favorite target. One of her cheap tricks is to bring out your review two weeks in advance of publication. She trashes it just to hurt sales and embarrass the author…But the Times editors can’t fire her. They’re terrified of her. With discrimination rules and such, well, she’s a threefer…. Asiatic, feminist, and, ah, what’s the third? Well… let’s just call her a twofer. They get two for one. She is a token. And deep down, she probably knows it.

How about, she got (and has kept) her job because she’s damn good at it? I read Kakutani’s reviews regularly, and she’s fantastic — she doesn’t kiss ass, and she doesn’t fawn over a writer’s work just because they’re well-established or because they’re some hot new thing. And aren’t Asiatic women supposed to be quiet and submissive, according to all the played-out sexist and racist stereotypes that Mailer peddles? He should go back to complaining about angry black women and ball-busting femi-nazis, territory he’s more familiar with.

via Mike

9 thoughts on Mailer v. Kakutani

  1. I miss honest appraisals of books, movies etc. It seems that the corporations have taken over the critics too, only having the critics who work for the same corporation that published the book or mad the movie, critique the publications or movies.

  2. He should go back to complaining about angry black women and ball-busting femi-nazis, territory he’s more familiar with.

    Day-amn. Jill, you’re my hero today.

  4. And if Kakutani panned him because she’s “Asiatic”, how does Mailer explain Tom Wolfe’s disdain (he calls Mailer, Updike, and Irving “My Three Stooges”)?

  6. I think someone should tell Mailer that ‘Asiatic’ as a reference to Asians fell out of fashion awhile ago.

    Though it does thrill me to know that being Asian and feminist more than qualifies me for a job at the NY Times. Wow, should I send them my resume or what?

  8. Fred Vincy
    And if Kakutani panned him because she’s “Asiatic”, how does Mailer explain Tom Wolfe’s disdain (he calls Mailer, Updike, and Irving “My Three Stooges”)?

    Maybe he doesn’t feel so entitled to bash white men when they call him out on his lack of talent. Or maybe even a bloated gasbag like Mailer knows deep down that Tom Wolfe would turn him into a greasy, gently smoking smear on the literary carpet if he so much as squeaked in Wolfe’s direction.

    Or maybe Tom Wolfe is actually from Laos. Who knows?

  9. One of her cheap tricks is to bring out your review two weeks in advance of publication. She trashes it just to hurt sales and embarrass the author

    You know, aside from the racism and anti-feminist misogyny he manages to cram into that short paragraph, this passage offends me as a reader. It’s not a sentiment any author should take seriously, although I’m sure all of them have entertained it at one point or another.

    I *heart* splenetic reviewers. I have no use for the nice ones.

    I expect literary critics to be merciless. I don’t have time to read indifferent books, let alone utterly crappy ones. If a novel is pasty, boring, pretentious, preachy, sophomoric, trite, derivative, or any of the other qualities that would make it a waste of a good evening, I want a book reviewer to tell me! Using those words! I need Kakutani, et al., to counteract the bright colors on the jacket and steer me towards the unassuming future classic that made their Saturday afternoon.

    So, shut up, Norman Mailer. I just wish Kakutani had been there to smack my hand away when I first reached for The Naked and the Dead. Besides, if she and all the other righteous haters weren’t around to forewarn the easily impressed, an affronted mob of your readers would probably have strung you up by your thumbs already.

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