Daniel Mendelsohn begins his review of Dale Peck’s collection of literary criticism Hatchet Jobs with a long discussion of Aristotle’s method of attack as opposed to that of Aristophanes; “Great popular criticism,” Mendelsohn writes, “acknowledges and exploits the cruelty inherent in any critique, which is probably why we’re still reading Frogs, and still giggling at Aeschylus’s attacks on Euripides.”
This statement contains the basic elements of Mendelsohn’s recent collection of his own criticism, How Beautiful It Is and How Easily It Can Be Broken: it makes a connection between classical and contemporary cultural trends, and it’s not afraid to be negative. Mendelsohn even introduces his collection with a reclamation of the word “critic” (“a word with a rich and suggestive pedigree,” he writes). In the thirty essays that make up the book, he does the critic’s job—to carefully consider the aesthetic value of the work at hand.
Mendelsohn is the author of two previous books (three, if we count his Gender and the City in Euripides’ Political Plays). The first, The Elusive Embrace, explored Mendelsohn’s identity as a gay man; the second, The Lost: a Search for Six of Six Million, looked at his extended family as exemplars of the Holocaust. These books, taken together, point to Mendelsohn’s themes: history, sexuality, secrets, and families (both of birth and of association).
How Beautiful It Is and How Easily It Can Be Broken is organized along these lines into five sections: Heroines, Heroics, Closets, Theater, and War. Mendlsohn reviews not only the cultural high points (Thucydides’ History, Eugenides’ Middlesex, a Pinter retrospective at Lincoln Center) but also more popular culture (300, Kill Bill, and Sebold’s The Lovely Bones). As expected for a critic of his training, he has a knack for connecting the object reviewed to larger cultural forces, usually originating in Ancient Greece. He connects Aeschylus’s Persians to Oliver Stone’s World Trade Centerand Paul Greengrass’s Flight 93 in “September 11 at the Movies”; all three are examples of “the way in which what happens becomes the story of what happens.”
Mendelsohn is at his best when exploring a work of mass appeal. “Novel of the Year,” his dissection of the more problematic aspects of Alice Sebold’s massive bestseller The Lovely Bones, attacks not only the larger themes of that novel but also the writing itself; Mendelsohn opines that Sebold’s style “has the superficial prettiness you associate with the better class of greeting cards.”
Most of these reviews were originally published in The New York Review of Books, and as such, tend to run much longer than the average review; one of Mendelsohn’s great strengths is the space he allots to his work. He does not criticize works glibly, with a thumbs-up-or-down, five-star system. Thoughtful analysis and careful consideration of the cultural impact of a work guide the book along its path.
The rare misstep comes with the inclusion of “The Man Behind the Curtain,” an overly lengthy rebuttal to John Boswell’s Same-Sex Unions in Premodern Europe. While the point of the essay fits within Mendelsohn’s overall project as a critic and author, the essay’s careful attention to the flaws in Boswell’s argumentation (a good thing, generally) pushes it into the realm of academic discourse—a battle best left to the professionals, and of only minor interest to a general readership.
How Beautiful It Is and How Easily It Can Be Broken restores a sadly lacking aspect to popular criticism—a truly critical eye. Mendelsohn doesn’t shy away from negativity when negativity is required; it is a pleasure to report, then, that his book is a positive addition to the thoughtful reader’s shelf.