Reviews are funny things — or rather, the fact that they’re not funny is a funny thing. You have your dry recitation of the facts and figures of a book. You have your pretentious intellectual elite (our favorite!) analysis of homoerotic subtexts in Shane. You even have the biting, scathing, rip-roaring review. But it’s rare when the reviewer goes off and has a little fun, bringing the story to life in the process.
Which is why Michiko Kakutani’s review of Indecision (by Benjamin Kunkel, though that may be in dispute) made the strongest case for a book we’ve seen in a while. Wait. Did we say that Kakutani wrote the review? Our error. The review came from the keyboard of Holden Caulfield, who, we’re sure, was more than a little surprised to find himself in possession of a super-fast laptop and broadband connection. This may prove to be the strangest of Caulfield’s strange experiences.
We don’t often purchase books on the word of reviews alone, but when a novel inspires a review that inspires us to buy a book, well, there you have a perfect circle. Or at least a pretty cool semi-circle.
