长春省妇幼坐261哪下车:Are You Serious?

Published: July 29, 2011

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Drew Angerer/The New York Times

Stephen Colbert at the “Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear” last year.

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Excerpt: ‘Are You Serious?’ (Google Books)

“Are You Serious?” — Siegel’s fourth book — is a handy distillation of the elements in his critical approach that tend to drive readers bananas. The subtitle and the introduction promise some kind of arch handbook for the perplexed, exhorting readers to “consider this book a guide to seriousness past and present, as well as a survivor’s manual for the seriousness-­starved.” But there is little practical counsel here. Only a few times does Siegel get around to suggesting, not very helpfully, how readers might find ways to be more serious in their daily lives.

What Siegel offers instead is a string of discursive meditations on how the idea of seriousness has evolved in Western cultural life up to the contemporary moment. He begins by invoking a well-known 1904 cartoon by Max Beerbohm, in which the incomparable Max pokes fun at the 19th-century superintendent of “high seriousness,” the poet and critic Matthew Arnold. The tension between Beerbohm as gadfly and Arnold as authority figure is a paradigm for similar tensions throughout the book, which tries to explain how the seriousness of public figures ossifies over time into caricature, into “the mere performance of seriousness.” It then gets bumped into obsolescence by a pendulum swing toward a cheekier form of seriousness — what Siegel calls, in one of his frequent fits of ungainliness, “ironic anti-serious seriousness.”

Siegel rattles around for a bit in history’s vaults, placing figures like Socrates, the European Romantics, Mark Twain and Allen Ginsberg on a spectrum between “the staled seriousness of the cleric, the statesman, the businessman” and the slyly courageous anti-serious seriousness. But the time period that most interests him is our current one: the “Age of Silly.” He’s not saying that contemporary events are silly; he’s criticizing the responses to those events in politics, journalism and literature. Those responses are silly, he believes, because they’ve become “the earnest performance of seriousness in the absence of both genuine seriousness and real laughter. . . . Think Keith Olbermann. Think Glenn Beck. Think, in a different key entirely, Oprah.”

According to Siegel, politicians used to be serious, but they abdicated that role to journalists who exposed political deceit during the Vietnam War. In turn, during the Iraq war, when journalistic integrity was discredited by the revelation that contrary to reports, Saddam Hussein was not stockpiling “weapons of mass destruction,” journalists abandoned the seriousness racket, bequeathing it to comedians. (Think “Saturday Night Live.” Think Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert.)

Whether or not one agrees with this assessment, Siegel deserves some credit for identifying seriousness as a worthy subject and attempting to consider it, um, seriously. Reading him is a bit like observing the perfervid forays of a Victorian gentleman collector who’s on the hunt through every corner of Western culture for serious and unserious specimens. His book would be a charmingly old-fashioned effort, if it were charming.

But “Are You Serious?” is a brief work that feels much longer, an unlovely book that’s hard to love. Siegel’s prose style suffers under a load of graceless, distracting coinages: public figures have become “Cubistized” by our fragmenting information culture; Stewart and Colbert are masters of the “reality reprimand,” while Keith Olbermann is a “faux-serioso”; the post-9/11 atmosphere fostered a movement of “Whateverism.”

At times Siegel chews a lot more than he bites off, as in his assessment of Sarah Palin’s habit of “humbling herself as a way to re-serious herself,” or in an over-thought section on the significance of authors’ book-jacket photos. Elsewhere, he makes brash assertions without feeling any compunction to provide supporting evidence. In an extensive argument about the cultural irrelevance of contemporary fiction, he mentions exactly one novel — Jonathan Franzen’s “Freedom” — but makes no attempt to examine it or any other recent fictional work. Such hollowness makes it pretty hard for readers to swallow a sentence like this: “Fiction has now become a museum-piece genre most of whose practitioners are more like cripplingly self-conscious curators or theoreticians than writers.”

What’s especially irritating about this unsubstantiated claim is that Siegel has been making it for some time now, most notably in an attention-getting 2010 New York Observer column headlined “Where Have All the Mailers Gone?” Much of that article appears nearly verbatim in “Are You Serious?” — in fact, many of this volume’s arguments have appeared previously in Siegel’s earlier books and in various magazine articles — and his unwillingness to use this new opportunity to anchor his pronouncement with any critical analysis now seems not only cavalier but also lazy.

Which brings us to an important question: What does Siegel hope to accomplish with this book? “Critics worth their salt earn their reputations by taking on established taste,” he wrote in that 2008 Guardian essay, and clearly he still sees himself as a tireless adversary, battling wrongheaded people and worn-out ideas. This is one way of engaging with the world, but it’s a very limited engagement, and it’s the less important half of a critic’s job. Effective works of criticism are beautiful more often than they are right: it’s their style readers remember, after their opinions have turned to dust. Siegel seems to know this — he acknowledges it in that same Guardian essay — but he hasn’t yet developed a style that rises above truculence or condescension. Until he does, he’ll remain the grain of sand in the oyster that never quite becomes a pearl.

A version of this review appeared in print on July 31, 2011, on page BR12 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: All Kidding Aside.