Sam Tanenhaus: An Unideological Conservative

David Kipen, in the San Francisco Chronicle (April 13, 2004):

Sam Tanenhaus started work Monday. If this milestone somehow escaped your notice, if the sun seemed to rise and set with its usual indifference, then you probably don't toil in the vineyards of the publishing industry. For Tanenhaus didn't spend his first day on the job filling out W-4 forms and peeing into a cup just anywhere, but rather at the New York Times Book Review, where he's the new editor in chief.

Since his appointment a few weeks ago, Tanenhaus' likes and dislikes, his authorship of a prize-winning biography of anti-Communist icon Whittaker Chambers and an uncompleted one of William F. Buckley -- all but his hat size has been parsed and glossed with the earnestness of old-time Kremlinology. Literary insiders have done everything to divine his standards except, typically, to read a whole book Tanenhaus wrote on the subject in 1984.

This slender, out-of-print volume is called "Literature Unbound: A Guide for the Common Reader."...

[P]eople still talk about the power of a Times review, much as they still talk anachronistically about the cover of Rolling Stone. So it's at least noteworthy to pick up "Literature Unbound" and read that the new editor considers the Divine Comedy "the most influential and beautiful poem ever written." Tanenhaus also thinks Henry James "far and away the best critic the novel has ever had," and Isaac Babel "perhaps the best short-story writer of the century." Also, that "Tolstoy is to fiction what Shakespeare is to drama." Defensible if arguable statements, every one. They should also reassure any publicists fearful that the new sheriff in town might harbor an unwelcome aversion to blurb-ready praise.

"Literature Unbound" is actually pretty good, and goes a ways toward dispelling two out of the three principal anxieties that most NYTBR loyalists have about the new regime. These are: 1) that Tanenhaus will dumb the section down; 2) that he'll hijack it to the right; or 3) that he'll gut the fiction coverage. As it turns out, if the Times brass had wanted the section dumber -- as they inadvertently implied in a recent interview with the indispensable literary column "Book Babes" (www.poynter.org/column.asp?id=57) -- this is not a vision anyone would think to ask the author of "Literature Unbound" to implement.

On the basis of this 20-year-old book, it's safe to say that Tanenhaus ain't dumb. He writes like a man on intimate terms with Western literature -- so much so, in fact, that he may not know there's any other kind. After a perfunctory prelude about the transition from oral to written culture, the book cleaves neatly into two halves. The first is a thematic history of Western literature, by turns covering the realistic novel (Austen, Dickens, Bellow, that crowd), the psychological novel (Kafka, Dostoyevsky, Salinger), the visionary voice (Blake and Yeats, mostly) and what he calls "literature as a game." ...