The Hanover Collaboration

In the current issue of New York Review of Books, under the half-guise of career retrospective, John Leonard offers a critique of novelist Jonathan Lethem. Leonard’s problem with Lethem is less with his writing and more with what he sees (fairly good-naturedly, I thought, though Sasha Frere-Jones disagrees) as current trend for deifying cultural minutiae. In addition to Lethem, Leonard calls out Rick Moody, Michael Chabon, and Jonathan Franzen for propogating a “bundle of bombast about ephemera.” Now, don’t get me wrong, I love pop culture as much as the next guy, but I think Leonard has a fair point: nerd appropriation has gone too far. NPR, I turn to my steely gaze to you…

Driving home from class the other night, I caught a segment of All Things Considered, titled Pimp My Ride: The Ultimate Bodyshop Model for Hospitals. (Full disclosure: the fact that I caught any sort of news programming on WHQR, my personal archenemy, is a minor miracle given the station’s unfailing propensity for classical music. To be fair, there are 4 hours of Morning Edition, but 5 a.m. to 9 a.m… do those hours even exist?). In this commentary, Joe Wright expresses his desire for hospitals to be more like the custom shops on “Pimp My Ride” (Sure! Why not? Let’s do it!): willing and able to offer the quick fix for its ailing “patients”, turning lives around with a wave of a flame decal. Which is all fine, etc, etc, etc, but goddamn if “Pimp My Ride” wasn’t my last bastion of unironic, unmetaphorical, brainless entertainment. And now its been painted meaningful by NPR’s somber hues. Xzibit would not approve.

Am I grateful that ten years down the line I may be able to toss a “Pimp My Ride” reference into casual conversation? Of course. I await that fateful cocktail party with open arms. But is this all necessary? Well… Leonard writes: “Boomers have made sure that their every febrile enthusiasm since Pampers will last longer than radioactive waste, on digital cable or DVD. Gen-Xers are just as solipsistic; anything that ever mattered to them must have been profound.” Though a little harsh on Lethem, Leonard has a point: sometimes you just have to walk away. (And that means you, NPR. Take your stentorian tones and leave my MTV alone).

I agree to an extent with Leonard on his assessement of Lethem’s most recently (and kind of spectacular) novel The Fortress of Solitude, a book that’s only failing comes when the protoganist, Dylan Ebdus, revisits his superheroic childhood as an adult. Earlier in the novel, when the reader is asked to believe in the fantastical flights enabled by young Dylan Ebdus’s magical ring, we are as much placing faith in our own faith in a child’s imagination than anything Lethem has created. (The scenes of Dylan flying over Brooklyn are magical – picture Alfonso Cuaron’s vision of Harry Potter’s flight over Scotland, but with graffiti, the Brooklyn Bridge, and dope-dealers). But when Dylan flies again as an adult, this turn (a cop-out in Leonard’s opinion) somehow diminishes what we’ve previously imagined as Dylan’s childhood escape from a motherless upbringing. It seems, that in order to truly move on, Dylan must have had to leave his magic powers in the past.

Because some things are better left behind. The other night I caught a little bit of (ok, all of) of CBS’s “Spring Break: Shark Attack,” and it was spectacularly awful (in a good way), but let’s just leave it that way. I hope that the folks over at NPR do the same, especially those watching from the ER, looking for advice. Because even I know that you never remove an impaled object, especially when the splattering blood is going to alert a swarm of killer sharks.