James WolcottCritiques

Fancy that, a talking stag! Wolcott on Lit > TV > Rock > Film. The density of later publications made me a bit wistful for the length restrictions of his Voice/Texas Monthly reviews, but that's a shallow complaint when we're dealing with prose as fine-woven as this. Favorite tendency is his fondness for a parenthetical gag after quoting an author - the opening fragment here following a ludicrous love scene out of Mailer. The closing Lena Dunham essay from TNR was, I think, my real introduction to Wolcott and spurred this impromptu purchase. It's not his best work, but it's a fitting end note; in applying his style to a Millennial celebrity like Dunham, a descendant of the New York arts scene that so sculpted Wolcott's sensibility, he's able to expose how meandering most of the discourse about her work really is, and gets off plenty of jabs at the right targets along the way.

Wolcott shares everything that was great about NYC (well, HIS nyc) in the 70s, without lording it over your head or making you feel like a dolt simply because his parents had sex before yours did. I picked it up expecting to drool over the CBGB's sections and instead found myself entranced with his tales of Pauline Kael and of falling in love with the ballet. I will buy this as a gift for any aspiring journalist I meet.

Wolcott is a talented writer who knew Mailer and Kael and was in the middle of the mid-'70s CBGBs scene, yet his book is a snooze. Wolcott is fond of long sentences put together in long paragraphs for page after long page; when a bit of dialog appears in this stuffy construction, it's to be savored like a brief breeze in an airless room. The attitude is somewhat witty, but mostly dry. Reading it is like listening to a guy who's not that passionate about what he's saying, yet who can't stop talking.

I get the feeling that if Wolcott got only semi-dirty in the Seventies, it's because he was only semi-involved—always looking on, noting names and eager to get back to where he really wanted to be, at his typewriter.

A bit disappointing. If you are interested in the subjects (roughly, in Seventies NYC: Village Voice, Pauline Kael, Punk rock, Porn and ballet) you'll be interested in the book, but unless you take enough satisfaction in Wolcott's vigorous, playful and cheeky prose for its own sake, you may like me feel there is too much potted and cliched cultural history about what everyone thought, and too much skimming the surface of the names Wolcott often reaches for just to be able to drop.

If you know what "New York in the 1970s" means, then this book is for you. The author was a hustling young author from the hinterlands who got a start at the Village Voice, hung out at CBGB's, and saw movies as an apprentice of sorts to Pauline Kael, who he defends at some length. There's also a pretty interesting chapter on porn and ballet and the general "emergence of the body" as something worth thinking about in the 70s. A bit bloviating at the end, but worthy.