Bad Faith
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Dale Peck, the author of Hatchet Jobs,
strikes again. And again. At the gay Republican journo and pundit
Andrew Sullivan, whose self-hating screeds supporting the traditional
family, compassionate conservatism, and other such mythical beasts
deserve buckets of vitriol but receives at Peck's hand the scalpel of
savage, and very funny, wit. Here's how the review of Sullivan's Out on a Limb: Selected Writing 1989–2021 (Simon & Schuster) begins:
"Andrew Sullivan first showed up on my radar in 1991,
an innocuous blip that gave no indication of the full-frontal assault
about to be launched on the American left. I was working for OutWeek
at the time, and I’d been tasked with proofing an interview between a
seraphically beautiful young journalist named Maer Roshan and the
recently appointed editor in chief of The New Republic (who, if I’m being completely honest, wasn’t so bad-looking himself). The angle was TNR’s
first out EIC, but what had the office buzzing was the fact that he was
also a self-declared conservative—“a proud Reaganite and Thatcherite,”
as Sullivan describes himself in Out on a Limb. I remember
poring over Maer’s interview as though it were a Darwinian account of a
Galápagos endemism, a flightless cormorant or blue-footed booby,
although maybe I should reference Borges’s The Book of Imaginary Beings
instead, since on top of everything else Sullivan turned out to be a
devout Catholic. The Catholic conservative homosexual: a nebulous
shapeshifter distinguished from garden variety bogeymen by its beaded
miter, Eton jacket, and leather chaps. With one hand it cuts taxes and
runs up huge deficits, with the other it dispenses water-based lubricant
and pamphlets extolling the virtue of abstinence before marriage."
To read the rest of the Baffler review, click here.
In the current arena of celebrity endorsements, toe-the-line hype, and
cynical careerism that is book blurbing and reviewing, it is refreshing
to read a no-holds-barred take-down of a pseudo-intellectual. The prose
is something too, jaunty in tone but always serious in intent. The essay
is a masterclass in book reviewing. I proudly acknowledge that Dale
Peck is my Editor-in-Chief over at the Evergreen Review.
*
The Second Saturdays Reading Series returns with the 2021 Gaudy Boy
Poetry Book Prize Finalists' Reading this Saturday, 9/11, 8 pm ET. All
five finalists deserve a wide audience for their work. RSVP here for Zoom link.
Jee Leong Koh
September 9, 2021
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