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.

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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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