The democracy-endangering antics of the wretched would-be influencers on the political desk have understandably alienated many former New York Times subscribers. But the erstwhile paper of record still does some things well, including obituaries, crossword puzzles and providing a high-profile platform for the excellent Michelle Goldberg. Also, some of the book reviews are amusing.
The latter is the subject of this post, specifically, a review of Jared Kushner’s “Breaking History,” which the NYT review headline describes as “soulless” and “very selective.” Dwight Garner drew the short straw for this assignment. A few choice lines:
- Kushner looks like a mannequin, and he writes like one…
- Kushner’s fealty to Trump remains absolute. Reading this book reminded me of watching a cat lick a dog’s eye goo. [Eww!]
- A therapist might call these [a lengthy list of included quotes praising Kushner] cries for help.
- Every political cliché gets a fresh shampooing… “Every day here is sand through an hourglass, and we have to make it count.” So true, for these are the days of our lives.
In a satisfactory way, Garner pisses all over Kushner’s smug disregard for the central role wealth and nepotism have played in his life so far, his bland corporatism, his gross name-dropping, his cathedral-sized self regard, his tragically (in the world-historical sense) misplaced confidence in his own abilities, etc.
Garner also intersperses Kushner’s accounts of events with allusions to the fate of other terrible Trump administration figures who were central to them. The impression is that at least grubby operatives like Lewandowski and Bannon earned the trip by riding the shaggy orange Beast to the White House. All Kushner had to do was shag the Beast’s favorite daughter.
Anyway, it sounds like a gross memoir of a grotesque fraction of a person, and I am grateful I’m not obligated to read it. But Garner’s ending was elegiac, at least for me, because it hits close to home:
It makes a kind of sense that Kushner is likely to remain exiled in Florida. “The whole peninsula of Florida was weighted down with regret,” as Cynthia Ozick put it in “The Shawl.” “Everyone had left behind a real life.”
Sometimes you really can’t go home again.
Open thread.
