“Emily Wilson Is Being a Bit of a Jerk”

Good morning! Last week, I linked to Emily Wilson’s review of Christoper Nolan’s Odyssey. Here’s a snippet if you’ve forgotten: “It has nothing convincing to say about time, memory, history, war, or about the relationship between one warrior’s glorious return and the lives of his family, adversaries, comrades, friends and neighbours . . . It lacks psychological, emotional, political and ethical depth. Its narrative structure is gimmicky. The writing is abysmal . . . I would be ashamed to have written any part of this script.”

For some reason, Joyce Carol Oates responded on X accusing Wilson of not being nice: “Her tone of dismissal & haughty superiority strike a sour note. Rather than disagreeing with interpretations of Homer in a collegial manner, this person, who has benefited enormously from Nolan’s film, speaks in the crude language of MAGA folks attacking someone with ideas that differ from hers. . . . One would expect a translator, of all people, beholden to a text, in service to a text, to be just a wee bit more thoughtful & respectful of others who are acting in good faith just as (she would claim) she is.” The writer Susan Orlean seconded Joyce: “Emily Wilson is being a bit of a jerk.”

Wilson’s review was negative, for sure, but I didn’t see much haughtiness or bad faith in it (though I detect a bit of both in Oates’s post). Wilson herself noted: “You can disagree about some or all of it! I may well be wrong! . . . But it’s not ‘personal’ to analyze a film or other work of art, even negatively. Criticism is more than ‘Hurray!’ or ‘Hiss!’”

Speaking of the Odyssey, Victoria Moul reviews a new book in the latest issue of Portico on English poetry’s debt to Homer: “Power’s engaging new book—about poets reading and responding to Homer—is, in essence, rather old-fashioned. This is not intended as a criticism. Though he does his duty by Homeric scholarship and theories of translation, and he is sensitive to contemporary concerns about the female perspective and colonial experience, he covers it all with a light touch. The book is aimed squarely at lovers of English poetry. Very few people have any reading knowledge of ancient Greek, and even fewer can read with any sort of ease and pleasure the Homeric poems, which are written in a distinctive dialect. Homer in the original language is incomparable, but Power does not pester his reader with lectures on what they’re missing. He assumes no knowledge of Greek and quotes almost none of it. All the same, the book is quietly ambitious: He wants his reader to develop a feel for what it is like to read Homer in Greek. Rather than attempt to explain, word by word, the effect of the original to readers with no knowledge of the language, Power seeks to use the full range of English poetry indebted to Homer to offer us, piecemeal, something like the Homeric experience in all its capacious variety.”

Jessica Hooten Wilson reviews Caro Claire Burke’s Yesteryear:

Without giving too much away, the book is predicated on a false either-or about the available options for women, pitting one vision (the Christian, conservative, traditional wife-mother domestic sphere) against the other (the Harvard-educated, ambitious, career-oriented single life of loneliness). Granted, that dichotomy is posed by the rather untrustworthy narrator Natalie herself. She predicts her Harvard roommate Reena will have a hard life: “She would have to work hard to get the job, and hard to keep it, and even harder to get promoted.” For Natalie, the only other option to Reena’s unhappy destiny as a working woman is to pour herself into an idealized home life, one curated for photos, funded by her wealthy father-in-law, and supported by leaning into the fears of the right-wing culture warriors.

While the novel spits out bits of truth at the reader, the caricatures of the woman who chooses motherhood and family versus the woman who chooses work play off a lie. Natalie is not wrong that “some women” compromise “every ounce of themselves in the name of building a life for themselves that they [don’t] enjoy.” The same could be said for men — for any human being who realizes that corner offices and winning senatorial races are no more than straw compared to things such as family or integrity. And, many wives likely nodded their heads at Natalie’s revelation that “there comes a point in every marriage when a woman realizes that the man she married is a freak. This is inevitable.” However, I would suggest the wife, too, unveils her freakishness in marriage. Not one of us is perfect.

Julia M. Klein on Peter Ackroyd’s Auden biography:

What is most astonishing in Mr. Ackroyd’s brisk, persuasive account is the gulf—and, eventually, chasm—between the discipline and virtuosity of Auden’s verses and his increasingly dissolute and unhappy personal life. Auden was a chain-smoker, a regular user of Benzedrine and a heavy drinker. In later years, he was visibly drunk and disheveled at poetry readings. Though rigid about his schedule, he disdained not only cleanliness and exercise but regular medical care.

Mr. Ackroyd is admiring of Auden’s poetic accomplishment, from his recondite early work to the later, more conversational and religiously inspired verses that some critics have disliked. The author is less enthusiastic about Auden’s penchant for rewriting his published poetry and for omitting well-regarded political poems such as “Spain 1937” (1937) and “September 1, 1939” (1939) from his collections.

Where Auden really shines is in its portrayal of the life. At Oxford, Auden, after considering a scientific career, reaffirmed his poetic vocation but graduated only with an unimpressive third-class degree. Even then, Mr. Ackroyd writes, Auden was “dogmatic . . . querulous, assertive and sardonic.” In time, his didacticism would “lapse into bullying.” He once heckled Anne Sexton at a poetry reading.

Max Carter reviews David Potter’s Atlas of the Roman Empire: Battles, Conquests, Legions, and Rulers: “A professor of Greek and Roman history at the University of Michigan, Mr. Potter does not emulate the layered syntax of Gibbon or the gossipy slant of Suetonius, the Roman historian whose writings in the second century reveled in imperial misbehavior. Atlas of the Roman Empire is brisk and impartial, demonstrating how the Romans’ success in maintaining power owed more to their administrative proficiency than individual flair.”