Hitchens

Memory can play nasty tricks on one. I "discovered" Anthony Lane long before Tina Brown, for instance: he was the film reviewer for the Independent on Sunday before he moved to the New Yorker, and I always loved his reviews there. I especially remember his review of London Kills Me, Hanif Kureishi's regrettable move from writing into direction. A masterpiece of comedic criticism, it left both subject and reader helpless on the floor, although, of course, for different reasons. It ranks up there with Clive James's review of Princess Daisy, by Judith Krantz, where at least he has the good manners to pause at one point and say that attacking such a book is a bit like kicking a powder-puff. (Sidenote: while going to Amazon to provide you, gentle reader, with a URL for the bonkbuster, Seattle's most famous bookstore tells me that "Felix, you'll love this!" with a predicted rating of 4.5 stars out of a maximum five.When I ask Amazon why, it tells me that it's because I bought Paris to the Moon, by New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik. Huh?)

But London Kills Me came out a long time ago, and I've long since lost the review (actually, I lent it to Purni Mukherjee, and she never gave it back). And when I finally asked a friend with Lexis-Nexis access to email me a copy of the review, it turned out to be much shorter, and much less funny, than I had remembered.

So it was with trepidation that I opened my brand-new copy of Unacknowledged Legislation, the new book from Christopher Hitchens. I ordered it from the library, and was particularly looking forward to rereading Hitchens' article on Oscar Wilde, which had first appeared in Vanity Fair and which I had loved. As luck would have it, the article was the first thing in the book. And was I disappointed? Not a bit. It's all of five pages in the book, but I daresay it's the best single thing that has ever been written about Wilde. I urge you all to go out to your nearest bookstore and read it: it doesn't take long to read five pages.

Of course, a lot of the piece is given over to Wilde himself, who naturally shines in his own words much more brightly than he ever does in the words of others. But quoting a genius to good effect is harder than it looks. And some of the quotations are not nearly as familiar as you might think. I'll leave you with this one, if only because the subject of the death penalty in the United States is getting a lot of coverage at the moment:

As one reads history ... one is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed, but by the punishments that the good have inflicted; and a community is infinitely more brutalised by the habitual employment of punishment, than it is by the occasional occurrence of crime.

Posted by Felix at 1:41 EST