Sam Tanenhaus

For Tanenhaus didn't spend his first day on the job filling out W-4 forms and peeing into a cup just anywhere, but rather at the New York Times Book Review, where he's the new editor in chief.

Since his appointment a few weeks ago, Tanenhaus' likes and dislikes, his authorship of a prize-winning biography of anti-Communist icon Whittaker Chambers and an uncompleted one of William F. Buckley -- all but his hat size has been parsed and glossed with the earnestness of old-time Kremlinology. Literary insiders have done everything to divine his standards except, typically, to read a whole book Tanenhaus wrote on the subject in 1984.

This slender, out-of-print volume is called "Literature Unbound: A Guide for the Common Reader." But before we crack it open and go spelunking for surprises, let's stipulate from the outset that, ideally, nobody should care who edits the New York Times Book Review. It's one book section among many in the English-speaking world, and not even the best. There are several underrated Sunday book review sections, including one just down the hall apiece. But even if the Times book review were the best, it helps no one to make a fetish of it, the way some otherwise intelligent people do. That consolidation of clout can only inhibit a healthy biodiversity of literary opinion. It's also weirdly tiresome to read about in a competing newspaper -- rather like listening to your date talk about other guys.

Nevertheless, people still talk about the power of a Times review, much as they still talk anachronistically about the cover of Rolling Stone. So it's at least noteworthy to pick up "Literature Unbound" and read that the new editor considers the Divine Comedy "the most influential and beautiful poem ever written." Tanenhaus also thinks Henry James "far and away the best critic the novel has ever had," and Isaac Babel "perhaps the best short-story writer of the century." Also, that "Tolstoy is to fiction what Shakespeare is to drama." Defensible if arguable statements, every one. They should also reassure any publicists fearful that the new sheriff in town might harbor an unwelcome aversion to blurb-ready praise.

"Literature Unbound" is actually pretty good, and goes a ways toward dispelling two out of the three principal anxieties that most NYTBR loyalists have about the new regime. These are: 1) that Tanenhaus will dumb the section down; 2) that he'll hijack it to the right; or 3) that he'll gut the fiction coverage. As it turns out, if the Times brass had wanted the section dumber --

as they inadvertently implied in a recent interview with the indispensable literary column "Book Babes" (www.poynter.org/column.asp?id=57) -- this is not a vision anyone would think to ask the author of "Literature Unbound" to implement.

On the basis of this 20-year-old book, it's safe to say that Tanenhaus ain't dumb. He writes like a man on intimate terms with Western literature -- so much so, in fact, that he may not know there's any other kind. After a perfunctory prelude about the transition from oral to written culture, the book cleaves neatly into two halves. The first is a thematic history of Western literature, by turns covering the realistic novel (Austen, Dickens, Bellow, that crowd), the psychological novel (Kafka, Dostoyevsky, Salinger), the visionary voice (Blake and Yeats, mostly) and what he calls "literature as a game."

"Literature as a game" entails some nose-holding on Tanenhaus' part, encompassing not only Oscar Wilde and William Faulkner, whom he likes, but James Joyce, whom he scores one or two cheap shots off of. Tanenhaus then reshuffles the deck for the book's second half. He tells the same ambitious story, only chronologically instead of thematically. This way we see many of the same authors from a different angle as they parade past historical watersheds like the advent of the printing press, the rise of a middle class and, finally, the turn of the 20th century, when "the most important word" in literature became -- to Tanenhaus' mind -- exile.

For all his squeamishness about "literature as a game," Tanenhaus isn't above playing it with us. He neglects to identify most of the passages in the first half of the book, thus engaging naturally competitive readers in a guessing game about who wrote them. (The answers are in the back.) Tanenhaus invokes a lot of perfectly valid reasons for doing this but he omits the most obvious one: It's fun.

Now for the bad news, at least in some circles: The conclusion that Tanenhaus is a man of the right can be reached by other methods besides jumping to it. A thorough reading of "Literature Unbound" discloses a thoughtful traditionalist whose conservatism isn't so much political as temperamental. Tanenhaus gently accuses James Joyce of "high-class doubletalk, " and doesn't admit until later that he stacked the deck with a quotation in which Joyce was parodying somebody else. It's a dodge unbecoming of a biographer of Whittaker Chambers, who in 1939 wrote Time magazine's cover story on "Finnegans Wake." Tanenhaus also brings in Thomas Pynchon for all of two sentences, just long enough to make a point about reclusive writers. It's rather like bringing in Joyce to make a point about nearsightedness.

But there's more to conservatism than a wariness of difficult prose -- or an admiration for the Victorian critic Matthew Arnold, which Tanenhaus also cops to here. More worrisome is when Tanenhaus plumps for the psychological novel by echoing, of all people, Ayn Rand. "There is much to be said for cultivating our selfishness, or, if the word still rankles, our 'selfness,' " he writes. I don't know what's scarier: that Tanenhaus sounds like a Randroid, or that he thinks anything could possibly rankle more than the word "selfness. "

Of course, background checks on conservatives often turn up a youthful flirtation with Ayn Rand's objectivism, much as background checks on liberals may reveal a flirtation with communism. Neither one should get anybody excommunicated. Yet Tanenhaus also writes that "our greatest triumph is usually not doing, keeping things in balance, refraining from the act we can't redeem." Is this the guy you want assigning the next FDR biography?

Still, Tanenhaus wrote "Literature Unbound" in his 20s. That's recent enough to make his smarts encouraging, yet old enough for us to cut him some slack for his less digested influences. Which leaves only the third question: whether he'll gut the fiction coverage. Here, too, there's fairly ample cause for optimism. About the only nonfiction writers he cites are literary critics themselves, such as Arnold, Aristotle, Northrop Frye, Samuel Johnson and Lionel Trilling.

While we're keeping score, it's also cheering to note how besotted Tanenhaus appears to be with poetry. This may be a good sign for poets who wouldn't mind getting reviewed even outside of National Poetry Month.

Women don't fare quite as well, though Tanenhaus does write appreciatively of Austen, Woolf, Doris Lessing and especially Emily Dickinson. As for the other kind of Western literature -- the kind west of the Hudson - - Tanenhaus actually respects Raymond Carver enough to quote him for half a page. Don't worry, the Times'll beat that out of him in no time.

On the basis of "Literature Unbound," then, if the Times wanted the book review dumbed down, they picked the wrong puppy. If they wanted a conservative, they got a good one, not an ideologue. This only means -- as with our governor, as with a few leftists in power -- that dissidents need to keep an eye on the people Tanenhaus hires, to keep him honest. (Don't get me wrong. Some of my best friends are conservatives. But some of their friends are nuts.)