At the turn of a year, Best Books list appear everywhere. But nothing for Worst Books. Makes sense. For one thing, who wants to plunge into enormous woodpile of bad books to find one that you're convinced stands out. For my purposes, I suppose it it would be the one that made the largest claim on public attention, yet at the same time was the one you hurtled across the room in anger, frustration or despair.
Most years, I wouldn't have an opinion of what the worst book. Or even cared. But for 2008, there's a hands-down winner -- Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization, by Nicholson Baker.
Now Baker is an estimable novelist and a good essayist (when he sticks to his knitting, like the ways in which librarians destroy our paper heritage. His book Double Fold accuses librarians of lying about the decay and destruction of paper materials and being overly smitten by faddish technologies. (We reviewed it here.)
And I thought at least two of his novels very interesting and inventive: Vox (1992), was entirely constructed around two characters having phone sex. In The Everlasting Story of Nory (1998), Baker, anticipating a current fashion for adolescent girl narrators, gives us a nine-year-old American in a British school. Even Checkpoint (2004), a somewhat silly novel in which two old friends plan to assassinate George W. Bush (the time has passed, guys), has its moments.
But Human Smoke? It's a pseudo-history of the Second World War that not only questions the accepted view that the Allies went to war only to thwart Hitler's ambitions, but attempts to paint Winston Churchill as equally a villain. In fact, the book is barely written at all; rather it's an agglomeration of documents, official and other, the cumulative effect of which purports to show that we, i.e. the Allies, provoked Hitler into war and that the true heroes were the pacifists (Baker is a noted and voluble one).
Here, in part, is what The Globe's reviewer, Peter Behrens, wrote (the full review in our now free archives is here):
Snippets pile up relentlessly, with no attempt made to provide context or the ghost of reasoned argument. They are bricks in what soon looks like a very wobbly structure indeed. This is not narrative history, or even polemic, but a collection of tags culled largely from Baker's cranky reading of the newspapers of the day. Their portentousness is reminiscent of the bland "truisms" ("A name means a lot just by itself"; "Every achievement requires a sacrifice") that U.S. conceptual artist Jenny Holzer began delivering, to much art-world hoopla, in the 1970s.
Baker's large insinuation -- it never steps out in the open to become an actual argument -- is that the Western powers, devious, anti-Semitic and obsessed with the threat of communism, shared responsibility for the war pretty much equally with Germany. Baker seems to be suggesting that if there had been a sincere commitment to pacifism in London, Paris and Washington, then Britain, France and the United States could certainly have short-circuited the war's apparent inevitability.
Baker's book simply does not engage with any of the serious histories of the Second World War and its prelude in that "low decade," the 1930s.
It is true that Winston Churchill was no pacifist. Praise the Lord, neither was FDR.
It is also true that there were lurid streaks of anti-Semitism in most Western societies before the war, and after. And plenty of people during the '30s mistook Stalinism for the immediate threat, while Hitlerism actually proved more dangerous more quickly. (They weren't so very wrong about Stalinism, though).
Could a powerful commitment to pacifism on the part the West have stopped the Second World War in its tracks? Given all we have learned about the Third Reich, even the question seems naive. Churchill's attention deficit disorder was not the cause of war. Nor was the callow Eleanor Roosevelt's early, offhand anti-Semitism. Hitler came to power determined to make war in the East, understanding that he needed to defeat the Western powers before he could do so. He never altered his strategic goal, and nothing the Western powers could have done would have diverted him. Each time the West rolled over to play pacifist during the appeasement year -- caving to Hitler on the Saarland; on Austria; on the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia -- they earned his scorn, while merely stoking his appetite for further conquest.
Behrens was hardly alone in this view. As one reviewer, Adam Kirsch, wrote, "A book that can adduce Goebbels as an authority in order to vilify Churchill has clearly lost touch with all moral and intellectual bearings." In her review in The New Republic, Anne Applebaum wrote:
... if we have arrived at the point where a solemn and excited individual can cobble together anecdotes from old newspapers and Nazi diaries, and write them up in the completely contextless manner of blog posts, and suggest that he has composed a serious critique of America's decision to enter World War II, and then receive praise from respected reviewers in distinguished publications, then maybe it is time to say: Stop.
Finally, in his New York Times review, William Grimes caught the quintessence of a work that can be most charitably called naive. Human Smoke, he wrote, is a "self-important, hand-wringing, moral mess of a book."
But what I'd like to know is: Why do publishers -- in this case Simon & Schuster, but they're hardly alone -- seem to believe that, just because a writer has written some good books, and made them some money, his merest maunderings are worth putting between covers?