It is such thoughtfully entertaining contributions as Mr. Mac Donnell’s just now that make me an enthusiastic reader of the forum.

Paul Schullery




> On Nov 5, 2018, at 1:42 PM, Kevin Mac Donnell <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> 
> Fear and Loathing in TLS
> 
> My reactions were annoyance, chuckles, and fatigue. I will skip the annoyance and start with the chuckles. I do not think highfalutin Twainphobes were the target readers for any of the books that twisted Karlin’s fancy-pants knickers, but it is not fair to brush off his screed without some specificity. He criticizes some essayists for telling him “things we knew already” after he noted that Twain wrote some very good things and some very bad things, and before he let it slip that Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is a masterpiece and that the jumping frog tale is a frame narrative. Intentional irony or unintentional hypocrisy? Funny either way, and the royal “we” is a nice touch. He says the essays in Mark Twain and Youth are uneven in “level or tone” despite the explicit warning in the introduction that the essayists do not all “talk alike”—this would have been inauthentic, just as Mark Twain famously warned readers of HF. Is he pretending he did not read the introduction? Or is he genuinely phobic of the diverse opinions, backgrounds, and writing styles? Either way, more chuckles, but I am sorry if he was frightened. When discussing the other books he squanders a lot of time telling us what he doesn’t like about books about Twain, providing only selective sketchy accounts of the books themselves. He bloats the lower bowels of his tract with a lot of gas about what he thinks are deep thoughts about Twain’s writings. Is this a trickster pretending to write a book review? Iterum chucklesus. His assessment of recent Twain scholarship (2016-2018) ignores excellent books by Beidler, Driscoll, Kinzer, Rasmussen, Roorda, Wuster, Zacks, and Zwonitzer. Now, what is so funny about that? All of these books, as well as those that induced Karlin’s burbling dyspepsia, have been favorably reviewed elsewhere at greater length by better-informed reviewers who actually like Twain, understand the necessarily broader scope of serious scholarly enquiry, practice the rhetoric taught in Book Reviewing 101, and actually tell us all things we did not already know. Fatigue soon descended, and only when his rant ended was the air again free of his falutulence. (Yes, I know). Readers have just one option—read the five books he discussed and the eight he did not, and decide for themselves. But woe unto ye wearers of fancy knickers.
> 
> Kevin
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