Montaigne begins by attacking rhetoricians in this essay, but I know that I shouldn’t take it personally. His beef, in our current economy, would be with marketers, people who use words to try to trick us into a belief rather than appeal to our reason. Very little of what I do as a speechwriter would qualify as manipulation and I often find myself on the other side of disputes that involve forms of trickery.

Marketing is so pervasive in our culture now that it’s nearly impossible to root it all out. Everywhere I turned this week, I saw a quote from New York Times book critic Dwight Garner from his recent review of Marlon James’ novel THE DISAPPEARERS. It goes:

Why not just say it? With this novel about gay experience and murderous homophobia in Jamaica and elsewhere during the 1980s and ’90s, James has written a masterpiece, the novel of the decade and possibly of the century thus far.

Ok, now I’m about to make a claim about Dwight Garner, but before I do that, I want to provide his official defense against it. On his New York Times bio pages, Garner goes to great lengths to protect his integrity against all possible critiques. He writes:

Book critics abide by the same exacting ethical standards as other Times journalists. For me, among other things, this means not sitting on prize committees, advising publishers or providing advance blurbs for books. I don’t review books by people I know. If I have had even a glancing acquaintance with someone whose book I might want to review, I discuss the details with my editors. I rarely go to book parties or other industry events.

I take Dwight Garner at his word and assume he had no commercial or personal motive in promoting the Marlon James novel so aggressively. And yet, look at what Montaigne has to say about rhetoricians and why he finds them so distasteful:

A rhetorician of times past said that his trade was to make little things appear and be thought great. That’s a shoemaker who can make big shoes for a small foot.

Which is precisely what Garner is doing in his review of the James novel. And he basically gives away the game very early in the review when he notes:

It takes James 90 pages to say hello.

It sounds like a joke, but it’s fully accurate. The novel spends its sweet time getting started, taking us on a tour of late 1980s Jamaica, following a group of gay teenagers as they discuss pop culture, think and talk about sex on nearly every page and have their fair share of it as well.

I’m not personally bothered by the sex or the descriptions, but why is it that the contemporary publishing industry only allows the LGBTQ community to be horny anymore? Any mainstream American male novel that speaks so openly about sex from a heteronormative point of view would likely be rejected at the agent level, never mind publishing houses.

But, whatever, the publishing industry is what it is. Still, what’s the need for so many superlatives, Mr. Garner? Why do you need to try to top your praise only two paragraphs later? He does this by saying Marlon James will be a frontrunner for a Nobel prize in a couple decades, never mind the fact that the Nobel committee seems to hate American writing these days and the current state of the world is unlikely to improve that status.

And why exactly do writers around the world hate American literature so much? Probably because we’re so hopelessly ideological about our prose. Every book has to advance the cause of enlightenment, from a particularly American academic point of view.

If Garner believes THE DISAPPEARERS deserves such status, fine, take readers on that journey, instead of throwing around superlatives and comparisons to great books of the past to which this one bears no resemblance.

But returning to my original point, why should a review like this be considered marketing? If Dwight Garner has no personal stake in the success of this book, why treat his praise as manipulation? Because Mr. Garner knows that he’s competing with a book ecosystem overrun with social media hyperbole. The only way for a review to cut through and get the attention of readers these days is to join the circus and heap on the praise.

Dwight Garner isn’t so much hyping the novel as he is hyping himself — he’s declaring to the book blogosphere that he can win at their game as well. Except, the only reason anyone is paying attention is because The New York Times’ name and reputation is attached to him. It gives him stature in a way no book-tocker could ever achieve.

We expect more from book reviewers in The New York Times. Which is why this minor little incident that maybe no one else cares about depresses me so much.

Whether Marlon James’ new novel eventually attains the stature Dwight Garner proclaims will depend on how readers react to it and how well it stands up over time, when the smoke of book promotion clears. I’m glad Dwight Garner liked it so much. But his fanboy level of praise is embarrassing.