Columnist Scott Dickensheets: Get started on 'When the Kissing Had to Stop'

I'm no synaptically nimble reader of the Wilson Quarterly -- which is to say, I'm not the sort of smarty to whom publishers might target books of literary essays. My mind is like a helicopter: For every hour in the air, it needs three or four of down time. Between the wife, the kids, the job, the playoffs and the general crushing burden of life, I barely have time to open books, let alone books of essays about books. Who reads this stuff? I wonder each time I see a fresh volume of critical mass at the local tome depot, even as I lay down my money for one.

Yep, I buy them sometimes, as if it were possible to teach an old brain new tricks. Most decorate my bookshelves, half-read. Other people do buy such books, though, and take them far more seriously. This week, the Slate website sicced a pair of writers on five new essay collections; in a lengthy e-mail back-and-forth, they pinned down something that's bothered me about most lit-crit: its chronic rearview syndrome. "The same great old names keep popping up," one of the Slate writers complains. "Emerson, Dickens, Eliot ... If you're going to turn out literary essays, I should think it would come in handy to hope that literature is something that can still be written today."

All of which, to make a short intro long, is my way of getting around to John Leonard's new collection of literary oddjobbery, "When the Kissing Had to Stop" (The New Press, $25). It wasn't among Slate's high five, and too bad. Leonard can be a bracing antidote to the rearward gaze. As much as any critic typing for the highbrow mainstream press (he publishes mostly in The Nation), Leonard is interested in the new, in the here-and-now, in the connections between books and the pop culture we live in. You can see it in the take-a-deep-breath subtitle he draped on his book: "Cult Studs, Khmer Newts, Langley Spooks, Techno-Geeks, Video Drones, Author Gods, Serial Killers, Vampire Media, Alien Sperm-Suckers, Satanic Therapists, and Those of Us Who Hold a Left-Wing Grudge in the Post Toasties New World Hip Hop." Yowzah!

So, while other critics may train their microscopes on, oh, "the aesthetics of detail in Nabokov's fiction" (true topic! zzzz), "When the Kissing Had to Stop" includes, for instance, a full-throttle appraisal of cyberpunk science fiction, that distopian futurism that eventually gave rise to "The Matrix" and similar pop artifacts. Can't imagine many other big foreheads of literary criticism bothering with that.

In other words, he's concerned with how books operate in the real world. "Before we use a nifty novel, Philip Kerr's 'A Philosophical Investigation,' as an excuse to talk about everything else under the fascistic sun ...," he begins one essay. He's willing to follow an idea from Point A to distant Point Z. His review of books about Atlantis leads to a meditation on utopianism, not just in literature but in real life: He movingly describes a village in Colombia where everyone lives in dream-like harmony. And I haven't even mentioned his crazy sense of humor. I'll never read William Gass' novel "The Tunnel," but I'll read any review of it that begins thusly: "Your wife is fat. Your penis is tiny. Your children are sullen-faced louts."

He is, as you might have guessed, a humanist-liberal of the idealistic old school -- that is, the '60s -- but he's quick to be skeptical of such lefty train wrecks as postmodern literary theory. He also reviews TV shows and movies for CBS' "Sunday Morning," and therefore likes pop culture, except for the bad stuff.

Kurt Vonnegut, in a bit of book-jacket back-slapping, suggests Leonard is the smartest man in the world. Therein lies his sole drawback. Leonard has read every book you can think of, far beyond the canon fodder of dead white European males. He refers to such works often, usually without sufficient explanation, and unless you're as widely read as he is -- and you're not, or Kurt Vonnegut would be saying nice things about you -- each essay comes with its share of unplugged wires. But so engaging is the "jetstream zippiness" (his description) of Leonard's prose, it's usually worth the ride.

In one essay, he describes a character in a book as being "so smart he falls asleep reading Baudelaire." That would be an apt description of Leonard, except that he's already read Baudelaire, and instead fell asleep reading Kurdish mythology, leaving the TV on and the newspaper open to the international news and the funny pages. What I'm saying, if I'm saying anything, is that I'd have bought this book even if I didn't get a free review copy.

Reading list* GQ, May 1999: The editors present their umpteenth package on "The Good Life." Thanks, guys -- without you, we here in the squalor of the Shelf Life scriptorium would never have known that the good life consisted of visits to French spas, eating binges in the chichi restaurants of Monte Carlo, custom suits and $50 corkscrews. Skip this nonsense in favor of John Sedgwick's entertaining take on the bald life and geneticist Angela Christiano's search for a remedy. "Christiano has really big hair," he writes. "Too big for any hat, too big for many rooms, statement hair, whoa! hair." But when it started coming out -- Christiano has seven bald spots she calls the "seven dwarves" -- she embarked on what the magazine assures us is a soon-to-be-fruitful quest.

* Outside, May 1999: One common requirement of the good life is that it unfold in a better place than wherever you've set down that houseplant you call your life. Luckily, Outside just happens to have a little list. Its biennial ranking of "dream towns" includes Homer, Alaska; Charlottesville, Va.; Boulder, Colo.; Hana, Hawaii; and Portlands, Ore. and Maine. Once again, Henderson comes up short. The magazine judges each town on a slate of livability factors, not surprisingly leaning heavily on outdoorsy recreation ops -- most are near primo ski spots, climbing and hiking areas or water-sport meccas. It also X-rays each city's job market, housing costs and cultural life. Elsewhere in the issue: Tad Friend's infuriating profile of surfer Kelly Slater. Infuriating because you aren't a 27-year-old millionaire surfer living the good, good life.

The biblio file* Libertarian tough guy Vin Suprynowicz -- who, thanks to that darn First Amendment, is allowed to hold down a post on the Review-Journal editorial page -- will sign copies of "Send in the Waco Killers," his collection of writings on the "Freedom Movement," at Borders Books and Music in Henderson on Wednesday. The 7 p.m. event is free -- unless you wear a Clinton-Gore T-shirt, in which case, it'll cost ya, mister. Call 433-6222 for info, and remember, freedom is just another word for being able to shoot taxmen and judges through the head!

* Speaking of the Henderson Borders, start saving your pennies for its May 29-31 cheap-books tent sale. See you there; I'll be the one in the Clinton-Gore T-shirt drooling on the books. Now that's my definition of the good life.

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