Ah, Richard Bernstein, We Could Have Had Something

I have been reading a lot about Richard Bernstein’s new book, The East, The West, and Sex. I am linking to Laura Miller’s review in Salon because I always enjoy reading her and found this critique fascinating. I also loved/adored Toni Bentley’s review of it. Toni has more fun writing book reviews than anyone else in the Book Review these days. I remember seeing Toni read her paean to anal sex at the Cutting Room several ago. My mouth fell open and didn’t shut for several hours.
So back to Richard Bernstein. The book has generated some controversy, if I read the “coverage” correctly, because he basically says that sex with Asian women was liberating to white men throughout history. He also has a Chinese wife. The combination of his thesis and his personal life irks people and I can understand why.
I have also heard through the grapevine that Richard Bernstein is a Park Slope father. Which means that if I pass him on the street I can finally talk to him about the review he once wrote of my novel Run Catch Kiss. That’s right, he gave us all a preview of his true prurient interests ten years ago when he was assigned, for some mind-boggling reason, to review Run Catch Kiss in the daily edition of The New York Times. My guess was that whoever assigned it to him thought that they would give it to the least likely person to have any interest in the book. Instead of asking a young, single woman, or even a not young, single woman, to review a roman-a-clef about a sex columnist bouncing around lower Manhattan, the editor asked a married middle-aged man known for his highbrow criticism. Bernstein, who probably expected his readers to expect him to tear the book to shreds, wrote a mixed review that called my book “palely imitative” but also contained some positive quotes I have been dining out on for a decade. He also used some ten-dollar words and phrases including, “Spenglerian gloom-and-doom.”
Little did we all know then that the guy was actually a dirtysomething. His Times editors know now that he had his earliest sexual experiences in a Chinese brothel. The sex scenes in RCK were probably light stuff compared to what he had seen. Who knows, he may even have read my book with one hand. And then felt guilty so he looked down at his hand and thought up the phrase “palely imitative.” But the best thing about this review – and the subject of writers and their reviewers has been in the news lately – is that it did what mixed reviews should. It inspired me to be better.
So now, as we near the ten-year anniversary of Bernstein’s review, I have linked to it here.
And for those who miss their SATs, here are the definitions of the ten-dollar words:
concupiscence – desire, lust
acidulous – acidic, sour, bitter
concomitant – existing or occurring with something else, accompanying
Spengler – German philosopher who argued that cultures grow and decay in cycles