The Critic at Leisure

The thing about this book-reviewing gig is that you don't get to read for pleasure -- I mean, to read books you don't have to write about -- a lot. But December is a slow month where new books are concerned, so I found myself with a couple of weeks when I didn't have review copies stacked up waiting to be processed. I kept telling myself that I'd check out some new fiction, like Richard Russo's Bridge of Sighs, or the new books by Richard Ford, Cormac McCarthy, Orhan Pamuk, Jennifer Egan, Claire Messud and Ward Just that got published this year. But no. I went straight for the books about stuff I really love to read about: movies and language.

Jeanine Basinger's The Star Machine (Knopf, $35) is a delicious popcorn book. No, that's not fair -- it has more substance than that. Basinger is a wonderful film historian who has written entertainingly about Hollywood's portrayal of woman and about silent movies. (My Washington Post review of her Silent Stars is blurbed on the jacket of The Star Machine -- a little embarrassingly, because the blurb is syntactically askew and calls Turner Classic Movies "Turner Movie Classics." I'll have to check if I really did that in the review.)

The Star Machine is about how Hollywood in the studio era discovered, created, and maintained stars. It's full of case studies, but none of them is of the really big stars like Bogart or Hepburn or Gable or Garbo. She writes entertainingly and informatively about stars like Tyrone Power, Lana Turner, Deanna Durbin, Jean Arthur, Errol Flynn, Loretta Young, Irene Dunne, Norma Shearer, Charles Boyer and William Powell. Legends in their own time, but in ours not so much. It's a spur to more thought about what constitutes stardom in our own time. Would George Clooney or Johnny Depp, Nicole Kidman or Angelina Jolie have been stars in the studio era?

Michael Erard's Um: Slips, Stumbles, and Verbal Blunders, and What They Mean (Pantheon, $24.95) takes on the curious study of what language gaffes -- the kind we make when we're talking, not when we're writing -- reveal about the nature of language. It's not about the "Freudian slip," though Erard deals with that famously reductive theory of our verbal goofs, but about how false starts, awkward pauses, spoonerisms and tongue-tanglers show the mind and the language interacting. After reading it, I became aware of how daily discourse, even that of professionals like TV interviewers, is full of discontinuities and rephrasings. Erard writes nicely, though he hasn't entirely shaken off the academic voice -- it sounds a little like a popularized version of a Ph.D. thesis.