The Solomon Scandals A Washington newspaper novel by David Rothman

A ‘snarky’ critique of modern humor? What would Saul Alinsky have thought? Or Lewis Carroll?

Sev­eral kinds of snarks exist in Lewis Car­roll’s poem The Hunt­ing of The Snark (free online).

Cer­tain of these crea­tures bite; oth­ers scratch. David Denby, author of Snark: Polemic in Seven Fits, may been think­ing of the teeth and claws when he titled his book.

I look for­ward to catch­ing up with Snark even if I have a few con­cerns ahead of time, based on Wal­ter Kirn’s writeup in the New York Times Sun­day Book Review (book excerpt here). Isn’t there a Catch-22? The risk of being snarky in attack­ing “snark”?

“Snark,” Denby writes, “is a teas­ing, rug-pulling form of insult that attempts to steal someone’s mojo, erase her cool, anni­hi­late her effec­tive­ness, and it appeals to a know­ing audi­ence that shares the con­tempt of the snarker and there­fore under­stands what­ever ref­er­ences he makes. It’s all jeer and josh, a form of bul­ly­ing that, except at its high­est lev­els, beg­gars the soul of humor.”

But, in Kirn’s words, do we really want to try to align humor with “civic virtues and lit­er­ary stan­dards,” so we won’t “laugh for no just cause, at jokes that aren’t witty enough to laugh at and that may even be plain stu­pid and mali­cious”? Where to draw the line? Just how effec­tive would Herblock have been against Joseph McCarthy and Richard Nixon if the leg­endary car­toon­ist had wor­ried con­stantly about avoid­ing snark? And in the com­mu­nity orga­niz­ing area, what about Saul Alin­sky’s obser­va­tion in Rules for Rad­i­cals that “Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon” and “A good tac­tic is one your peo­ple enjoy”?

Scan­dals’ own Car­roll connections—and snark ones, too: Sadi Ranson-Polizzotti (photo), han­dling pub­lic­ity for The Solomon Scan­dals, is a Car­roll expert, as well as a Dylan one, by the way. And that’s not the only angle here.

Wendy Blevin, the Vassar-educated gos­sip colum­nist In Scan­dals, is a literacy-related vol­un­teer for the D.C. pub­lic library sys­tem, and off-hours, she reads “Alice’s Adven­tures in Won­der­land and other clas­sics to stu­dents bused in from the slums.” Wendy actu­ally did study com­mu­nity orga­niz­ing under Alin­sky, some years ear­lier; and she isn’t the least hes­i­tant to apply both rules men­tioned. I’d hope she’d do so with bet­ter judg­ment than, say, Ann Coul­ter.

But, as noted ear­lier, one person’s snark can be another’s Shaw-brilliant wit. For that mat­ter, I sus­pect that vast stretches of The Solomon Scan­dals, a mix of sus­pense and satire, would give Denby fits. So be it. I just won­der what Lewis Car­roll would have thought of the Denby book.

Denby’s pos­si­ble kin­dred spirit: Christo­pher Lehmann, enemy of “reflex­ive irony” in D.C. nov­els. And speak­ing of cri­tiques of Wash­ing­ton fic­tion, I’ve just perped a quick lit­tle cri­tique of cri­tiques.

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