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Nothing less than “astonishing”

In a pretty funny essay in The New York Times Sunday Book Review, columnist Joe Queenan has publicly revealed the one criterion he uses when deciding what books to read: the adjective “astonishing.” As he explains it, he decided years ago to restrict his literary intake to books that have been described as “astonishing” by at least one professional critic, and so far, he reports, this screening system has worked marvelously.

Having recently picked up Alice Munro’s new story collection, The View From Castle Rock, which The Seattle Times described as “astonishing,” and the Nobel laureate J. M. Coetzee’s Slow Man, deemed “an intense, astonishing work of art” by no less an arbiter of taste than O, The Oprah Magazine, I was rounding out the year in solid fashion with a troika of masterpieces that promised to be nothing short of astonishing.

Previously, I had limited my purchases to merchandise deemed “luminous” or “incandescent,” but this meant I ended up with an awful lot of novels about bees, Provence, or Vermeer.

Queenan goes on to point out a large sampling of recent astonishing works – including books by Orhan Pamuk, Alice McDermott, Thomas McGuane, and George Pelecanos – and, in the process, not-so-subtly skewers the critical establishment for a general paucity of fresh language and original praise.

Near the end of the essay, Queenan momentarily allows that there may be some flaws in his system:

Are there ever times when I worry that my obsession with the word “astonishing” prevents me from buying a great book? Sure. But, the truth is, if nobody describes a book as astonishing, it probably isn’t astonishing, and if it isn’t astonishing, who needs it?

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