Want to feel, intellectually, like someone is rotating your tyres?

By Dwight Garner

NEW YORK: There was a period in the late 1990s or thereabouts when Christopher Hitchens’s byline was, or seemed to be, stamped in every respectable magazine and newspaper published in English. The Nation had his biweekly political columns. The London Review of Books and Newsday (where he wrote weekly) had the bulk of his book reviews. He loitered in Conde Nast Traveler and The New Statesman and the TLS and The Atlantic and The New York Times Book Review and Slate and The New York Review of Books as if they were dive bars. Vanity Fair, where he had a monthly column, had the good sense to simply point him at things. The American South, for example. Or his own Brazilian bikini waxing. And his own waterboarding.

Much of Hitchens’s fugitive material has made its way into print, sometimes in block-size collections. (The blockiest at nearly 800 pages is “Arguably” from 2011, the year of his death.) But some of it has not. A few years ago, I received in my inbox a bootleg assortment of his Newsday reviews, which remain unpublished. And here now is “A Hitch in Time: Reflections Ready for Reconsideration.”

These are book reviews and diary essays written for The London Review of Books between 1983 and 2002. None has previously been anthologised. The pieces are split almost evenly between political topics (Margaret Thatcher, Bill Clinton, the Oklahoma bombing, Nixon and Kennedy, Kim Philby, the radicalism of 1968) and literary, academic and social ones (Tom Wolfe, the Academy Awards, Salman Rushdie, P.G. Wodehouse, spanking, Gore Vidal, Diana Mosley, Isaiah Berlin). These slashing pieces often attracted angry letters, a few of which are printed here. Hitchens’s rebuttals are printed, too. They remind me of Kafka’s injunction, in his diaries, to “use the attacker’s horse for one’s own ride.”

It is no accident that this miscellany ends in 2002. That was the year Hitchens, previously a self-described “extreme leftist,” came out in favor of the invasion of Iraq. He broke with The Nation, The London Review of Books and many of his old friends. “The evening sky crimsoned from all the bridges he burned,” James Wolcott writes in this collection’s introduction. Wolcott refers to the post-Iraq War Hitchens as “Hitchens 2.0.” The essays here return to us the original, classic flavor.

Why care about a pile of old book reviews? Hitchens’s didn’t sound like other people’s. He had none of the form’s mannerisms. He rarely praised or blamed; instead, he made distinctions, and he piled up evidence. Often, he barely mentioned the book at hand. This must have infuriated authors, but his readers benefited. For him, the books were occasions; he picked up the bits that interested him and ran with them. (“It’s a book review, not a bouillon cube,” as Nicholson Baker put it, replying to Ken Auletta, who had complained about one of Baker’s similarly rangy reviews in the Book Review.)

The breadth of Hitchens’s references makes you feel that, intellectually, you are having your tires rotated. And he seemed to know everyone, or at least the right sort of people. If he needed to check an anecdote from a book, in pre-internet days, he would call the person involved, usually an old friend. Should critics get on the phone, and get out, more often?