Two weeks ago, the New York Times Book Review ran a somewhat positive, mildly critical, partially partial, richly neutral review of The Winemaker's Daughter, the first novel from the nature-loving, Pulitzer-having Northwest journalist Timothy Egan (whose books of nonfiction include Lasso the Wind and The Good Rain). The first four-fifths of the Winemaker's Daughter review was, in keeping with what seems to be a Book Review mandate, plot summary. Here, at random, is the fourth paragraph of the review, and of said summarizing:

"Although Angelo and his wife produced three children, only one has shown much interest in the family business. Niccolo is the handsome younger son, who at the novel's outset seems to have guaranteed his father a happy old age by announcing that he has decided to return to the vineyard when he finishes his last year of college. But Niccolo has a summer job as a smoke jumper, fighting forest fires, and at his next fire things go terribly wrong. That leaves the other son, Roberto, who prefers to be called Bob and has gone off to Texas to work for a mutual fund, and Angelo's daughter, Brunella, named for an Italian wine. Even though she knows nothing about her father's business and has been trained as an architect, there's reason to suspect that, given time, Brunella will save the day. Why? She loves Italian cooking (the novel is peppered with wonderful descriptions of people enjoying Italian food) and, unlike smarmy Bob, she hasn't Americanized her name."

Fascinating stuff. Fascinating to know that Roberto goes by Bob and that people still head to Texas to make money and that the novel is "peppered." Notice, too, the reviewer's invocations of such trite tropes as "things go terribly wrong" and "save the day" and consider that, elsewhere, said reviewer (one David Willis McCullough) writes approvingly that Egan's portrait of Seattle "tempts you to buy a plane ticket to see the place for yourself" and that "there's enough story here to provide an entire television season of adventures."

Yes, it's exceptionally dumb, this review ("This book's good enough for TV!"), not to mention prolix and schizophrenic (McCullough bizarrely asserts that the plot is "forced and overworked," the main character is "two-dimensional," and the novel is "worth reading.") But it's not an aberration; the hugely influential Book Review runs these toneless, endless, inconclusive fiction reviews week after week. Who, you begin to wonder, reads them?

And who edits them? The announcement of who will take over editorship of the Book Review is a few weeks off--longtime editor Charles McGrath is stepping down--though recent reports in Poynter.org's "Book Babes" column and in the New York Observer indicate that the Times' top editors are sick of the kind of convictionless shit that passes for fiction reviews in their pages. Their solution, reportedly, will be to emphasize nonfiction, relegating the Tim Egans of the world to brief blurbs--and, while that's not exactly the most encouraging solution (there is just as much information about the state of our culture to be gathered from fiction as from nonfiction, and arguably more), it is, admittedly, probably where Egan belongs.

frizzelle@thestranger.com