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Farah Mendlesohn's new book length study of Heinlein is, hands down, the best volume of Heinlein criticism yet published. Everyone with a non-trivial interest in deepening their grokking of SF's most famous, most controversial, and least understood author should read it.
Mendlesohn's book is the first posthumous book on Heinlein to not come from a card carrying member of the Church of Heinlein. Fannish essays and books that put Heinlein up on a pedestal, if not an altar, and decline to engage with the less savoury parts of his work and views, are easy to find, and pretty much useless for trying to understand the author, especially when it comes to his flaws and shortcomings.
Mendlesohn does not hesitate to discuss Heinlein's inadequacies as a writer. His literary heroes were mostly satirists like Twain, but he seemed to lack the ear for satire, as his own attempts in that mode mostly fail to come across as such. His (cold war motivated) decision to give up city living and move to small town Colorado, far from any nuclear targets (and later to small town California ditto) caused him to fall increasingly out of touch with America's cultural and political zeitgeist, but he never seems to realize just how out of touch he had become. Thus, for example, throughout his career, he modelled characters in intimate relationships on the interactions of romantic leads in the screwball comedies of the 30's, long after such comedies ceased to have much salience to most of his readers. He put a lot of trust into certain kinds of authority (military officers and America's mainstream media especially) and certain sources of information, without ever asking himself if those authorities were trustworthy or if the view of the world being conveyed by them was accurate. This left him woefully ignorant of the extent and nature of America's institutionalized racism, and ill served him when it came to understanding the cultural transformations of the 1960's. It also enabled him to maintain an incredibly shuttered view of foreign policy and the extent of America's imperialist activities and international bullying during the cold war.
The second chapter of the book, a thumbnail biography of Heinlein, is worth the price of admission all by itself, because unlike Patterson, Mendlesohn knows how to highlight what biographical events are important and use them to illuminate recurring themes and explain otherwise puzzling motifs in Heinlein's writing. I learned more about Heinlein from reading that single brief chapter than I learned from Patterson's huge "biography" of endless undifferentiated trivial details.
The third chapter provides an overview of Heinlein's body of work, divided into his short fiction, his juveniles, and his adult novels. The rest of the book abandons the usual work-by-work approach and instead delves deeply into Heinlein on a theme-by-theme basis.
In two brief chapters, Mendlesohn explicates Heinlein's most common storytelling techniques and rhetorical tropes, several of which I have never seen touched upon in any previous book of Heinlein criticism - such as his tendency to make the viewpoint character of the story a sidekick to the real protagonist, or his fondness, especially in his later books, for writing picaresques rather than novels. Then in five much longer chapters, she tackles Heinlein's politics and his ideas of the proper ordering of society, his views on racism and slavery, and his take on sexuality and gender. In each case, she is able to sort out and explain Heinlein's views far better than any previous Heinlein criticism that I have read.
Just as every person wishing to do a biographical study of Heinlein from now on will be forced to slog through Patterson (and I feel great pity for every one of them), so too every critic who wishes to write about Heinlein's fiction from now on will need to refer to Mendlesohn's book. Unlike Patterson, however, Farah Mendlesohn's book is well organized and well written, making it not only immensely informative and educational, but also a pleasure to read.
Mendlesohn's book is the first posthumous book on Heinlein to not come from a card carrying member of the Church of Heinlein. Fannish essays and books that put Heinlein up on a pedestal, if not an altar, and decline to engage with the less savoury parts of his work and views, are easy to find, and pretty much useless for trying to understand the author, especially when it comes to his flaws and shortcomings.
Mendlesohn does not hesitate to discuss Heinlein's inadequacies as a writer. His literary heroes were mostly satirists like Twain, but he seemed to lack the ear for satire, as his own attempts in that mode mostly fail to come across as such. His (cold war motivated) decision to give up city living and move to small town Colorado, far from any nuclear targets (and later to small town California ditto) caused him to fall increasingly out of touch with America's cultural and political zeitgeist, but he never seems to realize just how out of touch he had become. Thus, for example, throughout his career, he modelled characters in intimate relationships on the interactions of romantic leads in the screwball comedies of the 30's, long after such comedies ceased to have much salience to most of his readers. He put a lot of trust into certain kinds of authority (military officers and America's mainstream media especially) and certain sources of information, without ever asking himself if those authorities were trustworthy or if the view of the world being conveyed by them was accurate. This left him woefully ignorant of the extent and nature of America's institutionalized racism, and ill served him when it came to understanding the cultural transformations of the 1960's. It also enabled him to maintain an incredibly shuttered view of foreign policy and the extent of America's imperialist activities and international bullying during the cold war.
The second chapter of the book, a thumbnail biography of Heinlein, is worth the price of admission all by itself, because unlike Patterson, Mendlesohn knows how to highlight what biographical events are important and use them to illuminate recurring themes and explain otherwise puzzling motifs in Heinlein's writing. I learned more about Heinlein from reading that single brief chapter than I learned from Patterson's huge "biography" of endless undifferentiated trivial details.
The third chapter provides an overview of Heinlein's body of work, divided into his short fiction, his juveniles, and his adult novels. The rest of the book abandons the usual work-by-work approach and instead delves deeply into Heinlein on a theme-by-theme basis.
In two brief chapters, Mendlesohn explicates Heinlein's most common storytelling techniques and rhetorical tropes, several of which I have never seen touched upon in any previous book of Heinlein criticism - such as his tendency to make the viewpoint character of the story a sidekick to the real protagonist, or his fondness, especially in his later books, for writing picaresques rather than novels. Then in five much longer chapters, she tackles Heinlein's politics and his ideas of the proper ordering of society, his views on racism and slavery, and his take on sexuality and gender. In each case, she is able to sort out and explain Heinlein's views far better than any previous Heinlein criticism that I have read.
Just as every person wishing to do a biographical study of Heinlein from now on will be forced to slog through Patterson (and I feel great pity for every one of them), so too every critic who wishes to write about Heinlein's fiction from now on will need to refer to Mendlesohn's book. Unlike Patterson, however, Farah Mendlesohn's book is well organized and well written, making it not only immensely informative and educational, but also a pleasure to read.