Limning Kakutani

It was, to put it mildly, a harsh review: John Updike's new book "Seek My Face," said Michiko Kakutani in The New York Times on Nov. 12, is "graceless" and "bogus in every respect," a "blatant and gratuitous" book written by "a lazy, voyeuristic and reductive hand."

It was typical of the no-holds-barred writing style favored by the Times' lead reviewer. As probably the most powerful book critic in the country, she's already positioned to make enemies. But her particular command of the language, combining keen intelligence with, often enough, scathing anger, makes her a lot more.

Which may explain why so many people have jumped on her lately over her very command of that language; in fact, for her use of one word: "limn." It started last month when a MobyLives reader named Peter Kuntz wrote in to note that Kakutani had used the word in her (negative) review of Zadie Smith's new "Autograph Man"; Kuntz observed that, in general, Kakutanni used the word a lot. That opened the floodgates.

Another MobyLives reader, Matt Gross, an editor at New York magazine, saw Kuntz's letter and decided to do a little research. In the Nov. 11 New York, he helpfully noted that "For those unfamiliar with the word (yes, that included us), it means to outline something 'in clear sharp detail.'" Then Gross went on to list numerous reviews in which Kakutani had used "limn." Included were reviews of books by Gish Jen, Oscar Hijuelos, Ann Beattie, Sebastian Junger and more.

Alice Munro "has created tales that limn entire lifetimes in a handful of pages," she writes in one citation. Robert Olen Butler "draws upon [the] ability to limn an entire life in a couple of pages," she says in another. The word "appears to be a critical part of good writing" for Kakutani, observed Gross. "Though perhaps in her own work, she might consider using it a tad less?"

It was a playful piece, funny and fair, as was Kuntz's original letter, and as was a subsequent treatment given the story by Michael Cader, proprietor of the popular industry e-newsletter Publishers Lunch. Cader linked to Gross' New York article, and ran a search through the Times' online archive. "Dating back to 1996, the search engine returned 21 Kakutani reviews in all featuring limn," he wrote, "including four so far this year and a banner seven last year."

But things got decidedly less playful immediately thereafter, when Karen Sandstrom, the book section editor of the Cleveland Plain Dealer, waded in. She wrote in to Cader to take credit for having been the first to complain about critics using "limn," in a column she wrote last May.

"Some words become reviewers' clichés, and some clichés signal that the writer has developed a sense of superiority over her readers," declared Sandstrom. "It's one more way of separating the sophisticates from the commoners."

And suddenly, what had been an amusing and even interesting critique of Kakutani's prose became a nasty accusation of classism ... all for using so incredibly "sophisticated" a four-letter word as limn.

By the time, just days later, that the Times Magazine's "On Language" column by Kakutani's colleague William Safire weighed in on the matter, it seemed like so much piling on. Safire declared limn a "vogueword," a neologism of his own, and said, "Literary types and their followers use it instead of illuminate."

Well, nervous as it makes me to disagree with esteemed book review editors and the language maven himself, permit me to say: Hello? When in the world did a simple little four-letter word become such a freighted, obscure signifier of such upperclass arrogance?

Those "literary types" Safire cites (or at least me, and I think Kakutani) do not use limn "instead of illuminate." They use it simply to mean what the dictionary says it means: "To outline in clear sharp detail," if I may quote so sophisticated a source as, er, my Webster's.