...like the storming waters in the Hokusai print on the cover of 'Great Wave,' the topic of chaotic change is so powerful it comes close to overwhelming the book ... Many hinge moments involve culture and the arts. Kakutani may no longer be the New York Times' most-feared book critic, but a critic she remains. She brings effortless erudition to one perceptive segment about how, in changing times like fin-de-siecle Europe and late Cold War America, artists from painter Gustav Klimt to novelist Philip Roth pivoted inward 'as a way to grapple with an intractable and overwhelming reality' ... There are numerous moments in Great Wave where Kakutani's thesis is hard to discern ... Kakutani's concern about the history-proven potential for the disarray of hinge moments to be harnessed by fascists is well-founded; she convincingly deploys Hannah Arendt for that argument. But her narrowly progressive lens limits the range of outcomes, positive and negative, that she sees for our current era of strange. In some ways, The Great Wave is as chaotic as its subject. In that sense, Kakutani's all-of-the-above approach could feel appropriate. Because she is such a confident and compelling writer, she always carries the reader along — even if it's sometimes in the wrong direction.
The chaos of those eras, Kakutani suggests, is suggestive of the chaos through which we’re all living now. But in attempting to limn that chaos, Kakutani reveals the shortcomings of synthesis. It simply is beyond her abilities to evoke the modern era with any kind of individual, creative language. All she has are references, and all her references are basic as hell ... It’s all a gloss, that is to say, names cherry-picked to support trend-piece-level arguments about the evolution of culture ... The buzzwords, jargon, and tired cultural references reach their apogee in Kakutani’s chapter headings, which read like baroque PowerPoint slides for an undergraduate survey course about all the shit we’re already thinking about every minute of every day. I simply cannot decide which of these induced in me the deepest, most soul-weary shudder ... it’s so impersonal, so disheartening, barely a book at all, really. Michiko Kakutani, expert reviewer, has reviewed the past 10 years. She’s read everything there is to read on the internet, and taken extensive notes, and now she’s delivering her take. Well, was it good? No—it was bad.
A sneering, snobbish little exercise in ideological and cultural partisanship ... The biggest weakness of Ms. Kakutani’s book isn’t its bias. Partisanship, conveyed with panache, can be riveting. Ms. Kakutani’s sin is that she is a crashing bore.
Describing how trends in technology, government, and culture have intertwined to create unprecedented challenges, Kakutani presents an elegant summary, but risks restating the obvious. Sometimes she seems to be writing for a future audience that needs to be reminded of the early 2020s zeitgeist. But she’s also reminding today’s readers, especially those who lived through the late twentieth century’s own parade of disruptions, of how far we’ve already come.
Kakutani’s musings touch on everything from the Black Death to Breaking Bad, but they seldom cohere into a rigorous argument and often lapse into simplistic partisanship. The result is a sketchy, unconvincing rehash of progressive verities.
Her unoriginal thesis is that we are living in a period of radical change, technological disruption, and spreading chaos. She lines up the usual suspects for assessment: the Covid-19 pandemic, the dangers of social media, the loss of faith in institutions, the collapse of geopolitical and cultural boundaries ... This admittedly well-researched book, which contains justified anger at the current political landscape, will appeal mostly to those who share the author’s ideological views. Others will find the instructive messages buried under too much rancor and spite. Kakutani ranges broadly across issues but ultimately has little new to say.
