Kurt Andersen

I have absolutely no axe to grind with Michiko Kakutani, the New York Times‘s chief book critic. I know her slightly, like her personally, and have never been reviewed by her.

But over the years I’ve thought I noticed a tic in her writing — that is, an extreme fondness for the adjective “hallucinatory.” And when I saw a variation in the first sentence of her review of Denis Johnson’s new Vietnam War novel Tree of Smoke (“reads like a whacked-out, hallucinogenic variation on…whacked-out, hallucinogenic Vietnam classics”), I decided to search the Times archives and make a tally to see if I was right.

I was. In her thousand-odd pieces in the Times these last 25 years, she has, by my count, used hallucinatory in 63 of them, not counting a couple of references to literal drug experiences. She used to do it even more frequently — seven hallucinatorys in 1985, six in 1990 — often with only a few days separating instances. Since 2002 she has limited herself to no more than three a year.

Before Tree of Smoke, she had, in descriptions of fiction about Vietnam, defaulted to the word eleven times — and in three different earlier pieces had described Johnson’s 1985 novel Fiskadoro as “hallucinatory.” Apart from the Vietnam War, the work of Gabriel García Márquez (and fiction about Latin America generally) is the most reliable trigger: in writing about Márquez she has resorted to “hallucinatory” eight times.