The Wanderer

It is customary, when one is reviewing a klezmer concert or a kabuki dance, to first sit through the whole performance. But there is this one extravaganza, already in production for five million years now, called Earth. Because it is so full of redundancies, so repetitious in its winters and fishes, we feel we have seen enough to get a handle on it; we would like to set out our critique of the planet’s aesthetic merits and failures before we are toast like Tacitus. There was once a critique that it was “very good,” but that was affectionate and antediluvian; it is high time for a dispassionate reassessment of Earth as art.

Two felicities we would like to commend, first off—the artist’s facility and his versatility. There is an effortless quality to the inventions here, as if sneezeworts and salamanders came easily to him, without strain or torment. Of course, such extreme facility does bring up the question of taste. Let’s just say that if we were able to conjure anything out of the blue, it would not be a blobfish. As for the versatility on display, it is equally a virtuoso performance, viz., voodoo lilies, vireos, chiffchaffs, sapphires, walking leafs, surfing snails, hellions, moppets, yahoos. Such variation leaves us reeling, and also a little suspicious: to a certain degree, versatility is admirable—we admire someone who can speak Japanese and Hungarian, as well as the business and boxing dialects of these languages. But there is such a thing as being overly versatile: if this person also speaks Grackle and Grampus and Baby Just Born, that starts to weird us out; she starts to seems shifty, promiscuous.

Imagination unchecked can result in a mishmash. There should be a common thread in all of an artist’s works, a uniformity of purpose, a marshaling of ideas and characters. The stance of a writer can be maddeningly hard to detect if her characters are free to make their own decisions; we just think the world could have used a teensy bit more autocracy. It’s not that we want all the animals to be square; there should simply be some consistency, unity, something tying everything together to signal the values and priorities at work here. How hard can it be, if you can make porcupines and jellyfish out of the blue, to make uniforms for them to wear? Blue jackets, neat hats, chevrons for favor. As it is, the world seems deficient in uniformity and purpose. Granted, there are mini-purposes here and there, like how within his swarm a mortuary bee has a purpose: dragging away the dead bees. A mopper’s place in Mattress World is clear,...