Who's afraid of Michiko Kakutani?

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n Edward Albee's play Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, the character Honey confesses to having torn the label off a cognac bottle, to which George replies that we all tear off labels, dear, and when you go through the skin, the organs, and the muscle to the bone, you still haven't reached the bottom. Inside the bone there is something, the marrow, and that's where you have to get. Tearing off labels and extracting the marrow of literature is nothing less than the lifelong and bloody practice of the most mysterious of all, Michiko Kakutani. Eminent critic for The New York Times since 1983, the reference news source in the United States, Miss Kakutani is a fierce iconoclast and the most powerful gatekeeper of American literary culture. But we know less about her than even about J. D. Salinger

A favorable review in The New York Times can lead to a book selling like wildfire, an unfavorable one can kill it. "It takes at least three rave reviews to compensate for the damage," Norman Mailer explained in an angry letter to the editor of The New York Times. "She's a kamikaze," he raged, saying that "some fly has bitten her Nippon ass." Kakutani had written that his work was "foolish, conceited, and at times unintentionally comical." David Foster Wallace admitted that at twenty-four years old he had locked himself in his room and cried for two whole days after reading Miss Kakutani a positive but stumbling review of his first novel, The Broom of the System.

What is known about her? According to public records, she was born in 1955, the only child of a Japanese mathematician from Yale, where she herself graduated in English Literature in 1976. She started as a reporter for The Washington Post and in 1979 ended up at The New York Times before being named chief literary critic. In 1998, she earned a Pulitzer Prize. The selected reviews for the award included one of Thomas Pynchon's Mason & Dixon —"a novel as emotional as it is intellectual, as moving as it is daring"—, of Don DeLillo's Underworld, which she described as "a dazzling work of art," a solid one of García Márquez's News of a Kidnapping —"all the drama and emotional resonance of his most vigorous narrative"—, as well as others in which she fiercely censured J. D. Salinger's Hapworth 16, 1924, which she considered "a sour, implausible, and unfortunately, completely charm-deprived story," or John Updike's Toward the End of Time. She wondered: "How can such a gifted writer write such a bad book?" And the inevitable slap to her bête noire, Norman Mailer's The Gospel According to the Son: "Mr. Mailer's Jesus sounds like a guest on Oprah Winfrey's television show."

The only rumor about her love life is a relationship with Woody Allen. She interviewed him for The Paris Review during a long dinner at a famous restaurant of the time known for its star clientele, Elaine's. Phrases remain such as, "shy at first, he once expressed an intense desire to return to the womb; anyone's," or "what I like to do most is what I'm not doing right now." Miss Kakutani also deals with preeminent books, biographies of maximum interest, and political volumes that boil in the media and require a firm pulse: Bush, Obama, the Pope. Her reviews are never ambiguous, they are full of wit, incisive, and microscopically precise. Her seniority allows her to contextualize a work within a writer's creative trajectory, inexorably, for she was also there. Her analyses define tastes, everyone has to know what Michi thinks. She hovers over everything unseen, she is temperamental, a mystery, almost a diva. She is the Oracle from The Matrix, as untouchable as Eliot Ness and has been compared to Keyser Söze.

There are two unique friends, a sort of rat pack of the Times: the feared political commentator Maureen Dowd, who won a Pulitzer in 1992, and whose first book was Are Men Necessary?: "If men fear anything," Dowd wrote, "it is a woman who uses her critical faculties." It is said that Miss Kakutani called her upon winning her Pulitzer to lament that it would now be impossible for her to have any dates with anyone. The third Witch of Eastwick — John Updike's eponymous novel was kakutanied as "embarrassing gibberish" — is the all-powerful former television critic Alessandra Stanley, who currently covers the ultra-rich of the United States in the press, the one percent of the one percent.

"Her reviews of my books are stupid and frivolous," Susan Sontag retorted when Miss Kakutani questioned her essay Against Interpretation. When she defined Jonathan Franzen's biography, Cold Zone, as an "odious portrait of the adolescent imbecile," he called her "the stupidest person in New York." Martin Amis's Street Dog "resembles Amis's best narrative as a bad karaoke singer resembles Frank Sinatra, or as a refrigerator magnet of Munch's The Scream resembles the original work." One can imagine how Amis had his breakfast that morning. Nicholson Baker compared one of her reviews to a liver removal without anesthesia.

Let's imagine this: Miss Kakutani smiling and retorting like Martha in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?: "Oh, I like your anger. I think that's what I like most about you. Your anger." It all adds to the mystery of the most unknown woman in American letters, all-powerful and, frankly, very funny. In fact, for entertainment, she has gone to the extreme of writing reviews mimicking the voices of Holly Golightly, Holden Caulfield, Austin Powers, or even Brian Griffin, the dog from the series Family Guy. What is the secret? The freedom to write what she thinks thanks to her bosses covering her back no matter what. Rushdie defined her as "a strange woman who apparently needs to hand out caresses and lashes," after she considered The Enchantress of Florence "lacked magic." And there we have Miss Kakutani, retorting like Martha again: "I am not a monster. I am not." Smile.

Perhaps the writer Margaret Atwood hits the nail on the head, even though her novel Oryx and Crake was described as a "lumpy hodgepodge." Michiko Kakutani is a necessary evil. "She praises you once and the next time she tears you apart so you don't get complacent." A free critic performs a hygienic task. Writers know that someone expects them to give their best. Always. Virginia Woolf urges in her essay How Should One Read a Book? to think about how our criteria and judgments infuse the atmosphere that writers breathe while working. "Are not books that have wasted our time and our sympathy criminals; are not the most insidious enemies of society, harmful, corrupting, the writers of false books, falsified books, books that infect the atmosphere with decay and disease? Let us be severe, then, with our criteria; let us compare every book with the best of its kind."