"To Wagner, With Love and Morbidity" by Scott Timberg | Published 12/27/10 | A Book Review Analysis

           In “To Wagner, With Love and Morbidity”, Timberg weaves together a skillful essay using many rhetorical devices to analyze The Metropolis Case by Matthew Gallaway. One of those rhetorical devices is parallelism. This is seen when he describes how The Metropolis Case is propelled by "...mix of exuberance and morbidity, fatalism and erotic energy" (Timberg). In this quote, Timberg uses four nouns to describe the novel, creating parallelism and making his essay sound better. Furthermore, Timberg uses a lot alliteration in his writing. For example, when he writes, "funny first", "things together", "wily ways", and "from feeling". Furthermore, Timberg skillfully used diction to better his writing. A specific diction choice that really struck me is when he says, "there's hardly a lazy sentence here" (Timberg). His word choice of "lazy" struck me because I've never thought of a sentence as "lazy" before and I didn't understand why he wrote "hardly a lazy sentence" instead of "all the sentences are active". But on further consideration, I realized that Timberg most likely decided to use "lazy" in this sentence because it carries with it certain connotations that brings up thoughts of dull and lifeless, which is something that Timberg wanted us to associate with certain sentences that we know of in novels, but he is telling us that such sentences do not exist in The Metropolis Case. Overall, Timberg's use of rhetorical devices in his essay makes it flow easily and helps him convey his point in an easy-to-understand manner.

          The only weakness I see in Kakutani's essay is that it tries so hard not to give away the wittiness of The Metropolis Case that it ceases to let the reader know anything about the novel's plot except that it's about three characters from different time periods who are connected by music. How does the novel start? What do the characters do? We don't know. At many times, "To Wagner, With Love and Morbidity" read more like a characters list than anything else.

            In analyzing The Metropolis Case, Timberg used Formalist criticism. In his book review, Timberg analyzed The Metropolis Case from many perspectives. He looked at characterization, rhetoric, setting, plot, and style: many of the aspects of the novel itself.

            Timberg's description of The Metropolis Case reminds me of the novel One Day. In both novels, the plot progresses in small vignettes centered around different characters. Thus, although the plot of the two books may be vastly different. The style in which the two stories are told are very similar.
Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/28/books/28book.html?ref=bookreviews