I mean, come on.

So I've been gradually making my way, in no particular order, through this great pile of unread New York Review of Books...ses...?*—that has/have** accumulated over the course of the year...and so but God damn if I don't come upon a book review written by good old Michael Chabon (May 1, 2008)!

I made it through the first sentence.

"The protagonists of Richard Price's first four novels suffer from the fatal weakness of character known to moralists, comedians, writers of tragedy, and bullshit artists as New York City."

Isn't that just adorable?  Isn't it just so clever and cute?

He almost lost me at "bullshit artists"—such a facile twist, a real dud—but boy was I glad I stuck it through to the incredible finish.  The "bullshit artists" alone would have been merely annoying; the sentence in its fully realized idiocy is a glorious infuriating thrill I wouldn't have wanted to miss.

I mean, I could go on about it, but the problem here really just comes down to this: New York City is not a weakness of character that one can suffer from.  Yes, yes, it's figurative language, yes, I get it, thank you.  But figurative language has to work: it has to make sense (which, by the way, is why mixed metaphors are a problem: it's not just a natural law or some arbitrary rule written in stone with a lightning bolt).

Let me just ask you this:

If someone came up to you and said, "I have one big character flaw: New York City," would you not want to punch him in the mouth?  Just a little?

[To be fair, I'm sure I wouldn't be so negative about this...this surely very nice man...if he weren't so near-universally praised.  It's that damned public-opinion effect.]

* How do you make The New York Review of Books plural?  New York Reviews...?  May be simply that referring to an issue of the Economist as "an Economist" is actually basically just slang, i.e., there is no proper way to make it plural.  Huh?  What?

** The Reviewseses?  The pile?