Book Review: Falling Upwards: Essays in Defense of the Imagination

Written by: Lee Siegel

Publisher: Basic Books

Last February, a blogger named Sprezzatura started posting comments on the “Talkback” section of Lee Siegel’s The New Republic online column. Sprezzatura titled his first post “Lee Siegel is my hero,” and over the next several months, he celebrated Siegel’s wit and insight. But come September, an astute editor put an end to Sprezzatura’s gushing after discovering that it was none other than Lee Siegel. 

This bit of scandal lends an unintended dark emphasis to the word “fall” in the title of Siegel’s new book, a compilation of essays on present-day culture. Siegel takes on high and low alike: Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, “Sex and the City,” “The Sopranos,” Harry Potter, Eyes Wide Shut, even TV journalists. What unites these otherwise disparate essays is Siegel’s consistent valorization of authentic artistic expression over commercial packaging and his suspicion of those critics who have forgotten their obligation to “expose the shams.” I guess Siegel forgot something too—that he who casts the first stone is supposed to be without sin. 

Hypocrisy taints Falling Upwards. In an essay titled “Television and the Pope,” Siegel compares various talking heads to “self-dramatizing performance artists” and to “bloggers who broadcast their days and nights” in lieu of actual reporting. Such criticism is dead-on. Unfortunately, it also applies to the self-promoting Sprezzatura. Before venturing into the blogosphere, Siegel should’ve directed some critical energy toward himself.