In a recent review in the New York Times, novelist and critic Joshua Cohen went a bit over the top and has been called out for it in the Weekly Standard. Cohen is best known for his novels, including Witz (2010) and The Book of Numbers (2015) which have been compared to works by the late David Foster Wallace and Philip Roth.  In the  recent NYTimes article, he reviewed a book by Nobel Prize winning Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa. Cohen dismissed the book (Notes on the Death of Culture) as journalism but then piled on with comments about Vargas Llosa’s personal life. He concluded that discussion with the assertion that Vargas Llosa had himself revealed these details on his Twitter page and had sold exclusive publication rights for a large sum to a Spanish language popular magazine called Hola!
These latter comments turned out to be untrue and the NYTimes was forced to print a retraction.  The newspaper admitted that its reviewer relied on the Daily Mail as his source for these details. This is where the Weekly Standard’s “Scrapbook” column brings Waugh into the story:
The Scrapbook, aware of human frailty, will refrain from drawing any conclusions from this incident, except to make a few casual observations. First, as any reader of Evelyn Waugh’s novels must know, it is never a smart idea to take stories in the Daily Mail, or any Fleet Street tabloid, strictly at face value. (Our complimentary paperback edition of Scoop is on its way to Joshua Cohen.) And second, while the Times editors don’t mention it, the Book Review’s dereliction precisely represents what Vargas Llosa is complaining about. A sensational, and decidedly slanderous, assertion is made about a Nobel literature laureate—and no one at the New York Times can be stirred to verify it?…That’s journalistic, if not cultural, decline.
An internet search failed to turn up Joshua Cohen’s response or acknowledgement of his receipt of the book, although the NYTimes, for its part, admitted it should not have published unverified facts from the Daily Mail.
