Dear readers, We give a lot of thought to matching reviewers with the books they write about, and often the brainstorming leads us to ingenious places. I was thrilled when Dana Spiotta, who is among my favorite living American novelists, reviewed Zayd Ayers Dohrn’s memoir for the Book Review a few months ago. A novelist who’s imagined the lives of American radicals reviewing a book by the son of actual radicals? Fabulous! (Are you at all interested in hearing more about our assigning process? Send your questions to me at books@nytimes.com; I might answer a handful down the road.) This week, the author Joseph O’Neill reviewed Jacob Weisberg’s “Profiles in Cowardice,” a womp-womp Trump-era bookend to John F. Kennedy’s collection of heroic biographies with a similar title. O’Neill, who is perhaps best known for his book “Netherland,” is an ambidextrous novelist-critic equally skilled in both modes. Given his literary interests, it is perhaps unsurprising that O’Neill is also drawn to write essays about politics. His novels deal in transience and wanderers, usually anchored by educated, sensitive men trying to make sense of an absurd world around them. When we profiled O’Neill two years ago, on the occasion of his novel “Godwin,” the subject of his political writing of course came up, and he said that he sees it as “quite separate from my efforts at writing fiction.” His novels, he went on, “are inevitably political, too, but I hope not in a didactic way. One of the basic objectives of writing — or of painting, or making music — is to make an interpretable thing of language that will transcend one’s normal dreary take on the world.” That’s a worthy goal of criticism, too, I’d say. Take a look at O’Neill’s review for us and see what he means. It’s a real pleasure to watch writers tackling the issues of the day in different modes, whether or not you agree with their take on the world. See you on Friday.
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