Historian Michael Kimmage pens a devastating review of Rick Perlstein's latest tome for The New Republic, leaving this rubble at the end:
Rick Perlstein is a superb researcher and writer.... Before the Storm and, less memorably, Nixonland brought an intelligent enthusiasm to the history of American conservatism.
The same cannot be said for The Invisible Bridge. Running to some 880 pages, it is far too long. The Watergate section has endless citations from the tapes and the proceedings that are hardly digested into narrative.... The narrative energy dissipates in a welter of detail, paraphrase, and digressions, such as the several pages Perlstein devotes to summarizing the plot of the film, The Bad News Bears.... Worst of all, The Invisible Bridge takes the freshness of Before the Storm and turns it into formula. Its narrative of break-down and division is rigidly predetermined, a narrative of inflated melodrama without much real suspense.... [A] historian of Perlstein’s ability could have accomplished a great deal more with this material. In future installments he should work out another paradigm for his narrative. There was no golden age of unity prior to the postwar conservative movement, no garden of Eden awaiting its snake. Goldwater’s conservatism was as much the harbinger of a new consensus as it was the cause of eventual fracturing, one of many such storms in the republic’s long history.
I loved all of Before the Storm's roughly 700 pages, but I confess I surrendered roughly 300 pages into Nixonland's 748, which seemed more like 1,700, and, in my view, suffered from the same flaws that Kimmage attributes to The Invisible Bridge--a "welter of detail, paraphrase, and digressions." Some of the welter was interesting, but there are always others books beckoning. Once I found myself scanning rather than reading Nixonland, some other book called. I don't recall which one, but I'm sure I finished it. I very rarely give up on a book. Infinite Jest was another Nixonland-like attempt of mine, but that unsalvageable mess I happily relinquished.
Somehow, Proust could take a handful of rather insignificant memories and convert them into more than 3,000 pages of sheer delight. But most historians--even those working with subjects of epic significance--aren't Marcel Proust, and they should know their limits. Nearly 900 pages on Ronald Reagan is one of them.