Michiko Kakutani

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Michiko Kakutani (born January 9, 1955 in New Haven, Connecticut) is a highly influential and controversial literary critic for the New York Times. She attended Yale University, where she earned a degree in English. Before joining the Times in 1979, she had worked as a Washington Post reporter and as a writer for Time Magazine. She won a Pulitzer Prize in 1998 for her work as a critic.

Kakutani is best known for her strong-minded, flamboyantly written reviews, both positive and negative. Her eviscerations of many prominent authors have garnered her considerable attention and dislike. Her more famous excoriations include: John Updike's Seek My Face ("bogus in every respect"); Tom Wolfe's I Am Charlotte Simmons ("cheap, jerry-built affair that manages the unfortunate trick of being messy and predictable at the same time"); and Don DeLillo's Cosmopolis ("a long day's journey into tedium"). She has also been known to write reviews in the voice of movie or book characters, including Austin Powers [1], Holden Caulfield [2], Elle Woods of Legally Blonde [3] and Truman Capote's character Holly Golightly [4].

Her father was the mathematician Shizuo Kakutani, a professor at Yale University, who is best known for his demonstration of the fixed point theorem for multi-valued mapping, which served as a basis for the foundation of modern mathematical economics.

She has been prominently featured, though without appearance, in an episode of the popular show Sex and the City, in which Carrie Bradshaw releases a book that Michiko Kakutani reviews.

She has been a practicing Christian since 1996.

[edit] Critics

Salman Rushdie has called her "a weird woman who seems to feel the need to alternately praise and spank". In a June 2005 interview with Rolling Stone magazine, author Norman Mailer criticized Kakutani as a "one-woman kamikaze" (Kakutani is of Japanese descent) who deliberately "bring(s) out your review two weeks in advance of publication. She trashes it just to hurt sales and embarrass the author." Mailer also said that New York Times editors were "terrified" of Kakutani, and "can't fire her" because she's "a token," "an Asiatic, a feminist."

Kakutani also enjoys a quirkier fame for the alleged overuse of the word limn in her reviews. [5] [6]

She was famously parodied in the essay "I Am Michiko Kakutani", which the New Haven Advocate called "a great moment in McSweeney's history, by Kakutani's college classmate Colin McEnroe."