There’s an old expression, “Never pick a fight with someone who buys ink by the barrel.” Apparently, there’s a new addendum to the adage: “Never pick a fight with someone who sells novels by the millions.”
TNR’s Michael Crowley wrote a terrific-but-scathing cover story in March, blasting novelist Michael Crichton for his climate-change denials, partisanship, anti-intellectualism, and general hackery. With this background in mind, Crowley was apparently taken aback when he picked up Crichton’s new novel and found a character named “Mick Crowley.” Here’s an excerpt (warning: this is unpleasant, graphic stuff):
Alex Burnet was in the middle of the most difficult trial of her career, a rape case involving the sexual assault of a two-year-old boy in Malibu. The defendant, thirty-year-old Mick Crowley, was a Washington-based political columnist who was visiting his sister-in-law when he experienced an overwhelming urge to have anal sex with her young son, still in diapers. Crowley was a wealthy, spoiled Yale graduate and heir to a pharmaceutical fortune. …
It turned out Crowley’s taste in love objects was well known in Washington, but [his lawyer]–as was his custom–tried the case vigorously in the press months before the trial, repeatedly characterizing Alex and the child’s mother as “fantasizing feminist fundamentalists” who had made up the whole thing from “their sick, twisted imaginations.” This, despite a well-documented hospital examination of the child. (Crowley’s penis was small, but he had still caused significant tears to the toddler’s rectum.)
Crichton went to describe the Mick Crowley character as a “weasel” and a “dickhead,” and, later, “that political reporter who likes little boys.” As it turns out, the Mick Crowley’s role in the book is entirely inconsequential, and has no bearing on the plot. It’s almost as if the character were an afterthought, thrown in to make some kind of point.
And what might that be? Hmm, Michael Crowley is a political reporter, Mick Crowley is a political reporter. Michael Crowley went to Yale, Mick Crowley went to Yale. Michael Crowley wrote a scathing criticism of Crichton, Mick Crowley is a child rapist in Crichton’s next book.
Talk about payback.
The road to this literary hit-and-run began back in March, when I wrote an article about Crichton pegged to his 2004 best-seller, State of Fear. The 624-page thriller presented global warming theory as the work of a fiendish cabal of liberal environmentalists, celebrities, journalists, academics, and politicians. Crichton’s populist disdain for these “experts” dovetailed neatly, I argued, with the Bush administration’s antiintellectual streak–and it was the reason that Karl Rove had invited Crichton for a chat with George W. Bush at the Oval Office and a right-wing senator had asked him to testify before his committee. Crichton discussed his White House visit with me, and our talk was friendly — though Crichton was clearly nervous about being linked to Bush. How ironic, then, that he wound up responding to my critique with a move worthy of Rove’s playbook.
I suppose, at a certain level, this is to be expected. Crichton has been hanging out with Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.) to help attack climate change science, and addition to cozying up to Bush. Not exactly above-board types.
That said, doesn’t this kind of over-the-top response in Crichton’s novel make him appear rather … I don’t know … small?