Times book critic Dwight Garner was last seen here back in April likening religion to masturbation. I noted then:
Mr. Garner manages to slip a masturbation reference into the Times about once a year. In November of 2013 he reported that the artist Lucian Freud "could imitate a whale masturbating." In 2011 he reported what he described as "the startling information that Marvin Gaye 'masturbated at length' before performing the vocal takes on his 'What's Going On' album."
It turns out I was wrong about the 'about once a year" part. It's closer to twice a year. The latest example is this passage, from Mr. Garner's recent Times review of the novel 10:04 by Ben Lerner:
A scene in which the protagonist masturbates into an in vitro fertilization vial at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital is a small comic masterpiece of wayward post-"Portnoy's Complaint" onanism.
Then there is this from Mr. Garner's September 2013 Times review of a memoir by a professional football player: "you will learn more in this book about N.F.L. player's hotel-room masturbation practices than you will soon be able to forget."
Editors used to keep these matters out of the newspaper, but Mr. Garner seems to be making a kind of game of seeing how far he can push the limits, or showing that those limits that used to exist no longer apply at all, at least to him. Meanwhile, readers lose out, because lots of good and serious books about public policy matters are ignored by the Times daily review column. But books that include a mention or description of masturbation somehow get laudatory coverage from the book critic.