New York Times book critic Dwight Garner begins a review of a book that came out in 1984 by writing, "The 1980s, that otherwise deplorable decade, was a fertile era for satire."
It's a deplorable way to start a review, for a variety of reasons. Mr. Garner doesn't say what he found deplorable about the 1980s. Was it the economic growth? The tax cuts that allowed Americans to keep more of their own money? The Berlin Wall's fall, a Cold War victory that allowed millions to escape the misery of Soviet Communism? The stock market rally?
The way that the opinion of the 1980s is stated as though it is obvious and widely shared, rather than argued or explained, is the sort of thing that readers such as myself who don't share it find off-putting. It's particularly off-putting when it comes not on the paper's opinion page or editorial column, where one expects left-wing opinions, but in a book review, where a reader might expect to find informed and well-argued opinions about books rather than blunt, sweeping, and unsupported statements about entire decades.
Maybe Mr. Garner was trying to be funny. But I didn't think it was funny.