Don’t get me wrong. I love me some New York Review of Books—its coverage of international affairs, economics, domestic politics, art history, musicology. Each issue is like a year in college in capsule form. When I finish I feel smarter about history and current events.

But if there’s one thing the NYRB has consistently gotten wrong in the ten years or so I’ve been reading it, it’s contemporary literature, and especially contemporary fiction, and the blame for that must fall squarely on the shoulders of its lead literary critic, Daniel Mendelsohn—a Princeton-educated classicist who should never be allowed to write about anything more recent than, say, Suetonius. Frankly, I’m not sure he should be allowed to write about the classics either, but I don’t know enough Latin and Greek to say if he’s as wrong about them as he is about modern stuff.

Because man is this guy wrong. Always. Every time. Completely off the mark.

I suppose I’ve been paying attention to him since way in the days when he wrote for the New York Observer, where he published a clueless review of Brad Gooch’s The Golden Age of Promiscuity.* This novel is, by most measures, a failure, but it’s an interesting failure, a compelling failure—a pseudo-inarticulate evocation of genuinely inarticulate people that seeks to articulate the inarticulable, and in the process flouts all the standards of symmetry and taste that classicists are taught to hold dear, and that Mendelsohn assiduously, with a sharp eye but a tin ear, applies to everything he reviews. If it was good enough for Aristotle, it must be good enough for us, right?

Now, I’m not even remotely going to to pretend to take on Aristotle. I’ve read—and learned from—the Poetics; I’ve quarreled with it; I’ve lost. But the guy’s been dead for, what, 2300 years? Seems like there might’ve been a few developments in the world of letters since then. In fact, it seems to me that if Mendelsohn explored the contrasts between contemporary writing and classical standards of composition, rather than simply holding new books to an old standard, he might tell his readers something interesting about the evolution of literature. But, like Tom Wolfe in his notoriously bad art criticism, he’s interested only in formal matters: in pattern-making and –manipulation on the one hand, and, on the other, the treatment of a few classic subjects—love, death, family, war—in suitably reverential tones.

Having said all that, this post is actually about Mendelsohn’s recent review of Mad Men, which starts with the right premise—that the show is wildly overpraised—and then, as usual, gets it all wrong. As with literature, Mendelsohn’s idea of TV is based on some golden age—my guess is the period from I Love Lucy to All in the Family—a magic moment when the conventions of storytelling as borrowed from theatrical sketch comedy were unchallenged, and the only irony was of the time-honored dramatic variety. An absolute rejection of postmodernism, in other words, whether it be the show’s creators’, or its viewers’.

I think that, ultimately, is my problem with Mr. M.: he has no inkling of the problematic but fascinating phenomenon of the postmodern savvy audience—educated to the point of jadedness, suspicious but also sentimental, craving the thing it’s been taught to distrust (“the thing” being the well-made narrative to which Mendelsohn is so slavishly devoted). Thus when he points out how Mad Men’s depictions of casual racism, rampant sexism, mid-morning office cocktails, and smoking pregnant women aren’t exactly News, he misses the simple fact that they’re not meant to be. Mad Men isn’t telling us anything about the Sixties we don’t already know; rather, it’s letting us experience it in a uniquely self-conscious manner. It invites us to indulge in a view of the world that, however wrong-headed (by which I mean racist, sexist, homophobic, grotesquely entitled, and compulsively materialistic), was innocent of its own failings. Moral standards were dictated by custom and character was measured by adherence to social codes, in sharp contrast to the present moment, when each and every social encounter has to be parsed from dizzying array of points of view, and in many situations it’s simply not possible for all parties involved to do the right thing. Taking responsibility for yourself has always been hard, but taking others’ needs into consideration, particularly when they clash with your own, is exhausting. But it’s also the price we pay to live in a society that genuinely respects individual identity and autonomy.

But like I said: it can be exhausting, and we need to escape it sometimes—not from tolerance per se, multiculturalism, respect, whatever the catch-all name is for post–Social Revolution notions of equality, but moral relativity. Sometimes you just want your place in society to be fixed and secure, even if it lands you on the bottom, the fringe, the outlaw. The most common release valve is the “new” offensive comedy, the more or less ubiquitous brand of humor that invokes racist, sexist, and homophobic stereotypes of yore not out of nostalgia but, rather, to point out the absurdity of essentializing the behavior of this or that ethnic or identity group into a social judgment. Mad Men partakes of this, but in a more subtle way. It doesn’t just invoke the spectre of a pre-enlightened era: it recreates it and forces us to see and identify with the sympathetic aspects of its demagogues and xenophobes and idiots. And if we bask a little too longingly in the show’s Technicolor, streamlined universe, it’s a pleasure tinged with more than a hint of schadenfreude, because we know the blindfold is about to ripped off like a bandaid from an unhealed wound.

In Mad Men, we see the moment when the United States went from being a New World of wide-open possibility to just another stodgy, self-justifying Old one. In any other era society’s disgruntled element—young people, the ethnically excluded, etc.—would have emigated, but the world was full by the 1960s. There was no place to go. Thus the exodus had to be psychological, not physical. Certain aspects of that mental evolution are familiar to us, and justly (if somewhat prematurely) celebrated: Civil Rights. Women’s Rights. Gay Rights. But another aspect—the emotional and intellectual fatigue that comes with living in a morally equivocal world—is less visible, less understood. In a way, it’s this generation’s version of the Sixties’ ideal of keeping up appearances, when Tricky Dick’s silent majority espoused, or at any rate didn’t challenge, racist, sexist, and homophobic standards, despite the fact that it knew such ideas were wrong, and often antithetical to its own self-interest. In the Sixties, anxiety over this double standard—all men are created equal, but only if they’re straight, white, and, well, men—manifested itself in neurosis, alcoholism, libidinal excess, and other acts of self-sabotage. The modern world offers different releases. Some, like the Tea Party, are even more insane than their Sixties’ counterparts, while others, like Mad Men, are harmless pabulum, a bolus of cud or a scoop of mashed potatoes. But hey, even mashed potatoes can be delicious with the right gravy. Jon Hamm can spread himself all over my plate any time he wants to.

* Full disclosure: In 1999, Mendelsohn sent his book The Elusive Embrace to me for a blurb. I didn’t blurb it. In 2004, in a review of Hatchet Jobs in the NYRB, he said that I was a good critic but a bad novelist. I’m not saying that this was a case of tit-for-tat. I’m just pointing out that it’s kind of weird to ask for an endorsement from a writer whose work you don’t like, don’t you think?