The State of the Book Review
John Palattella, The Nation’s literary editor, writes this month about the shrinking – and in some cases, the disappearance—of newspaper books sections.
He offers some context for the situation and some history of the written word and in the end argues that the time is ripe for someone to step up and do something about proper book reviewing.
Along the way, he points out that the argument of newspaper editors that the book section doesn’t pay for itself is a bogus one. It’s not a matter of economics, Palattella insists, it’s a matter of newsroom anti-intellectualism:
It’s necessary to explain these broad economic trends to understand a crucial and overlooked point—namely, that it is disingenuous for newspaper executives to justify the elimination or reduction of the book beat by claiming that books sections don’t turn a profit. Undeniably, the executives’ math is correct. A newspaper books section, if one were to total up its costs, loses money. But does not the sports section or the metro section? Yet of all the sections that fail to turn a profit on their own, it’s the books section that is most often killed or pinched. Claims that books sections are eliminated or downsized because they can’t earn their keep are bogus. It is indisputable that newspapers have been weakened by hard times and a major technological shift in the dissemination of news; it is not indisputable that newspaper books coverage has suffered for the same reasons. The book beat has been gutted primarily by cultural forces, not economic ones, and the most implacable of those forces lies within rather than outside the newsroom. It is not iPads or the Internet but the anti-intellectual ethos of newspapers themselves.
He defines anti-intellectualism this way:
In a news context, “anti-intellectual” does not necessarily mean an antipathy to ideas, though it can be that too. I use the word “anti-intellectual” to describe a suspicion of ideas not gleaned from reporting and a lack of interest in ideas that are not utterly topical.
And then gives an example from the LA Times:
In 1999 Steve Wasserman was three years into his tenure as the editor of The Los Angeles Times Book Review, and that July he published a review of Richard Howard’s new translation of Stendhal’s The Charterhouse of Parma. The reason was simple: Howard is among the best translators of French literature. As Wasserman explained several years ago in a memoir of his days at the Los Angeles Times published in the Columbia Journalism Review, the review of the book, written by Edmund White, was stylish and laudatory. The Monday after the piece ran, the paper’s editor summoned Wasserman to his office and admonished him for running an article about “another dead, white, European male.” But the paper’s readers in Los Angeles thought otherwise. Soon after the review appeared, local sales of the book took off; national sales did too when other publications reviewed the book. The New Yorker ended up printing a “Talk of the Town” item that traced the book’s unexpected success to The Los Angeles Times Book Review.
Followed by a swipe at the New York Times:
The taboo still exists, and it is sometimes enforced not by other editors but by newspaper books sections themselves. In August 2008 The New York Times Book Review published a piece by Walter Kirn about James Wood’s How Fiction Works. Wood is one of our liveliest critics of fiction, and How Fiction Works is his attempt to write something like E.M. Forster’s Aspects of the Novel. Kirn’s review drips with contempt for Wood’s knowledge of his subject. Irked by Wood’s readings of great novels by great novelists like Joyce, Proust and Balzac, Kirn attacked Wood for his alleged “genteel condescension,” “his donnish, finicky persona,” his preference for novels that offer “precision and clarity over mere vigor and potency” and for wearing his knowledge on his sleeve. Kirn belittled Wood’s learning, which is to say, his reading; he sounded like a restaurant critic chastising a chef for spending too much time in the kitchen. But there’s another twist. Kirn’s piece was the cover story of that week’s Book Review. An attack on reading was the lead review in the nation’s one remaining Sunday books supplement. Kirn wrote the piece, but he didn’t put it on the cover. The editors of the Book Review did that, and their decision was a reminder that in its current incarnation the publication resembles the version of the Book Review criticized by Elizabeth Hardwick in Harper’s in 1959: “a sort of hidden dissuader, gently, blandly, respectfully denying whatever vivacious interest there might be in books or in literary matters generally.”
Not all Palattella’s readers are convinced that he’s right, though.
For instance, there’s this in the comments section:
Posted by: Dan Green at 06/03/2010 @ 2:15pm
“We are in the throes of another newspaper crisis, yet nothing comparable to the NYRB or the LRB has emerged, in print or online, even though there is, I believe, a genuine hunger for serious books coverage.”
This is manifestly not the case. Just two examples: The Quarterly Conversation and Open Letters Monthly. You might have more honestly said “Nothing comparable to the NYRB or the LRB written and edited by recognized, mainstream literary journalists, preferably based in New York, has emerged.”
You be the judge. Here are links the the London Review of Books and The New York Review of Books.
