Month / October 2006

by Edward Champion

Memo to Tanenhaus: Liesl’s Your Only Shot

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Dear Mr. Tanenhaus:

Nearly every serious literary person knows that your finger ain’t exactly on the pulse of contemporary fiction. Your coverage, even when it does concern itself with literature, often misses the mark. (This week’s issue, however, isn’t bad. But still, NO BROWINES FOR YOU! Just because I’m under no obligation to resuscitate the Tanenhaus Brownie Watch.)

This is troubling, given that you have long maintained that you are the shit, that somehow the name “New York Times” means something and that we are supposed to ignore the often ridiculous essays that pass for substantive coverage. (And, come on, Sam, was Alford snorting lines when he wrote this nonsense? Or is this the mark of an editor who thinks this and Joe Queenan’s solipsistic hit pieces are funny? For this, I sentence you to two weeks of Buster Keaton, Stanley Elkin and the Marx Brothers!)

However, there is one person among your roster of contributors who does know fiction and who actually loves books (Imagine that! Someone who actually loves LOVES loves books on your payroll! You know, like some of us upstart litbloggers and podcasters!). And frankly Sam, she’s your only shot at the NYTBR having any kind of journalistic credibility in the future.

I’m talking about Liesl Schillinger! This week, she wrote a fantastic review of Kate Atkinson’s One Good Turn that somehow escaped the dull, clause-happy house style you cling to like a barnacle to a scow or an attorney to boilerplate.

And yet you keep her in the background, often assigning her a book from Glamour instead of, say, the new Richard Ford book — which you assigned to that assclown Tony Scott, a man who doesn’t understand that he’s a film critic, not a book critic.

And yes I’ll even forgive her solecism against bloggers on the Pessl front.

If you have even a shred of editorial instinct, I urge you to have Liesl cover substantial fiction. During your tenure, you’ve been almost completely tone-deaf in your tenure in providing . But Liesl? Oh, I know me a fellow reader when I see one!

So what of it, Sammy T? The time has come to lay down the gauntlet. Are you writing for readers and literary people? Are you writing to get people excited about literature? Or are you writing for an audience that nobody but you seems to understand? An audience perhaps of humorless bureaucrats?

Very truly yours,

Edward Champion

by Edward Champion

Sam Tanenhaus Crosses the Line Between Advertising and Editorial

If there was any doubt that Sam Tanenhaus lacked integrity after his unethical assignment of John Dean to review Mark Felt’s memoir, Galleycat uncovers this disgraceful juxtaposition of an ad for Jonathan Franzen’s The Discomfort Zone running on the same page as a letter from Tom Bissell gushing about Franzen. (Bissell’s letter is in response to Daniel Mendelsohn’s review.) I observed two weeks ago that the timeliness of this review was suspect. (Mendelsohn’s review appeared almost two months after the book was reviewed by Michiko Kakutani.) Whether this had any bearing on securing the ad, only the folks inside the NYTBR will know for sure.

Even so, I haven’t seen such an obvious shill since the infamous Target-sponsored New Yorker. Ron Hogan emailed Sam Tanenhaus and Tanenhaus responded, “We don’t see any ads until we close” and further noted that “letters are neutral space, unlike reviews.” Except, of course, that Tom Bissell’s letter engages in highly subjective language that is a bit more than “neutral.”

Yeah. My dog ate my homework too.

Sam Tanenhaus sincerely believes that the NYTBR is the best newspaper book review section in the nation. But his continued incompetence leads me to believe that he doesn’t care about journalistic integrity and that he lacks even the forethought, something that every journalism major is aware of, to switch an ad like this to another page. That’s too bad. The NYTBR used to be something worth reading. Now, it’s just a joke.

[To offer something Tanenhaus’s way, I will say that the new issue has some interesting coverage. For example, how many review sections have you seen containing a full review of Fowles’ second notebook? But Tanenhaus interviewing Amy Sedaris in this week’s podcast is semi-disastrous, simply because Tanenhaus’s gruff interrogative questioning style is at odds with his desperate efforts to show how hip he is. Here’s a hint, Sam: loosen up. Also: What the fuck, Henry Alford?]

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by Edward Champion

Responding to Dawkins

Terry Eagleton on Richard Dawkins: “Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is the Book of British Birds, and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology. Card-carrying rationalists like Dawkins, who is the nearest thing to a professional atheist we have had since Bertrand Russell, are in one sense the least well-equipped to understand what they castigate, since they don’t believe there is anything there to be understood, or at least anything worth understanding. This is why they invariably come up with vulgar caricatures of religious faith that would make a first-year theology student wince. The more they detest religion, the more ill-informed their criticisms of it tend to be. If they were asked to pass judgment on phenomenology or the geopolitics of South Asia, they would no doubt bone up on the question as assiduously as they could. When it comes to theology, however, any shoddy old travesty will pass muster. These days, theology is the queen of the sciences in a rather less august sense of the word than in its medieval heyday.”

And he’s just getting started.

There’s also an essay by Marilynne Robinson in the November Harper’s.

And this interesting Gary Wolf piece talking with Dawkins and a host of other New Atheists who share the belief that professing one’s atheism is now necessary.