From Cynthia Ozick’s excellent essay “Literary Entrails” (Harper’s, April 2007), which I hope Harper’s eventually makes freely available. Ozick’s essay should be read by anyone who has any interest in the current book reviewing climate, particularly as very few of the participants have the effrontery to look inward.

When, not long ago, the New York Times Book Review asked a pool of writers to name the best novel of the last twenty-five years, the results were partly predictable and considerably muddled. Toni Morrison’s Beloved, a tale of slavery and its aftermath, won the most votes. Philip Roth, John Updike, Don DeLillo, and Cormac McCarthy were substantially represented. In an essay musing on the outcome of an exercise seemingly more quixotic than significant, A.O. Scott noted that the choices gave “a rich, if partial and unscientific picture of American literature, a kind of composite self-portrait as interesting perhaps for its blind spots and distortions as for its details.” Or call it flotsam and jetsam. You could not tell, from the novels that floated to the top, and from those bubbling vigorously below, anything more than that they were all written in varieties of the American language. You could not tell what, taken all together, they intimated in the larger sense — the tone of their time. A quarter-century encompasses a generation, and a generation does have a composite feel to it. But here nothing was composite, nothing joined these disparate writers to one another — only the catchall of the question itself, dipping like a fishing net and picking up what was closest to the surface, or had already prominently surfaced. All these novels had been abundantly reviewed — piecemeal. No reviewer had thought to set Beloved beside Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America (both are political novels historically disguised) to catch the cross-reverberations. No reviewer had thought to investigate the possibly intermarried lineage of any of these works: what, for instance, has Nick in DeLillo’s Underworld absorbed from the Nick of Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby? The novels that rose up to meet the Book Review‘s inquiry had never been suspect of being linked, whether horizontally or vertically. It was as if each one was a wolf-child reared beyond the commonality of a civilization; as if there was no recognizable thread of literary inheritance that could bind, say, Mark Helprin to Raymond Carver. Or if there was, no one cared to look for it. Nothing was indebted to nothing.

One of the more interesting moments in history to me is The Lincoln Assassination. It’s kind of been stuck in my brain since I visited John Wilkes Booth’s grave.

Well, I’m tooling around the internet this morning and I find a news story on Yahoo regarding how modern doctors think Lincoln would have survived had he been shot in the same place today.

If Lincoln had survived, American history would probably have changed dramatically. Would Andrew Jackson still become president? Would the South find a way to rise again? Would there be repeated attempts to kill Lincoln during his recovery?

I wonder if Lincoln was wounded and weakened if it would have changed how the war ended. Lincoln became a martyr and, though the war was technically over, members of the south still wanted to fight. I wonder if a wounded and weak Lincoln (whether in office or not) would have spurred the south to fight on.

What do you think?

More on Simon & Schuster’s power grab

…with the advent of technologies like print-on-demand, publishers have been able to reduce the number of back copies that they keep in warehouses. Simon & Schuster, which until now has required that a book sell a minimum number of copies through print-on-demand technology to be deemed in print, has removed that lower limit in its new contract.

In effect, that means that as long as a consumer can order a book through a print-on-demand vendor, that book is still deemed in print, no matter how few copies it sells.

The Authors Guild says that is not fair. “If a book is only available in print-on-demand, it certainly means the publisher isn’t doing much to promote the book,” said Paul Aiken, executive director of the Authors Guild. “We’re not against the technology; we’re just against the technology being used to lock up rights.”

Mr. Aiken said that authors often ask to take back the rights of out-of-print books so they can place them with new publishers and give their work new life. He cited the example of Paula Fox, a novelist who had six out-of-print novels when Jonathan Franzen, the author of “The Corrections,” cited her work in an essay in Harpers Magazine. Ms. Fox took back the rights for her novels, resold them to W. W. Norton and revived her career.

For mid-list authors (and people like me, who aspire to be mid-list), The Authors Guild has been able to bring many OOP books back to life with its Backinprint.com program, which has also made Lazaruses out of neglected works by masters like Mary McCarthy’s The Oasis and Thornton Wilder’s American Characteristics.

(Thanks to the MSM for letting me be a parasite and cite it on this site.)