It’s the Books, Stupid
Written byPosted on September 19, 2007
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An anonymous comment at the National Book Critics Circle blog:
Has book coverage started on Truthdig? If it has, it’s very invisible on the home page. Second, those of us who are interested in literature and literary culture wish all you folks would stop talking about yourselves for a few minutes and start reviewing some more books. Most of you work from assignment, so you can’t necessarily be blamed, but since we can read any book review we want these days, why do we have to read so many reviews of the same twenty books every week. That this “campaign” to save book reviewing takes up so much of your attention is only further evidence of how important you all think you are. It’s actually the books that are important and so many of them–books that are often far more interesting than the few that you sheep are all getting your two cents in about every week–just disappear without a bit of attention. If literature is to survive, it has to do something that movies don’t do, it has to move forward, it has to grow. This hammering away at Delillo, Chabon, Díaz by all of you at once is downright boring. Folks who read are looking for a disovery, not the same old same old. Your homogeneity spells the death of culture in this country. If, indeed, we ever had one.
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Books To Jump Up and Down Over
Beyond Heaving Bosoms by Sarah Wendell and Candy Tan. The famed writers behind Smart Bitches, Trashy Books have written a very funny and thoughtful volume about romances, both Old Skool and New Skool. Here is a book that any smug and humorless literary manboy beating his flabby passive chest over Banville or Bolano should probably read pronto, if only for the distant possibility that he might get over himself. While the Choose Your Own Adventure segment at the end caused me to have a very disturbing dream involving Shelley Long (don't ask), Sarah and Candy did have me rethinking many of my own misperceptions when I wasn't busy laughing. They're not afraid to take on the New York Times Bok Review or even the groupthink within certain sectors of the romance community.
Alice Fantastic by Maggie Estep. This wild and highly enjoyable narrative involves two sisters (presumably, the third one was still being rented out by Chekhov), a hippie ex-junkie mother who lives with seventeen dogs, a murder, gambling, and libidinous Hollywood actresses who live in Woodstock. But this is the wonderful Maggie Estep we're talking here. And what seems at first like a quirky yarn becomes something unexpectedly moving about connectivity. What I love about Estep's work is the way that she'll juxtapose an extremely astute observation (now that you mention it, why do cab drivers always have somebody to talk with on the phone past midnight?) with an often outrageous story development.
Generosity by Richard Powers. It doesn't come out until September 29th, but Richard Powers's latest will have anyone committed to books reconsidering their literary fervor. I foresee some animosity from the vanilla critics hostile to idea-driven novels, but book bloggers, YouTube chroniclers, and MFAs would do well to plunge into this chance-taking narrative, which introduces vital questions about what the reader's relationship is with media, scientific dissection, and "creative nonfiction." Are we rats fleeing to happy cities? Or can we find the humanism within the purported plague?
Pieces for the Left Hand by J. Robert Lennon. Lennon is one of the most underrated fiction writers working today. Much as On the Night Plain proved that Lennon had a lot more in the toolbox than heartfelt (and often very funny) suburban satire, this slim but fascinating volume juxtaposes 100 small-town anecdotes -- arranged by category -- in a manner that reads, at times, like Nicholson Baker's passions for minutiae and, at other times, Stewart O'Nan's concern for psychological detail. The result is fiction that makes us wonder about whether one person's subjective view of particulars can entirely be trusted. This book never found a publisher in 2005. But thankfully, Graywolf has released it in the United States, along with Lennon's latest novel, The Castle.
Wonderful World by Javier Calvo. This wonderfully raucous volume has been completely ignored by the Washington Post, the New York Times, and the Los Angeles Times. But it's probably one of the most delightful reading experiences I've had this year. Calvo cavalierly mashes up multiple genres and manages to mix up familial subtext with larger-than-life, almost cartoonish characters. (Indeed, one might argue that one mobster's penis is a character of its own in this sprawling novel.). This is not an easy thing to pull off, but Calvo makes it work. And it's helped immeasurably by Mara Faye Lethem's idiom-specific translation. (See longer post.)
The Means of Reproduction, Michelle Goldberg This thoughtful book tackles the complicated (and little discussed) subject of reproductive rights from numerous angles, which includes a number of unpleasant but necessary ones. The upshot is that there isn't a quick fix solution for declining birth rates and fundamentalist abuses. Just about every political faction has contributed to the friction. But you'll want to read this book anyway to refamiliarize yourself with the topic, but also to understand just what's occurred during the past several decades to get us where we are today. (See also podcast interview with Goldberg.)
Nice. You were the author?
Nope.
I would say this: right now, so far this fall, if you are a blog or a big reviewer, you have to deal with Denis Johnson and Junot Diaz and the last Ghostwriter novel by Roth. The Amy Bloom book perhaps as well. Three have made the NYTBR best seller list for fiction, and probably the Roth will as well. In the case of all four you are dealing with novels by celebrated and quite special writers.
That’s not to say that other books shouldn’t get covered. But there is a heirarchy and a pecking order. But the biggest and most important guns deserve a certain amount of play. And if someone is going to be taken seriously, to some degree they should be able to add to the conversation concerning the big books.
HAH! I’ve read (and I wrote) similar posts all over the web. Pretty much the entire literary world just wants them to shut up and get back to work. Cowboy up, as it were.
The homogeneity of book reviewing follows the homogeneity of the publishing houses’ amount of money for marketing and this flow of money and influence does not necessarily have that much to do with the value of the book in terms of a civilization. I grew up reading Roth and he deserves to be ranked at one of America’s best writers of the last sixty years. But I just don’t know if America wants to read a book wherein the first three pages is about an old guy’s incontinence problems. I get the book, I really do; analogy and parable and all that. Maybe next a book about some old lady’s vaginal prolapse?
Lyn
“That’s not to say that other books shouldn’t get covered. But there is a heirarchy and a pecking order. But the biggest and most important guns deserve a certain amount of play. And if someone is going to be taken seriously, to some degree they should be able to add to the conversation concerning the big books.”
No. No, no no no no no, no no, no no no. I, as a reader, do not need every single book review page, literary magazine and journal to review the same Rushdie-Bloom-Roth-McEwan book, certainly not at the same time, predictably given the front page (whether the darn thing is good or even an interesting failure) days apart. No, I don’t see why a paper has to review the new Didion to be taken seriously. It’s the quality of the reviews, the writing, the diverse, intriguing selection of books that, the pages devoted to fiction that makes me take a book review section seriously. Dare to be bleepin’ different, for crying out loud.