Lit Crit Archives
November 10, 2009
Posted at 1:04 PM in Lit Crit
Journalists are handed a lot of evidence that the world at large doesn't think much of our trade. No-one seems to appreciate how selflessly we serve the greater good, what keen-eyed observers and trenchant analysts we are.
So there we are, feeling all righteous and aggrieved, and then the news cycle coughs up a reminder that sometimes we really don't have a clue. One recent example I found especially painful because it involved literary journalism, which has more or less been my home turf since the dawn of time.
On Nov. 3, the Philadelphia Inquirer published a story headlined "Celebrating the Memoir: Fiction's Day Is Done?" It's a profile of Ben Yagoda, a well-published writer who has a new book out called Memoir: A History. Okay, the guy has a new book and he was appearing at a local festival on "Memoir and Documentary Art." Fine, profile him. Perfectly sound logic there.
The trouble starts when the profile writer tries to go all big-picture: "The emphasis on memoir is so strong that autobiography, history and fiction may be endangered. And the reasons for memoir's popularity may rest in our very nature as Americans: In a land where the majority rules, individuality is exalted and memoir is more befitting the American ideal of resourcefulness." The story goes on to quote Yagoda: "When it comes to proving points and making cases, fiction's day is done," he says. Then it serves up some palaver about history books (we no longer believe in them) and book clubs (terrible places to talk about fiction).
Now I haven't read Yagoda's new book, so I can't weigh his arguments and conclusions with any justice. I can and do, however, take issue with just about everything else the profile would have me believe: the essentialist argument that "our very nature as Americans" means that we love memoirs more than anything else; the idea that we used to read fiction mostly to have points proved and cases made; the suggestion that history doesn't cut it as a genre any more and that book clubs are hopeless when it comes to talking about fiction. (I imagine book clubbers south of Canada and north of Mexico picking up copies of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, screaming "Novel!" and running for the exits, leaving their glasses of Zinfandel untouched on the coffee table.)
In a word: No, no, no, and no!
I'm going to go curl up in the Curmudgeons' Corner now and grumble about what my profession is coming to. Mark Athitakis has far more reasonable (and well-reasoned) things to say about memoir vs. fiction here.
October 16, 2009
Posted at 8:17 AM in Lit Crit
Yesterday was the 20th anniversary of the untimely death of the Yugoslav writer Danilo Kiš (A Tomb for Boris Davidovich, Encyclopedia of the Dead). My friend Rich Byrne pays tribute to Kiš' "painfully comic vision of human beings careening through a universe of injustice and accident," and talks about how his work affected the Yugoslav/Serbian literary scene and how it anticipated the horrors to come:
One of the great ironies of Kiš' career is that "Boris Davidovich" set off a lengthy war within Yugoslavia’s -- and mainly Serbia’s -- literary establishment that turned not upon interpretations of Stalinism (the vexed question that forced both author Mihajlo Mihajlov and director Dušan Makavejev into dissidence and exile) but on questions of nationalism and literary cabalism....
The battle over "Boris Davidovich" presaged the violent breakup of Yugoslavia set in motion a decade later, and Kiš clearly articulated the vicious mentality that would later sweep through the nation as rooted in paranoia, banality, kitsch and ignorance.....
July 9, 2009
Posted at 12:48 PM in Lit Crit
An abridged version for those who don't want to wade through the chatty one below:
1. Read the book. All of it.
2. Be honest. Say what you think and why.
3. Do not hide behind vagueness and cliche.
4. Resist the temptation to be mean just because you can.
5. Remember that the author is a human being who (we hope) put a lot into this book.
6. Be entertaining. Dullness is unforgivable.
7. Don't spoil the surprise.
8. Think twice before you accept an assignment.
9. Do not kid yourself that a review is the equal of a book. It's not.
10. Read the book. All of it.
July 8, 2009
Posted at 9:31 AM in Lit Crit
I don't write many reviews these days. Ten years at Book World gave me my fill, and it was time to focus on on other kinds of writing. That's been a happy decision, but I still read a lot of reviews (and write them once in a while), and I still find the push-and-pull between writers and critics a fascinating thing to watch. The recent bad behavior from Alice Hoffman and Alain de Botton made me think again about how that game's played, or should be. So I came up with a code. (Authors need some guidelines too, as Hoffman and de Botton demonstrated.) I've said a lot of this before. Much of it is advice I gave my students at Eugene Lang College a few years ago, when I taught a seminar on "The Art of the Review." Much of it is obvious, at least to me. This is a personal list, and there are probably lots of good reasons to bend or break at least some of these rules. Please don't break Rules 1, 6, or 10, though, or you'll break my heart.
1. Read the book. All of it.
2. Be honest. Say what you think and why, even if the author's not going to love you for it. You won't do readers or literature any good if you ladle out helpings of false praise. If you like the book, don't be afraid to say that, either. Just be damn sure you explain why. (See Rule No. 3.)
3. Do not hide behind vagueness and cliche. Exactly what makes this book intriguing, upsetting, offputing, worth my time or worth flinging across the room? Did it make you angry, happy, or leave you cold? Tell me only that an author has "luminous prose" and I will read no further.
4. Resist the temptation to be mean just because you can. Nobody loves to read a good savaging more than I do, but it has to be justified. Some books manage to be such a waste of time and paper that righteous indignation or witty evisceration is called for. Before you whip out the scalpel, though, ask yourself: Are you an avenging Fury, setting right the wrongs done to literature, or are you a narcissist on a power trip?
5. Remember that the author is a human being who (we hope) put a lot into this book. You don't have to give an A for effort. You should be aware that, to the author, a negative review can feel like a knife in the thigh, maybe even the heart. As de Botton put it so memorably to Caleb Crain, "You have now killed my book in the United States, nothing short of that. So that's two years of work down the drain in one miserable 900 word review."
Note: This rule does not trump Rule No. 2. Don't let the author's humanity cripple you as a critic. To publish a book is to invite people to read and react. Authors, if you can't take some honest heat, don't read the reviews.
6. Be entertaining. You can define "entertaining" in many ways. Dullness is unforgivable. A 900-word review demands less of a writer than a 50,000-word novel does (see Rule No. 9), but you still have to make those 900 words worth the reader's time. People blame the fading away of book-review sections on cultural and economic changes. I say that the lazy review--heavy on plot summary, light on style, substance, and genuine criticism--has played its role in the decline.
7. Don't spoil the surprise. There are times when it's necessary or useful to give away elements of a story. If you must, though, give readers a heads-up.
8. Think twice before you accept an assignment. It's okay to say no. True, we all need to make a living, not that there's much of one to be had from book reviewing. But if an editor asks you to review the latest teen-vampire novel and you would rather be bitten by a vamp than read about one, take a pass. In most cases you will not do yourself, your editor, the reader, or the author any favors by tackling a book you're guaranteed to loathe.
9. Do not kid yourself that a review is the equal of a book. It's not. Sure, reviewing can be important and useful work. Writing a book is harder and takes a lot longer. End of story.
10. Read the book. All of it.
July 1, 2009
Posted at 9:38 AM in Lit Crit
It's been a bad week for author-critic relations. First Alice Hoffman used Twitter to get back at a reviewer who made the mistake of not entirely loving her latest novel. Then Alain de Botton went after Caleb Crain--in the comments section of Crain's blog--for not entirely loving his latest opus in a review for the NYT. (At least give de Botton points for drama: "You have now killed my book in the United States, nothing short of that. So that's two years of work down the drain in one miserable 900 word review.")
I love a good literary smackdown as much as the next guy, and there should be some contentiousness--not personal abuse, as Hoffman and de Botton apparently forgot--built into the game. Writers are not obliged to like negative reviews of their work, although it's an occupational hazard. (Don't publish if you can't take the heat.) Critics must be honest in their reactions to a book, although they sometimes forget there's a human being, one who might even have feelings, behind that opus they've just pasted.
None of that means writers and critics can't be friends--or at least mutually respectful and interested parties. Mark McGurl, an associate professor at UCLA, makes an intriguing case for coexistence in his new book, The Program Era. One of the book's chief arguments is that the rise of the creative-writing program is "the most important event in postwar American literary history." McGurl points out, rightly, that such programs "have bequeathed to us more interesting reading than one person could do in a lifetime." He wants literary scholars to take the whole enterprise seriously--which is all a writer really should expect from a critic, inside or outside academe.
You can read my profile of McGurl and The Program Era here. More takes: Louis Menand wrote about the book in an intriguingly personal essay for the New Yorker last month. Charles McGrath kicked out a skewed and unfair review of the book for the NYTBR back in April; he likened writing programs to Ponzi schemes and took McGurl to task for overusing academic jargon. (A scholar dares to use theory-speak in an academic book? The nerve!) Bookforum's reviewer took the project more seriously, and Conversational Reading waxed positive too.
If you come across further commentary, please pass it along. I have a feeling that this book does mark a turning point in writer-critic relations. I hope so. Alice Hoffman, are you listening?
January 28, 2009
Posted at 3:53 PM in Lit Crit
The WaPo has finally announced that it will kill the stand-alone print edition of Book World and move books coverage into Outlook and Style and the arts section. No surprise there; rumors have swirled (what else do rumors do?) for weeks now.
What to say? I worked at Book World a long time, and I got used to it in its stand-alone print incarnation. But BW's talented staff will not lose their jobs because of the Post's decision. Literary news and reviews will still be part of the paper. Book World will have some kind of unified presence online. All of that is good.
Book World hasn't had enough readers in a long time, and there's a decent chance that more people will find and read Post book reviews in Style and Outlook than ever did when reviews ran mostly in the Sunday section. Also good, yes?
More reports here (Motoko Rich reporting for NYT) and here (NBCC blog) and some very sensible commentary from Sarah Weinman, who says we need to buck up and get on with it::
...for so long, literary culture has been a passive endeavor. One that prescribes what readers should read, what books should be paid attention to, a trickle-down effect that hopes, pleads for people to magically "discover" what is the best of books.
But now we're in the opposite age. Instead of passive intake, this is a world of active consumption and discussion, where people seek out what they want, when they want it at their own discretion. Looking for guidance and seeking things out aren't mutually exclusive, but readers should be--and are--suspicious of entitlement and suspicion that comes with books coverage being wholly separate from the larger world.
Book World's "demise" comes on the heels of yesterday's death of John Updike, truly one of the last great literary audodidacts, and not long after the death of John Leonard. Both those men understood how vital it was to engage with culture and beyond, to help those who were just starting out and to see the joy and the humanity in all that they wrote and read about. There's a void, but instead of crying over the spilt milk of a bygone age, let's move forward to engage, to excite, to entice, and to hold the reader in thrall to all possible things.
Stop salvaging; start suggesting. Stop whining; start writing.
Long live Book World.
December 17, 2008
Posted at 3:29 PM in Lit Crit
I have read exactly one thing by Roberto Bolano so far, and that's the short story in the Dec. 22 issue of The New Yorker. I should probably tackle The Savage Detectives or 2666, but I don't think I can bear to until Bolano fever dies down a little. Meanwhile, scholars have joined litbloggers in the Bolano boom. From an essay (subscription only) by Ilan Stavans in the Dec. 19 Chronicle Review:
Witnessing Bolaño's canonization in academe has been fascinating. Barely a few years ago, he was a don nadie, a supreme nobody; now The New Yorker puts its imprimatur on him with a review, he's a household name at symposia, and he's taught as a refreshing perspective, a kind of Jack Kerouac for the new millennium.
Alas, Bolaño's work is rapidly becoming a factory for scholarly platitudes. More than a year ago, I had a student who wrote his senior thesis on the author. My student started early in his junior year with a handful of resources at his disposal. By the time he had finished, the plethora of tenure-granting studies was dumbfounding: Bolaño and illness, Bolaño and the whodunit, Bolaño and the beatniks, Bolaño and eschatology, etc. Since then, interviews, photographs, e-mail messages — everything by or about him — are perceived as discoveries (even though most of the material was never lost to a Spanish-language audience).
November 11, 2008
Posted at 2:28 PM in Lit Crit
RIP John Leonard. Lots of appreciations elsewhere to which I have nothing useful to add, except to direct you to this Nation essay from 2000, which ought to be read by all working critics and reporters and the people who edit them:
I like to think of myself as having published in the New York Review, The New Statesman, the Yale Review and Tikkun. But there was also TV Guide.
This sounds less careerist than sluttish. It is, however, a sluttishness probably to be expected of someone who had to make a living after he discovered that the novels he reviewed were a lot better than the novels he wrote. We may belong to what the poet Paul Valéry called "the delirious professions"--by which Valéry meant "all those trades whose main tool is one's opinion of one's self, and whose raw material is the opinion others have of you"--but reporters, critics and "cultural journalists," no less than publicists, are caged birds in a corporate canary-cage. Looking back, I see what I required of my employers was that they cherish my every word and leave me alone. If I understand what Warren Beatty was trying to tell us in the movie Reds, it is that John Reed only soured on the Russian Revolution after they fucked with his copy.
Exactly.
November 3, 2008
Posted at 2:55 PM in Lit Crit
I've just had the pleasure of writing about the work of Charles Robinson, a textual scholar at the University of Delaware. Working closely with Mary Shelley's Frankenstein notebooks in the Bodleian Library at Oxford, Robinson has given us a new edition that strips out Percy Shelley's edits, emendations, and "improvements." And boy, are some of them purple:
In Mary's early version of the monster's final speech, for example, he looks forward to his death with these words: "I shall ascend my pile triumphantly & the flame that consumes my body will give rest & blessings to my mind." In Percy's version, the line becomes: "I shall ascend my funeral pile triumphantly, and exult in the agony of the torturing flames. The light of that conflagration will fade away; my ashes will be swept into the sea by the winds. My spirit will sleep in peace; or if it thinks, it will not surely think thus. Farewell."
I know which version I prefer. Hint: It's not Percy's.
Robinson's new edition could help quiet down a debate that's been raging since the novel was published, anonymously, in 1818: Did Mary Shelley really write Frankenstein? There are a few holdouts who argue that she couldn't have. (See Maud Newton's thoughts on how that point of view "really chaps my ass.")
Better question, and the one most scholars ask: Just how much of Frankenstein did Mary Shelley write? As I ask in the article,
How much of a participant was Mary Shelley's better half? Should Percy be considered a co-creator of her masterpiece? Was he a co-opter of her genius? Was he Mary's Svengali, her Max Perkins, or merely a good copy editor?
Robinson firmly believes that Mary wrote the book:
"There's no evidence that Percy is responsible for the conception of this novel or even the early drafting of it," he says. "All the evidence that we have is that he comes in at this intermediate stage and offers his editorial advice and changes, and comes in at the fair-copy stage and offers some melodramatic prose for the final version of the scene in the polar regions."
One of the things I find coolest about the kind of dogged textual work Robinson does is that it reminds us of the necessary thrill of working with original manuscripts. Digital copies are wonderful things, especially for scholars who can't hop on a plane and travel to, say, the Bodleian--but sometimes there's no substitute for the original.
For Robinson, there's a larger lesson to be drawn from his toil. "For this kind of close editorial work, the manuscript is absolutely essential." As a textual editor, he has worked his way through what he calls "a kind of stemma or sequence" of Frankenstein manuscript materials: high-resolution, black-and-white photographs of the manuscripts; high-quality digital images; and original manuscript pages.
"Digitals provide new opportunities for handwriting analysis, but it's only in the originals that you can see the exact shade or color of the ink," Robinson explains. "It's the manuscript itself that provides the best evidence."
September 24, 2008
Posted at 10:33 AM in Lit Crit
One of David Foster Wallace's students has posted a copy of the syllabus Wallace used to teach an undergrad course on "Literary Interpretation." The document makes more honest literary sense than most of the overbearing, over-reaching tributes we've had thrown at us since Wallace's suicide:
The goals of this section of E67 are to survey certain important forms of modern literature—short stories, novels, poems—and to introduce you to some techniques for achieving a critical appreciation of literary art. "Critical appreciation" means having smart, sophisticated reasons for liking whatever literature you like, and being able to articulate those reasons to other people, especially in writing. Vital for critical appreciation is the ability to "interpret" a piece of literature, which basically means coming up with a cogent, interesting account of what a piece of lit means, what it's trying to do to/for the reader, what technical choices the author's made in order to achieve the effects she wants, and so on. As you can probably anticipate, the whole thing gets very complicated and abstract and hard, which is one reason why entire college departments are devoted to studying and interpreting literature.
(Via.)
More tales of Wallace as a teacher here and here.
September 22, 2008
Posted at 8:15 AM in Lit Crit
Surprise us sometime by not putting Philip Roth's latest on the cover of the section. It would be okay. Really.
(For yesterday's section, I'd have gone with either the review of Asne Seierstad's The Angel of Grozny or the review of Marilynne Robinson's Home. Either would have been a more refreshing choice than Indigation.)
September 16, 2008
Posted at 1:50 PM in Lit Crit
My former colleagues over at the Washington Post Book World are now blogging daily. Check it.
August 26, 2008
Posted at 12:58 PM in Lit Crit
During my stint as a contributing editor at Book World, the phrase "minor novelist" used to get thrown around once in a while. I always hated it: It's patronizing, and it's almost always used by people who will never get around to writing a novel at all. (Though of course if they did it would be anything but minor.)
After reading a review in the Aug. 1 TLS, though, I'd like to suggest that the phrase "minor memoirist" needs to go into wider circulation, given what the publishing industry has been dishing out. Here's A.N. Wilson (in no sense a minor writer) taking the lash to Jeremy Lewis's Grub Street Irregular:
But in this account of how the author "plumped" for publishing, worked in a minor capacity for a number of firms, and then helped out in an editorial capacity at several small magazines, the reader is left wondering whether anything interesting is going to happen and I may as well spoil it for you by saying that it doesn't. At one point, attending a seminar on the art of biography, the author is sharply upbraided by Roy Foster, who tells him, "I think, Jeremy, that we’ve had enough of this anecdotage."
Exactly.
August 14, 2008
Posted at 8:17 AM in Lit Critin Net Life
Not long ago, I wrote a story for the Chronicle Review on "literary geospaces," profiling two digital humanists who are using technologies like Google Earth to see literary history in fresh ways. One of the scholars I wrote about, Matthew Jockers of Stanford, has posted more about his work on his blog, describing the bigger picture--
As long ago as 1997, my research had shown that the Irish experience in America was largely determined by place. It's true, of course, that the time of immigration to the U.S. was important in coloring the Irish experience: were these pre-famine immigrants, famine refugees, or the 1980's so-called "commuter Irish." But I discovered that equally important to chronology was place and the business of where the immigrants settled. For my research, I divided the country up into a number of regions (Midwest, mountain, southwest, pacific. . .) and each one of these regions turned out to have a distinct "brand" of Irish-American writing. Generally speaking, though, the further west we go the more likely we are to find writers describing the Irish-American experience in positive terms.
--and how he built a bibliographic database of IA lit that he turned into a "Google Earth mash-up." You can catch a QuickTime video of the mash-up here.
July 29, 2008
Posted at 8:44 PM in Lit Crit
Finally, somebody with something sensible to say about the LATBR and its devolution from stand-alone section to part of the culture pages. More reasonableness here. And the NBCC, after a spate of the usual hand-wringing, actually did a mini-interview with LATBR editor David Ulin and learned a couple of reassuring things (what's NOT going away, in other words). Was that so hard?
If you want more, you can find an editor's note from Ulin to LAT readers here.
Meanwhile, I am resisting the impulse to read this as ironic:
Having some standards seems more and more important in a time when the traditional arts have lost a bit of their prestige, some of their audience, and all of their monopoly on perceived quality. As silly as the chaste, Victorian tones of the literary and high culture worlds could be in their heyday, we need a certain amount of seriousness in our lives. At least I do. If the marketplace is left entirely unfettered, we'll lose a lot of what we consider valuable -- not just J.S. Bach and John Coltrane but shows such as "Deadwood" and nonchain bookstores.
The LAT running a defense of "a certain amount of seriousnes in our lives" the same week it downsizes its book coverage? Interesting. Then again, much of the article is a defense of high-middle-lowbrow mashups. It's all good, right?
Right.
March 24, 2008
Posted at 4:37 PM in Lit Crit
Did Coleridge translate Goethe's Faust? Two Romanticists say yes. Others say no. Passionate debate ensues. I've written about the devilish kerfluffle here. As one of my sources told me, "Coleridgeans are not known for their unanimity."
February 19, 2008
Posted at 9:17 PM in Lit Crit
I have been accused, from time to time, of being a mixer. My husband likes to remind me of the time that I posted a perfectly innocent question--about the pros and cons of circumcision--to a parenting listserv. Before long, the pro- and anti- camps were hurling accusations of genital mutilation and cultural imperialism at each other. Let's just say it was an eye-opener.
Another question of mine, this one about what "post-avant" really means, had a similar match-meets-powder-keg effect not long ago. You can read the question here (scroll to the bottom) on the Chronicle's Footnoted blog, the answer here ("Who You Callin' Post Avant?"), and reaction here. As one commenter wrote, "Damn, y'all. It's like Knots Landing in here. Somebody, call Wallace Stevens!"
February 11, 2008
Posted at 12:53 PM in Lit Crit
If you're reading one of the Bard's plays, you can now join the global crowd--online--via Shakespeare's Global Globe, the brainchild of an English professor at Carnegie Mellon. (Love the orbis-mundi URL.) The Chronicle's Wired Campus blog has some background.
As of 12:59 p.m. EST, 108 people are reading Shakespeare. Well, 108 people have logged on to report that they're reading Shakespeare.
February 9, 2008
Posted at 8:05 PM in Lit Crit
If you find yourself reviewing James Wood's new book, please don't invoke Edmund Wilson in your lead. Trust me. It's been done.
Thanks.
(More Woodiana here, if you must.)
February 5, 2008
Posted at 10:40 AM in Lit Crit
Please stop profiling and otherwise making a fuss over James Wood. I hear he's good. I hear he has a new book out ("an Olympian critic points out where major-league talents are getting it wrong," the Independent says). I understand he likes to spend time with his children. Enough said.
