I’ve done my time as a book reviewer. I’ve lived in the foxhole, or the book-reviewer’s equivalent: an efficiency apartment overflowing with reviewer copies of books, books in every corner, books on the desk, the table, the bed, books like a madness or some fungus.
Thus, even after saying a happy goodbye to the whole ill-paid business,
I do think about reviewing. I think about how my time, in the 00s, was a pretty bad time for the business as a whole: newspapers that used to host book reviews as a natural function, just as they’d host obituaries and wedding announcements, were in the midst of the great change that would destroy most of them. Part of that change was the weird idea that reviewing anything but reading material – in a forum that depended on people, well, reading – would make papers ‘relevant”. The video game, cable tv, social media – great things in themselves, but competitors for the attention space – became the obsession of newspapers (the latest iteration of this being AI – a sort of imbecilic end to the newspaper obsession with a world in which newspapers are marginal or extinct. A Darwinist business historian would have a name for this fatal tendency. I lieu of which, I'll name it: the Sears Roebuck complex. How to fuck up a good thing, from the top).
On the other hand, newspapers had been on the skids for years, as the variety of papers in market after market thinned to a monopolistic one. And book reviews, in such an environment, were never going to make it.
I at the time had regular freelance gigs with the Chicago Sun, the Austin Chronicle and the Austin Statesman, and found a niche, here and there, with some odd characters: The National Post, the Globe and Mail, the Examiner, even the Wall Street Journal (which in the old days had a book review section edited by a man whose name I can’t remember, but who was, I do remember, politically inclined to socialism – in the pre-Murdoch days, the WSJ, always far to the right, still did things like hiring Alexander Cockburn to write a regular column). So I was in touch with the sickness of the whole reviewing world in North America.
Thus – I am a big man for a thus, and though I seem to be throwing out random reminiscence, there is a point, goddamn it! – the awful NYT review of Gabriel’s Moon, which seems to be an awful book by the British novelist William Boyd, has been weighing on my mind. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/03/books/review/gabriels-moon-william-boyd.html
The review that calls the main character a "turd", after calling him a "meatloaf". A hatchet job in which the hatchet man does not know how to swing a hatchet.
My mind goes back, reviewerishly, to the figure of John Leonard.
John Leonard is a name that rings a chime, most likely, only for older writers. Leonard reviewed TV. Leonard wrote novels (one of which Hugh Kenner called the “anti-V”, which is the only time, I believe, Kenner ever referred to Pynchon), Leonard wrote a column full of musings about society, but mostly, Leonard reviewed books.
In 1959, Elizabeth Hardwick launched a famous salvo against the sheer mediocrity of the book review section of the Times. Looking back at that time through the archives, one finds that every new thing written in the U.S. was dissed by reviewers who seemed to be closer to the Edwardian age than their own. For them, Naked Lunch was tedious pornography. So was Lolita. And so on. On the other hand, one is also surprised that, well into the sixties, the section kept tabs on the literary scene in disparate foreign parts – Marc Slonim, for instance, wrote a regular column on what was happening in Italian, French, German and Eastern European literature. There is a reason that the NYT of that period becomes practically a Greek chorus in Uwe Johnson’s Anniversaries.
The slough of the review was, however, sloughlike for a decade after Hardwick’s attack. And then, for a period of about five years, John Leonard somehow, through some synaptic blackout of the managing editor, was given charge of the book page.
As a result, the Edwardian age was swept away. Exhibit one in what a book review section could be like: November 9, 1975. The NYT Book section features two reviews on its front page (in the book reviewing world, the front page of the NYT is, or was, the most valuable property in the fame – it is Park Place with four hotels): one is of Donald Barthelme’s The Dead Father, and the other is of William Gaddis’s JR. The latter is a particularly sweet victory, of sorts, for art. Notoriously, Gaddis’s The Recognitions was subject to a completely uncomprehending review by Granville Hicks, of blessed memory, probably playing his harp in the heaven of the middle brow that must exist if God is just somewhere in our universe, back in the fifties, that had the effect of submerging Gaddis for almost two decades. It is a famous case.
In the collection of Leonard pieces, Reading for my Life, Leonard tells a story:
“In 1947, a young American and a middle-aged Japanese climbed a tower in Tokyo to look at the bombed temple and the burned-out plain of the Asakusa. The twenty-three-year-old American, in U.S. Army PX jacket, was the critic Donald Richie. The forty-eight-year-old Japanese, wearing a kimono and a fedora, was the novelist Kawabata. Kawabata spoke no English; Richie, no Japanese, and their interpreter stayed home, sick in bed with a cold. And so they talked in writers. That is, Richie said, “André Gide.” Kawabata thought about it, then replied, “Thomas Mann.” They both grinned. And they’d go on grinning the rest of the afternoon, trading names like Flaubert, Edgar Allan Poe, and Stefan Zweig; Colette and Proust.
It’s a lovely story, isn’t it? Two men on a tower, after a war, waving the names of writers as if they were signal flags or semaphores… I take it personally. It seems to me that my whole life I’ve been standing on some tower or a pillbox or a trampoline, waving the names of writers, as if we needed rescue.”
Leave it to Leonard to find a parable for book reviewers. That dying breed.
No comments:
Post a Comment