Book Reviews

The newspaper owners are killing the book reviews. It’s a fad among the owners, sweeping the nation. The review sections seem in danger of going in a short time. Will the disappearance of the book review sections be like the moment when we realized the elm trees were going? One day, as I remember it, we got the news a lot of them were dying in towns across the country, and the next moment the cities were sawing them all down and carrying the dead bodies away. “Bring out your dead!!”The disappearance of criticism from the daily papers in the United States poses a problem that goes way beyond the problems that are most immediately apparent, such as few reviews means fewer ads for books and fewer sales of the sorts of books I publish at Harvard University Press or of the sort most publishers of serious fiction and non-fiction produce.Since Day One as an editor I have always thought about which book review editors can I or the publicists I work with reach personally to make an appeal for a book to be covered. I know a goodly number of newspaper people—maybe more than some editors—because I just feel I have to have personal ties. I want to know someone is going to be on the other end of the phone line when I call. So, it seems like a nightmare to think that those lines are being pulled out. If the papers shut down reviews, it’ll be like having the door slammed in my face and the door removed.
In those glorious days of yesteryear just a little more than a century ago, when the future seemed to belong to the West, Walter Pater urged sensitive souls to always burn with a keen, gem-like flame, but what do we do now when the disappearance of the book reviews from so many papers portends the extinguishing of the critical flame? I would urge you to realize that the disappearance of criticism from our papers is not the cause, but the symptom of vast changes in our cultural ecology. It signals changes so long in gestation that they may be irreversible; and they are symptoms as indicative of momentous change as the discovery of hole in the ozone layer, the disappearance of the plankton from the sea, of the bees from fields, and the permafrost from Alaska. Oh, fine, the bosses might say, a literary person so besotted with books and their paraphernalia that he’s crying out like Chicken Little that the sky is falling when all we’ve done is closed out a few unproductive accounts! Boo-hoo!! But I’m warning you: the problems are bigger than they seem and they’re not solveable by getting a few newspaper excecs to restore the book pages.Beware, I say, lest the whole edifice of modern democratic society collapse if a stake is driven through its heart. That’s what killing books and arts reviewing means. We must constantly be indulging ourselves in the freeplay of critical intelligence. Is the new De Lillo book good? What about Pynchon’s Against the Day? Mary Gaitskill’s Veronica? Is the new Arcade Fire really good? And what about the new Electrelane album, No Shouts, No Calls? We modern humans need to be able to read critics wrestling with their own feelings about such works of art. We don’t want them to be invoking authorities who have sent down the word that a particular work is worthy. And we don’t need authorities recognized as such by society telling us to tune out of works of art the way the self-styled “Dean of America” Stanley Fish does. You don’t need to give a work of art the taste-test, he’s written. All you need to know is whether it comes to you by a card-carrying writer; your reactions to the work are irrelevant.