On Book Reviews and “Literary” and “Popular” Fiction
By Since this discussion of a conflict between the authors Jennifer Weiner and Jodi Picoult and the New York Times jumbles some valid and some silly critiques together, I thought I’d try to untangle them:
- The underlying ressentiment on the part of the two bestselling authors doesn’t inspire a lot of sympathy. There are two good reasons for venues like the Times to focus (to the extent that the diesgnation is meaningful) on “literary” fiction: it’s likely to inspire the best criticism, and it’s most valuable to readers to alert them to novels they wouldn’t otherwise know about. Discussions of more “commercial” fiction can be valuable too, but the priorities of the Times book review strike me as right. There aren’t many venues for the discussion of “literary” fiction, and authors like Weiner and Picoult are hardly obscure whether or not they get reviewed.
- Weiner does make a good point about the kinds of genre fiction the Times examines. I can’t make any judgments about her fiction specifically, but it does seem right to say that discussions of “commercial” fiction in the Times focus on genres that are primarily read by men. I think she has them dead to rights there — it’s hard to justify special sections for mystery or detective fiction but not, say, popular family dramas.
- On the other end of the spectrum, as Gawker unkindly but not inaccurately notes Picoult invoking Dickens and Shakespeare in this context is pretty risible. It is of course true that there’s no necessary contradiction between popularity and artistic merit; many more recent examples from Kind of Blue to A Fine Balance show that masterworks can appeal to broad audiences. I don’t think this fallacy is all that widespread, but it is a fallacy. But of course the logic cuts both ways; popularity doesn’t require any durable artistic merit either. Selling lots of books doesn’t make James Patterson Charles Dickens, and selling lots of records doesn’t make Jessica Simpson Miles Davis. I haven’t read Picoult’s books, so I can’t say anything about whether they merit more discussion from critics, but the fact that they sell a lot is neither here nor there. That she seems to be demanding not merely reviews but nice reviews (apparently these atypically biting takes from World’s Nicest Reviwer Janet Maslin doesn’t count) gives away the show.
- Is the Times book review unduly focused on male writers from Brooklyn? Possibly! It would require a much more systematic analysis than I’m willing to do. I can say that coincidentally four of the five works of fiction I’ve read most recently — Marcy Dermansky’s very well-turned noir Bad Marie, Anne Lamont’s Imperfect Birds, Lorrie Moore’s typically exceptional A Gate at the Stairs, and Alice Munro’s Selected Stories — happen to have been written by women. All but the first*, for what it’s worth, received positive notices in the Times. Munro is another good example of the fact that major work can appeal to a broad audience, and the first two blur lines betwen “literary” and “genre” fiction, but I if I had to guess I don’t think the attention paid by the Times to female “literary” novelists is especially low. Scanning my shelves for other recent favorites, I would also say that other important authors such as Enright, Gaitskill, Zadie Smith have also gotten a reasonable level of engagement. Whether it’s high enough is a matter of judgment, but at a minimum I don’t see the kind of easy prima facie case you would have against, say, the Washington Post op-ed page. [*Dermansky, generously responding to my inquiry, notes that Bad Marie was discussed in this Times article and did receive a variety of other prominent notices.]
- The really glaring bias in terms of what the Times chooses to review, I think, is just straightforward backscratching. The multiple reviews given to Lee Seigel’s witless anti-internet rants and Joe Lelyveld’s still-widely-ignored memoirs still strike me as much more egregious than any attention paid to hot young Brooklyn novelists.