The Reading Experience

Marital Matters

Probably it will be John Updike's "domestic fiction" for which he will be best remembered and perhaps on the basis of which he will be judged as a writer. And indeed "The Married Life," the third section of The Early Stories, provides the most provocative and most consistently accomplished set of stories in this book so far. (For a discussion of the first two, go here and here.) Of the fourteen stories in this section, probably only "The Crow in the Woods" and "Wife-Wooing" fail to reward a careful reading.

Which is not to say these stories are unequivocally agreeable, without their disturbing qualities. The portrayal of marriage that emerges probably has at least as many shadows as warm light, although that is ultimately what makes them seem more honest than not and gives them the dramatic tension they need to succeed as short stories. The underlying assumptions about gender roles can at times seem questionable--again the majority of the stories were written in the 1950s and early 1960s--as can some of the attitudes toward unfolding political and cultural changes that are at times expressed or at least implicitly suggested. However, many of these problematic features can be interpreted as inherent in the circumstances and the mindsets of the characters themselves, whose assumptions and actions are precisely the focus of Updike's depiction of marriage in postwar America.

Most of the stories in "The Married Life" are in the form of vignettes or isolated episodes, episodes that nevertheless reveal much about the characters and their moments of heightened awareness of the pain and toil involved in married life. It is a form that Updike handles well (and that he had perfected long before it was taken up by the minimalists and neorealists of the 1970s and 1980s), seems perfectly suited to the disclosure of small insights Updike seems to be after, and that also allows him to exercise his stylistic gifts in a way that can transform the stories into something like lyrical set-pieces. (Readers will of course have greater or lesser tolerance for fiction of this kind.) Even the slighter stories have these kinds of lyrical moments, as in the conclusion to "The Crow in the Woods": "Something happened. Outdoors a huge black bird came flapping with a crow's laborious wingbeat. It banked and, tilted to fit its feet, fell toward the woods. His heart melted with alarm for the crow, with such recklessness assaulting an inviolable surface, seeking so blindly a niche for its strenuous bulk where there was no depth. It could not enter. Its black shape shattering like an instant of flak, the crow plopped into a high branch and sent snow showering from a sector of lace. Its wings spread and settled. The vision destroyed, his heart overflowed. . . ."

Perhaps the very best story of this type in the group at hand is "Unstuck." The story can be easily summarized: A married man wakes up to find that a heavy snowfall has occured overnight. He goes outside to dig his car out from under a snow bank that has hemmed it in. Unable to do so, he enlists his wife to help him. They succeed. The story begins by telling us of the husband and wife that "They had made love last night and again she had failed to have her climax." Later: "She wanted to make a holiday of it. And she wanted, he thought, to bury the aftertaste of last night." In the story's conclusion, the wife has navigated the car out of its snowbank: "[The car's] driver, silhouetted with her nose tipped up, looked much too frail to have managed so big a thing. . .Mark shouted 'Great!' and leaped over the shattered ridge, brandishing the shovel. . .He walked to his car and opened the door and got in beside his wife. The heater had come on; the interior was warm. He repeated, 'You were great.' He was still panting. She rosily smiled and said, 'So were you.'" The not-so-subtle humor of the sexual suggestions here are nicely balanced, at least in my reading of the story, by the authentic generosity of the wife's words, making the story itself the most generous vision of the rewards of marriage in this section of the book.

This generosity toward her husband is shared by Joan Maple, wife of Richard, the two of whom are featured in a series of stories from the 1960s and 1970s chronicling the break-up of their marriage. Five of these stories are featured in "Married Life": "Snowing in Greenwich Village," which introduces the couple, and the four concluding stories in this section, "Giving Blood," "Twin Beds in Rome," "Marching Through Boston," and "Nakedness." Taken individually, these are not necessarily the best stories in part III of The Early Stories, but collectively they are probably the most significant of these fictions when considering the development of Updike's career as a whole. They clearly serve a dual purpose: to give an account of the difficulties of marriage in America, but also to register the social cultural changes in postwar life that contributed to these difficulties.

It is a good thing for Richard and Joan Maple's marriage that Joan exhibits some generosity of spirit, some forebearance and acceptance, since Richard Maple doesn't himself possess many such characteristics. The stories, although told in the third-person, are deflected through Richard's central consciousness, and while this technique almost always creates some initial bond between character and reader, it isn't long before this bond is frayed and Richard comes to seem a frightened and insecure man with some very unpleasant habits and assumptions. He's inclined to be patronizing toward his wife, mostly because he's the man and she's the woman, but he also comes to be envious of her, almost afraid. Joan takes the social changes of the 1960s in stride, attempting to accomodate herself to them, but Richard does so with great reluctance, sometimes out of jealousy that Joan's increased activism is taking her away from him, and frequently lashing out because of it. His racial attitudes and his contempt for "liberals" like his wife come to seem unsavory indeed. Some readers might be inclined to think that Richard's attitudes are given too much prominence, suggesting they might be shared by the author himself, but Updike elsewhere, particularly in the Rabbit books, has demonstrated his ability to explore the mindset of characters whose views he himself does not share, and the portrait of Richard Maples that emerges from these stories finally comes off, to this reader, at least, as an honest attempt to present such a character from the inside, so to speak, to depict Richard Maples the middle-class American male of this period as authentically as possible.

"Snowing in Greenwich Village" shows Richard already, early in the marriage, not entirely comfortable in the role of young husband, as in this story he escorts a dinner guest back home, going up to her apartment and at story's end obviously tempted to take things further. "Giving Blood" begins "The Maples had been married nine years, which is almost too long," and shows the marriage to be indeed quite fragile. "Twin Beds in Rome" begins this way: "The Maples had talked and thought about separation so long it seemed it would never come. For their conversations, increasingly ambivalent and ruthless as accusation, retraction, blow, and caress alternated and cancelled, had the final effect of knitting them together in a painful, helpless, degrading intimacy." The couple's vacation in Rome perhaps momentarily revivifies the marriage, but Richard's bad faith (in a noxious alliance with his genuine love for his wife) is sufficient to guarantee that this reprieve won't last long. "Marching Through Boston" and "Nakedness" most directly chronicle the Maple marriage in conflict with social change, in the former case the civil rights movement and in the latter the sexual revolution. "Marching Through Boston" casts Richard in an especially ugly light, as his latent bigotry is exposed quite explicitly, although some of his vilest words are clearly enough spoken in his own protest against the changes taking place in his relationship with his wife. (The story literally narrates Richard's participation with Joan in a civil rights march in Boston. It only drives them farther apart.)

What these Maple stories most memorably offer is a representation in fiction of the way in which the neuronal threads constituting the male psyche, perhaps reinforced by that patriarchal cultural climate of the 1950s, began to unravel during the 1960s and 1070s. This unsettling of gender roles and perspectives is further reflected in such stories as "Sunday Teasing" and "Should Wizard Hit Mommy?" (A parallel kind of turmoil in racial perspectives can be seen in the story "A Gift from the City," perhaps the most direct confrontation with these kinds of changes.) The male characters in these stories are not completely aware of the way in which their assumptions are being overturned, and perhaps Updike himself could not have entirely recognized the long-term consequences of those social forces causing the marital tension he was attempting to depict in these stories. Perhaps all of this makes the fiction collected in "Married Life" at least as interesting for sociological as for aesthetic reasons. But in all of the ways I have indicated, most of the stories as well show Updike's talent for writing poetically insightful short fiction coming to be confirmed, the WASP-y, middle-class focus on marital matters notwithstanding.

Dissecting Literature

Over at The Weblog, Adam Robinson wonders about the value of literary criticism. Although acknowledging that inferior works of literature can sometimes provoke instructive criticism, he's not so sure what criticism can actually say about great literature:

Literary criticism stretches the distance between life and art to a near breaking point. Scratch that--it completely severs any connection between our life and the beauty we can find in it. It contrives terms and categories that are natural to our instincts but not to our existence. For instance, when we apply the force of love between Romeo and Juliet to our own lives, when we derive our definition from their relationship, we've made love into something concrete, definable, and weird. Now we feel funny about having a crush, and we hope no one makes fun of our emotions or plagues our houses behind our backs.

This is nicely put, and, up to a point, I agree with it. Sometimes it is better to say of a book, play, or poem that has moved you or has enhanced your appreciation of what literature is capable of doing simply that it has moved you, enhanced your appreciation, etc. In other words, sometimes you just want to savor the reading experience. However, it is just as true to say that often criticism appropriately "stretches the distance between life and art to a near breaking point." Life isn't art, and it's probably Romeo and Juliet, not criticism of it, that encourages us to unfavorably compare our experiences of love to those of its protagonists. Criticism, at its best, would warn of us of the dangers of doing this: It's only a play, and look what happened to Romeo and Juliet, anyway.

Ultimately I think Adam's post carries some unexamined assumptions about "criticism." I do think criticism can perform a useful function on behalf of great, or even just good, works of literature, as long as we recognize that these assumptions are not inherent to literary criticism as it has been practiced by great critics or to criticism as it might be more efficaciously practiced in the future.

The first assumption is that literary criticism is essentially academic criticism, the kind of thing done by those belonging to a "profession" and according to the standards of that profession's "discipline." A literary critic is someone who works for a university and observes the conventions of what has become (or what once was) literary study. This is the kind of criticism engaged in, as Adam puts it elsewhere in his post, "vivisecting Ulysses. . .to try and make a relevant point." It is certainly true that for the better part of the last half-century literary criticism has essentially been subsumed to the prerogatives of the academy (for reasons that seemed good ones at the time), but must it remain there? The "advanced" forms of academic criticism at the moment--cultural studies, critical theory in its most politicized version--have almost nothing to do with literature, so this would be an especially good time to reclaim literature on behalf of a literary criticism that rejects both the conversion of criticism into sociology and the practice of "vivisection."

The second assumption is that criticism is primarily evaluative. Whereas Adam finds that it is with the lesser books, "those that you laugh at because they're so bad" that he "can find a compelling essay" to write, he is hard put to write about the books he loves because, by my reading of his remarks, he would simply want to describe them, better yet, just tell other people to read them. But a form of literary criticism could be developed to do both of these things. Describing a work of literature and what seem to be its aesthetic ambitions is not as straightforward as it might seem, and many good books and poems have suffered from the inability of critics and reviewers to fairly and accurately give readers an account of what reading them might be like. And criticism that ultimately convinces readers to give a particular book a try, but perhaps also provides perspective or information that makes reading it more rewarding, would be in my opinion criticism that redeems the very potential of literary criticism.

Unfortunately, there's very little criticism to be found these days that doesn't proceed according to at least one of these assumptions. Academic criticism has, to be sure, performed vivisection on a body of work that was still living, although now is indeed nearly dead. "General interest" criticism, even as practiced by intelligent and informed critics who don't accept the first assumption, is almost entirely evaluative, usually in ways that limit readers' ability to comprehend the range of possibilities available to writers of fiction and poetry and that foreground the critic's own superior sensibilities--not just superior to those of the larger mob of readers but to the writers whose work is being evaluated. Valuable criticism of worthwhile and accomplished works of literature could be written, but it would first of all have to arise from the conviction that literature itself is valuable, and would in addition have to be open to the myriad ways in which works of literature are and can be created.

Updike Redux

The second set of stories in John Updike's The Early Stories is a more miscellaneous grouping, united only very loosely through their characters' shared circumstance of being ""Out in the World," as this section's title has it. Whereas the first section, "Olinger Stories," (a discussion of which can be found here) is worth reading as a whole because of its portrayal of Olinger (a fictionalized version of Updike's home town), the second can probably be read selectively, focusing on the better stories and skipping over the less substantial. I will try to identify what seem to me to be the better stories, and perhaps suggest how these stories might be read within the context of Updike's then developing career as a writer.

The characters in this group of stories, most of them still recognizably some transformed version of Updike himself (or at least of Updike and his experiences taken as representative of certain kind of postwar American, an aspirant to the educated middle class), are "out in the world" as students, as recent college graduates, as husbands starting families, or in some way getting an idea (in at least one case, not getting it) of what the world "out there" is really like. Like the Olinger stories, these stories were all written between the mid-1950s and the early 1960s, and if one were to judge by these first two sections of The Early Stories, it would seem that Updike set out to be a writer who would chronicle the coming-of-age and the subsequent experiences of that generation of Americans who were born before World War II but came to maturity and adulthood in the immediate postwar period. In Updike's case this also entails chronicling the journey from small-town America and its assumptions to those of the more "wordly" suburbs and cities.

Some of the stories are slight and, in my opinion, readers could safely pass on them: "The Kid's Whistling,""Who Made Yellow Roses Yellow," A Trillion Feet of Gas," Dear Alexandros, and "At a Bar in Charlotte Amalie" would fit into this category. "The Lucid Eye in Silver Town" and "His Finest Hour" are worth reading, but are ultimately fairly recognizable kinds of maturation stories (the latter confronting its married protagonists with the reality of domestic violence just next door) that, after promising beginnings, more or less disappoint by the end. One group of stories--"Dentistry and Doubt," "A Madman," "Still Life," and "Home"--portray their student protagonist's visit to and return from England, but only the last, which concerns this character's return and the beginnings of his readjustment to "home" and career, could really be classified as among Updike's more compelling stories.

This leaves "Tomorrow and Tomorrow and So Forth," "The Christian Roommates,""The Doctor's Wife," and "Ace in the Hole" as the cream of this crop. "Tomorrow and Tomorrow" depicts an episode between a young male schoolteacher (still somewhat earnest and unsuspecting) and what he assumes to be a female student with a crush on him. (She is caught conspicuously passing a note that expresses her love for him.) It turns out, however, that this girl has been buttering up all of her teachers, and it is the protagonist who indeed winds up crushed. After discovering her strategem, "Mr. Prosser took his coat from the locker and shrugged it on. He placed his hat upon his head. He fitted his rubbers over his shoes, pinching his fingers painfully, and lifted his umbrella off the hook. He thought of opening it right there in the vacant hall, as a kind of joke on himself and decided not to. The girl had been almost crying; he was sure of that." (This latter is a repetition of the same thought he had had upon confronting the girl with the note) Many of Updike's stories end with these epiphanic moments of truth, but this is a story in which that moment is particularly affecting.

"The Christian Roommates" is finally less effective as a story, but is remarkable for the current of barely concealed homoeroticism that runs through it. Otherwise a more or less conventional story of "the college experience," it presents probably the most naive and sheltered character in this group of stories, Orson Ziegler, who "came straight to Harvard from the small South Dakota town where his father was the doctor," confronted with his assigned roommate, "Hub" Palamountain, an unconventional fellow of a sort Orson certainly has never before encountered. Orson comes to hate Hub, but the hate clearly enough hides a simultaneous attraction. It all comes to a climax, so to speak, when Hub steals a parking meter and brings it into their room. Orson is scandalized and the two of them finally have it out: "Orson came up behind him and got him around the neck with one arm. Hub's body stiffened. . . Orson experienced sensations of being lifted, of flying, and of lying on the floor. . .He scrambled to his feet and went for Hub again, rigid with anger and yet, in his heart, happily relaxed. . .Hub's body was tough and quick and satisfying to grip. . .Orson felt a blow as his coccyx hit the wood; yet even through the pain he perceived, gazing into the heart of this forced marriage, that Hub was being as gentle with him as he could be. . .He renewed the attack and again enjoyed the tense defensive skill that made Hub's body a kind of warp in space through which his own body, after a blissful instant of contention, was converted to the supine position. . . ." By today's wised-up standards, this scene has a barely suppressed hilarity about it, but Updike's language is clear enough to conclude he knew what he was doing.

"The Doctor's Wife" in a sense takes us farthest "out in the world," to an out-of-the-way Caribbean island where a young American family is vacationing. The doctor and his wife are permanently resident caucasians, and the story impressively enough depicts some of the racial tensions being felt during the early 60's. (As, in its way, does "The Christian Roommates.") The doctor's wife has come to have the attitude of the white colonialist toward the black inhabitants of the island ("Unnatural, childish ingratitude. You just don't know how unnatural these people are"), and at the end of the story she tells the American husband that the locals think his own wife's "good tan" means she is "part Negro." The husband is left brooding on his own reaction to this: "She [his wife] would have wanted him to say something like yes, her great-grandfather picked cotton in Alabama, in America these things are taken for granted, we have no problem. But he saw, like something living glimpsed in a liquid volume, that his imaginary scenarios depended upon, could only live within, a vast unconscious white pride; he and the doctor's wife were in this together."

The most noteworthy story among the "Out in the World" group may be "Ace in the Hole," and not just because it is clearly a precursor to Rabbit, Run. It is an interesting and accomplished story in its own right, perhaps the most successful of those stories (so far) in which Updike tries to move beyond his own experiences and create a protagonist who is not merely a fictional persona. Like Rabbit Angstrom, Ace is a former high school basketball hero no longer in the spotlight. But unlike Rabbit, Ace Anderson seems only obliquely aware that his glory has irretrievably faded, and although he clearly is just drifting through his life as depicted in the story, he can't quite let go of the happy-go-lucky attitude of his basketball days. The story ends with a confrontation between Ace and his wife (Eve) that doesn't bode well for the future, reinforcing the uneasiness Ace has been feeling of late: "He wasn't hungry; his stomach was tight. It used to be like that when he walked to the gymnasium alone in the dark before a game. . .But once he was inside, the locker room would be bright and hot, and the other guys would be there, laughing and towel-slapping, and the tight feeling would leave. Now there were whole days when it didn't leave."

What Ace Anderson lacks is Rabbit's self-awareness that his life has become tragic in an archetypally American way. Having made it to the top so early (and under such unavoidably consticted circumstances), Rabbit isn't likely to have another chance, and his horror at this prospect is what gives Rabbit, Run its sense of urgency and inescapable failure. Ace is less astute than Rabbit, and it's unlikely that as written his character could have developed the alertness to his situation that made it possible for Rabbit to be the center of a full-length novel. But the very qualities that distinguish Ace from Rabbit still illuminate for us the realities of American life Updike seems to be exploring in both "Ace in the Hole" and Rabbit, Run. In the one case a growing sense of quiet desperation that will probably remain muted, in the other a prolonged outcry against the conditions that create that desperation in the first place.

Sclerotic and Irrelevant

In the Times Literary Supplement, Peter Brooks (author of Reading for the Plot) recently wrote of the conquest of academic literary study by "theory" that "the coming of theory actually rescued the study of literature at a time when it was threatened with sclerosis and irrelevance. In particular, it brought students back to literary studies with a sense that there was something exciting going on."

There are several things wrong with this contention, although I do not myself believe that "theory" of the kind Brooks discusses (he is reviewing a book centered mostly on figures like Foucault and Derrida, the "poststructuralists") was itself necessarily a bad thing for literary study. Much of Derrida's work, for example, is perfectly compatible with the kind of "old-fashioned" literary study focused on the close reading of literature for what it as literature has to offer us, and he could not have been happy when the notion of "deconstruction" eventually became, among some alleged "followers," essentially a synonym for trashing the place.

But I do have problems with idea that the study of literature needed to be "rescued," and I do not believe that the coming of theory "brought students back," since they hadn't gone anywhere in the first place and since every account I have read about the level of student interest in English or comparative literature or Romance Languages suggests that enrollment in such departments has only declined since the advent of theory. If Brooks has the graduate study of literature in mind, then bringing students into a field where finding a job upon completing one's study, no matter how "exciting" it may have been, has now become difficult approaching impossible performs a service for no one.

More to the point: literary study may or may not have become "sclerotic" pre-theory, but so what? If this means that literature professors were just teaching students how to approach works of literature--defined sclerotically as poetry, fiction, and drama--so they might read them more profitably, and were trying to point them to the kinds of novels or poems that might be worth their attention, then they were doing their jobs as efficiently as it could be done. Unless you think that studying literature in this way just isn't peppy and glowing enough and requires a dose of "excitement" in order to show it off in meetings with the Dean. But this is just another step in the process of making "literature itself" secondary to other more suitably "advanced" methods of academic inquiry, methods that have now become themselves the subjects of academic literary study, leaving literature far behind.

This yoking of literature to other purposes and other causes is equally typical of more traditional humanists who wouldn't otherwise countenance notions about the "subversive" quality of critical inquiry. In a recent essay in The Chronicle of Higher Education (June 4, 2004), Vartan Gregorian pleads for a return of liberal arts instruction to higher education. In many ways, this essay is just the usual blather one would expect from a certain kind of college president, pitched at such a high level of generality that he really never even bothers to define what he means by "liberal arts." It's pretty clear nevertheless that included in Gregorian's liberal arts curriculum would be the study of literature, perhaps even as its centerpiece. But what Gregorian wants is "to integrate learning and provide balance," to "help our students acquire their own identity," to "provide a context for technical training" so students may "understand the general nature and structure of our society, the role of the university, or the importance of values." All worthy goals, I suppose, and if you wanted to include works of literature in an ethics class, or a psychology class, or a political science class, this might be a perfectly sound strategy. But if you set up whole departments devoted to literary study, and then charge them with helping to "understand the general nature and structure of our society," you're using extremely indirect means to arrive at results better pursued in other ways. And you're implicitly demeaning what literature might really do for individual readers quite apart from your social engineering scheme--although perhaps that's really the point.

Probably what bothers me most about Peter Brooks's claims about theory is the appeal to the potential "irrelevance" of literary study without it. I'm not even sure Brooks himself means to suggest that literature ought to be "relevant," given that immediately following the passage I've quoted he goes on to say that theory "was something that might in the long run turn out to be unsubstantiable, and perhaps unusable--but then most literary undergraduates aren't planning to build a career on how they have read either Milton or Foucault." Thus Brooks acknowledges that the study of literature is indeed irrelevant in the context in which universities generally function. A few students are in college or graduate school just to learn, literally to become "learned," less ignorant, but everyone will acknowledge they're a vast minority. Even fewer would like to become more skilled readers of literature. But this is really the only authentic consituency literary study has. Everything else is just defensiveness and empty rhetoric. Literature can't be relevant to civic responsibility and reform agendas except in defying them.

To be defiantly irrelevant. How subversive is that?

Snob Appeal

In a recent e-mail rumination sent to various literary bloggers, Robert Birnbaum expresses his displeasure at a recent Laura Miller column, "Smiley's People," in the New York Times Book Review. Noting that many bloggers have long voiced similar complaints about Miller's The Last Word mini-essays, Birnbaum says that "I read [this piece] and starting in the first paragraph, where she stoops to the journalistic contrivance/ convenience of creating her own dubious categories, I found myself stopping nine or ten times, saying to myself, 'Says who?' or some such. I do not think it was quibbling, I just cannot seem to see the world and its facts in the way that Miller exhibits them. . . ."

I have to confess that I've found the blogospheric distaste for Laura Miller's writing a little bit puzzling, since, as Robert himself acknowledges, she "is no doubt smart and possibly passionate about literature, which frequently leads her to some original and thoughtful opining on things literary." In my opinion, she has had some interesting things to say, and her tone most often seems genuinely inquisitive rather than pompous or cynical. Yet I will also admit that usually I skip over Miller's "opining," not because I think it will make me angry or exasperated but because it's bland; these columns tend to be meandering and expository rather than critically engaging, the literary equivalent of noodling.

This is itself a somewhat roundabout way of getting to my real subject, which is the BEA panel discussion on book reviewing featuring the "Book Babes" and broadcast on C-SPAN as part of their coverage of the Book Expo. The most astonishing thing I heard said during this discussion was that, as far as the Book Babes are concerned, newspaper book reviewers are "literary snobs." Apparently book reviewers are way too interested in literature and not atttentive enough to the best-seller trash that most "real" Americans actually read. This can be the only logical conclusion to be drawn from their assertions, given that the sort of books featured on Oprah or other televison talk shows, which Margo and Ellen later claimed were the models of the kind of book discussion they had in mind, are already the books that most book reviews feature. The problem can't be that book reviews exclude the middlebrow (a point that Ron made during the question period), focusing instead on the highbrow. It's that these book reviews give any attention to the highbrow--that is, literature--at all.

Probably the Book Babes do not mean to say this, precisely. Their arguments are for the most part too confused to yield any coherent ideas in the first place. They seemed to agree with the remarks made by one questioner who complained that book review pages in general were just too "intimidating," implying, at least, that readers who might be interested in books wouldn't go to book reviews because, well, the reviewers seemed to like books too much! Mark Sarvas tried to indicate that truly serious readers of book reviews were more likely to find them too brief and thin on substance rather than otherwise, but this seemed to go right by them. The closest thing to a concrete proposal that I heard was Margo's entreaty that book reviewers focus on what a novel "is trying to say" rather than its "style." (I think I also heard her mumbling about how at one time "rich people" might have sat around thinking about style, but this was so silly that I tentatively concluded I'd just misunderstood her.)

I'd guess it's actually book commentators like Laura Miller that the Book Babes have in mind when they grouse about "literary snobs." Miller's knowledge of literature and of literary criticism is fairly wide-ranging, and she does periodically attempt to inject a higher level of discourse into the discussion of books. In the current column, for example, she refers to a quasi-scholarly book on spy fiction as a way of sharpening the debate about such fiction. She's trying, within the limitations of the form and the forum she's working with, to do something like literary criticism. Unfortunately, those limitations are too confining. They lead her to make simplistic generalizations--"Spy fiction falls into two categories: the preposterous and the disillusioned"--and into hasty summaries of both spy fiction and the critical book she's using. Her conclusion about spy fiction is actually, to my mind, quite sound: "The real fantasy the spy novel peddles is a dream of coherence and mastery, in which people have the power to transcend human error and the vagaries of chance and to direct the unfolding of fate itself. Even if those people are evil, at least they're people, and not the terrifyingly random forces that, we fear, may truly shape our lives." But it's a conclusion that can't effectively be supported in the kind of book-chat essay she's writing.

If Margo and Ellen really think that too many book reviewers are snobs, they just don't get around enough. There are snobs, and then there are snobs. Academics, for example, look down on journalist book reviewers as dabblers at best, rather dim bulbs at worst. Even now, when academic literary critics are themselves no longer much interested in literature, most of them wouldn't think of writing for newspaper book pages, where the discussion is so dreadfully undertheorized. But previous generations of academic critics were snobbish enough as well, regarding the mere newspaper book review as a sop to the uneducated masses. Even among writers themselves, while the good review in a prominent newspaper is always welcome, it's hard to believe that the most serious of them really have much respect for the tastes and the critical acumen of the newspaper critic.

Under the circumstances, maybe we shouldn't regard the shrinking of space given to book reviews in American newspapers with all that much trepidation. If book reviewing were to go in the direction the Book Babes advocate (sort of ), it would be the end of "general interest" book reviews anyone could take seriously, but perhaps other, better, sources of book discussion would pop up in their wake. (Book blogs, obviously, but also other forums for serious consideration of books, both online and in print.) Maybe even the book publishers would look elsewhere for ways to get the word out on new books, concentrating on the people who actually do read books, and not just every once in a while. Control of the national book-reviewing agenda might slip out of the hands of newspapers and uninformed journalists--who aren't doing such a good job by it now--and might spread out among writers and readers who don't consider serious book criticism a function of literary snobbery. Maybe not. But wouldn't it be nice to think so?

Disconnect

I like Sarah Weinman's blog a great deal, so when she writes something like this I must say I find it rather depressing:

This is where the crux of my argument comes in, which is as follows: the publishing world, at least in my estimation, works just like any kind of corporation, any kind of workplace. In other words, landing a book deal is no different than landing the job of your dreams. So a lot of the same skills that apply in the job hunt should be transferable to getting published.

What’s the top piece of advice for those on the job market? Make use of any and all contacts. Anyone, be it a friend, neighbor, family member, former boss, people you’ve worked with on a project, is a contact. Ask advice, get feedback, meet with your contacts on occasion, follow up and above all, be professional. And don’t abuse your contact base either, because they are people with valuable time who don’t like to be hit up sporadically because you want something.

What gets you an interview? A CV or resume that is polished and stands out, but doesn’t stand out too much. Throw in something extra like a letter of reference or two. What gets an agent to read the first 50 pages? A kickass query letter that is polished and stands out, but doesn’t oversell the product, and maybe some choice blurbs from the right people from your contact base.

This may or may not be good advice for those seeking entry to the "book industry"--I assume it is--but that it might be accurate is itself enough to make me want to boycott every piece of product to roll off of its assembly line. (If I did that, I know I'd miss a number of actually good books, but if by taking what I can from this assembly line I was only helping to perpetuate it, I'd almost rather do without them.) I understand that book publishing is a business, but it has always been among the least business-like of businesses. If it really was "only a business," only a way to amass capital for owners and stockholders, then almost no "literary" fiction would ever get published, since very little of it ever contributes to the financial stockpile. A truly efficient business would publish only what it considered to be potentially profitable, the more blockbusterish the better. If book publishing had always followed a sound business plan, only Clancy and Grisham and company would be available in your neighborhood bookstore.

So surely book publishing doesn't really work "just like any kind of corporation." I fear that descriptions like this only encourage people to think of it as such, only reinforces the behavior inside the book business that has created a situation in which many perfectly good writers see it as a "closed shop"--closed to all but the insiders who think they know how to make a buck. If we concede that publishing books ought to be a busness like any other, the current trends taking it in that direction will only accelerate. I've recently been reminded by a writer whom I respect that there are people in and around the book "industry" who do care about good writing and only want to facilitate getting such writing into the hands of readers. I don't doubt it. But if book publishers finally do become "just like any kind of corporation," these people will become as obsolete as the books on whose behalf they now advocate.

And I've been involved in job searches, from both sides, and I think I know what contacts and connections amount to. A "connection" means the fix is in, the "merits" of the candidate (or the book) no longer count for much, greasing the wheels that move the system becomes the end and not the means. Unless, of course, you're competing with someone with even better connections. (This happened to me once. I was able to become one of two finalists for a position mostly because of a connection I had to the inside, but lost the job to someone whose connections were tighter.) Besides, if you succeed in getting the job or getting your book published through contacts with people who may or may not know anything substantial about you or your work, what's the accomplishment? Your work still hasn't been acknowledged for what it may be worth.

"What gets an agent to read the first 50 pages?" How about 50 pages that are good? Agents don't have time to sit around and read 50 pages of a manuscript? They have to be queried and blurbed? They have to be sold on the manuscript based on activities that have nothing to do with the manuscript beyond hyping it? Then what are agents for? It's a pretty sad state of affairs when editors can't edit and agents can't facilitate because they can't find the time to read. Or want to avoid it if they can.

None of this is meant to be critical of Sarah individually. I know she believes she's only trying to do some good for the writers she encounters who are in distress because they don't know how to negotiate the book business. And Sarah's real love is crime fiction, perhaps a field of publishing in which the behavior she advises seems less exceptionable. At the same time, I find it hard to believe that the great crime writers of the past, among them Raymond Chandler, James M. Cain, Jim Thompson, would have been willing to jump through all of the hoops the publishing world now dangles in front of writers and would-be writers. Most of them, in fact, settled for publication in the pulpiest of magazines and the most obscure presses, in the off-chance their work might still attract readers sympathetic to what they were trying to do with it. And indeed in the long run that work continues to attract readers, even more than such writers could probably have imagined, partly because they managed to maintain their literary integrity despite the vagaries of the book business.

Perhaps the most dispiriting comment in Sarah's post is this:

If you get turned down by a job you want, it sucks—believe me, it does—but there are all sorts of reasons which may or may not have anything to do with your ability to do the job. But it’s nothing personal. When it comes to a book, yes, it’s your baby, you’ve slaved all your life, you want the rest of the world to love it—and you—as well. But if the book is turned down, well guess what: it sucks, oh yes, but there are all sorts of reasons which may or may not have anything to do with your abilities as a writer. And those reasons, too, aren’t usually personal ones.

The reasons likely are not personal, but I confess I find it almost incomprehensible that good work could be refused for reasons that "may not have anything to do with your abilities as a writer," even though I know that good work is rejected because of various and sundry "editorial" decisions. Not everyone can be published, at least not immediately, there are indeed constraints on time and money, sometimes fiction submitted for publication (both to book publishers and to magazines) ought to be rejected, and judgments about such things are always unavoidably subjective. But how often are good writers rejected because more time and effort needs to be expended on writers whose work just isn't as good, but is more clearly commerical, or more appropriately "connected"? To accept such a thing as simply part of doing business might be necessary, but it's a dubious business, nevertheless.