Pompous Pundits in the Penny Press!

I had intended to make the first Stevereads post of 2011 – the first of a new decade! - entirely wombat-related. But then I noticed the little “symposium” unfolding in the New York Times, a group discussion on the Role of the Book-Critic Today, and I swerved in my course, like a great white shark suddenly sensing the proximity of a wounded elephant seal. An intensely narcissistic subject, served up in fresh steaming piles of self-importance? Wombats will keep.

And I wasn't disappointed, except in the sense of being intensely disappointed. It being The NYT Book Review, I expected the thing to be more full of bromides than Granny's medicine chest – but even I was underestimating how bad it could be. The salt in the wound was the feature's invocation of the great literary critic Alfred Kazin as a sort of ghostly moderator, using his entertaining essay “The Function of Criticism Today” as a trampoline on which these six fat little babies could exhaust themselves until they reached their word-count. But the aggravation started before any of those babies could open their yaps – it started in the Editors Introduction, which included this precious line: “But where does it leave the serious critic, one not interested, say, in tabulating the number of “Brooklyn novelists” who receive attention each year in publications like this one (data possibly more useful to real estate agents and sociologists than to readers)?”

Gotta love that sniffing tone! Gotta love that hint of genteel mystification that anybody (except maybe a – sniff – real estate agent) might suspect the Book Review of being clubbish, of seeking to be cool, of assigning some of its reviews for less-than-Olympian reasons of pure literary quality. Wanna gut somebody's latest novel because they refused your drunken advances at a Tribeca party? Wanna praise somebody's uncle so you'll get invited to their fabulous loft in Dumbo? Well, then, you better peddle your wares someplace else, buddy! Here at the Book Review, we're entirely above such petty game-playing – perhaps you'd have more luck with – sniff – a sociologist.

But then, Editors Introductions are pretty much always bad (I ought to know – I've written my share of them), so we can take that with a degree of stoicism. But geez, did the rest of the feature have to be so bad? Granted, it's a boring subject, and granted (despite its serial bemoaning of the slapdash nature of the Internet) it was obviously pulled together about a hung-over half-hour before deadline, but even so, these six essays made for grim reading. Even the ordinarily-good Sam Anderson and Adam Kirsch were defeated by the Times-dictated bloat of the central conceit, and the others – derivative egomaniacs at the best of times – never stood a chance.

Stephen Burn's densely idiotic essay was the worst of a bad bunch (there are more cliches and mixed metaphors in this one piece than in all the others combined), and as horrifying as his prose is, his underlying sentiments are even worse. At one point he writes: “And while the removal — or more accurately, the redistribution — of the evaluative task is likely to dilute critical standards, it can also free up the critic to engage in more serious tasks that might bleed back into the culture, providing a stronger skeleton for a range of literary activity. The critic who reviews contemporary novels now might valuably turn her attention to different kinds of vertical or horizontal mapping.”

If you can get past the imaginative log-jam of bleeding skeletons providing range, if you can focus past the pompous vagueness of “vertical and horizontal mapping,” you'll see what I mean: it's bad enough that he writes about the diluting of critical standards as though it's just something that's going to happen, no big deal, but what follows is even worse – that muddy implication that it's a good thing that critics now won't have to bother so much with those boring critical standards, because now they'll be free to do more of that vertical and horizontal mapping we're always complaining we don't see enough of. Yeesh. Alfred Kazin might not have been pleased with a tribute like this.

I wish I could say that the implicit contempt for book-criticism that runs through Burn's piece was unique to it, but all six of these essays are lousy with it. Pankaj Mishra's piece has this astonishing opening: “I don’t think of myself as a literary critic. I write about novels and short stories. But I am reluctant to describe what I do as “literary criticism,” as I like to move quickly beyond the literariness of a text — whether narrative techniques or quality of prose — and its aesthetic pleasures, to engage with the author’s worldview ...” OK, fine – since you like to get past the, hee, literariness of the text, then by your own admission you're not a literary critic – but you spend the rest of the piece gassing on about Tolstoy as if you still think you are a literary critic, and more importantly, you're here, in a feature about the role of the literary critic today. And again, the implications here are worse than the statements. When somebody says “I like to move quickly beyond the literariness of a text” (in order to find out what the author thinks about Tamil refugees, or something important like that, not all this frilly folderol about prose), their implied conclusion couldn't be clearer: “...because really, who can tell whether the literariness of a book is any good or not? And really, given the state of the Indonesian economy, who cares?” When the literariness of a text is viewed as some niggling little obstacle, something to be quickly got beyond, the state of book-criticism is dire indeed.

But then, book criticism hardly seems to be on the minds of most of these writers. Most of them hit the same note about what a critic's really important job is. Adam Kirsch hits that note more fatuously than the others, but he'll stand for everybody when he writes: “Whether I am writing verse or prose, I try to believe that what matters is not exercising influence or force, but writing well — that is, truthfully and beautifully; and that maybe, if you seek truth and beauty, all the rest will be added unto you.” Say 'unto' much in your day-to-day speech, Adam? Think it comes across any less affected here? And although it's a little dispiriting that such a normally-smart critic would find it necessary to put so much elephantine stress on something so self-evident (yes, all publishing writers should strive to make their prose excellent … and?), the worst part, again, is in the implications. What, after all, is he talking about when he says 'the rest will be added unto you'? You're doing your best to write truthfully and beautifully, and somewhere along the line, 'the rest' will be added unto you – but what's that? It's obvious: 'the rest' are those pesky 'critical standards' – once you're done making your prose as pretty as you can, you'll just have to hope you accidentally drop some hints to your readers as to whether or not the book in question is any good. The important thing is that you get in lots of pseudo-literary swanning. The rest will either happen or it won't.

And the added twist to all this 'the important thing is the writing' bull-hooey is the hypocrisy of it all. The very first question asked by every one of these oh-so-exquisite aesthetes, upon being approached by the Times to desecrate Alfred Kazin's memory, was: How much does it pay? And no matter how feelingly they declaim that the quality of the writing is everything to them, if the Times had said, “why, we're not paying you anything – it's a friggin' symposium,” each and every one of these oh-so-exquisite aesthetes would have refused to contribute even one mixed metaphor. I care most about the truth and beauty of my writing – but you can't have it, because The Rumpus is offering me 5 cents more a word. Ah, the glory that was Athens.

Not to mention the obvious fact that it's a very tricky business, claiming that the only important thing to you is the quality of your own prose – it invites scrutiny of that very quality, like Achilles hanging a bulls-eye on his ankle. Needless to say, most of our Kazinites don't hold up well under that scrutiny. Katie Roiphe is no better than any of the others when she turns in a paragraph like this:

Before the requiem begins, we have to admit that critics have always been a grandstanding, depressive and histrionic bunch. They — and by “they” I mean “we” — have always decried the decline of standards, the end of reading, the seductions of mediocrity, the abysmal shallowness and distractibility of the general public, the virtually apocalyptic state of literature and culture. Yet somehow the bruised and embattled figures of both the writer and the critic have survived lo these many centuries.

Pretty much the only smile I had during the whole ordeal of this feature came in imagining how a paragraph like that would have fared in the general edits of Open Letters. From John Cotter's gentlemanly “Hmmm. Doesn't really work, does it?” to Greg Waldmann's grunting “can we nix this … and this … and this” to Rohan Maitzen's playful “We'd be doing her a favor if we 'nixed' the whole paragraph” to Sam Sacks' damningly curt “Cut this graf” ...and this is somebody writing about the role of the book-critic today, in the New York Times. The thing is a stunning comment on its own irrelevance; the swanning of the critic has firmly supplanted any other function, and the reason it's done that is disgustingly craven: because here in the most-read book review forum in the world, post-modern textual cowardice has entirely won the day. The reason this gang of six is concentrating so much on lo the gorgeous prose they're giving unto us is because they've turned and run from the task of actually analyzing prose (Anderson and Kirsch, at least, aren't usually like that – I tend to give them a pass for this “symposium” and just hope to see them back to work soon).

Fortunately, it's only the Book Review: it's been somewhat dimly bourgeois since the Eisenhower administration (Ike's response to reading his one and only review in the Times: “Well does he like the book or doesn't he? Gee, I can't even tell!”) - we mustn't expect the truth from a publication dedicated to providing comfort. But still, more people are going to read it in a single morning than read most other review-publications in an entire month, and I worry that many of those people will unconsciously absorb the defeatist implications everywhere throughout this “symposium” (the accompanying pod-cast is, if anything, more grotesque – is there anywhere on the Internet a literary pod-cast that's actually good? Or are they all doomed attempts to recapture the glory of the previous night's book-talk over wine and sleeping basset hounds?). I worry that these six pieces and their sniffing introduction will serve in some readers' minds as an actual examination of the role of the book-critic today, when actually they hardly come near it.

Sam Anderson, bless him, comes the closest when he talks about book-critics being 'evangelists' – that'll serve well enough if we recall that evangelists also condemn. The book-critic (all books, incidentally – our six writers here seem unable to conceive it possible to review a book that isn't a novel)'s job is the same now as it's always been: to serve as the more dedicated, more experienced, faster, and better-prepared reader all readers wish they had time to be, to employ a specially sharpened acumen and a lifetime of experience in order to assess the merits of the day's literature, for the sole purpose of determining whether or not it deserves the wider audience all published writing seeks. There's nothing in that purpose about the critic showing off his own literary talents, and there's nothing in it about getting beyond the literariness of the text – the literariness of the text is everything. And those texts must be judged, and judgement is not only possible but necessary. Book-critics use those 'critical standards' to uphold a dialogue between the readers they represent and the unending texts that confront them.

We're lucky the Internet has blossomed – we have more book-critics than ever before, and just in time, since we have more books than ever before too. So yes, this “symposium” in the Times disappointed me, but it's over now, and at least a couple of its better writers can now get back unto work.

And I'll be getting back to that work myself, here at Stevereads! 2010 here was a lot of fun, and I have high hopes for 2011 – I plan on resuming all my old favorite hobby-horses, and I plan on introducing some new ones, and I plan a good many other changes as well – I hope it entertains you all, and I invite your comments for all of it. And now that I've been clued in to how culturally important it is, I'll be adding lots and lots of vertical mapping – at no extra charge!

Fashionable Do's and Don't's in the Penny Press!

Whatever the current himbo-du-jour James Franco is paying the publicists he claims not to have, it's not enough: as the cover of the latest Esquire truthfully declares, the guy is everywhere (not that I'd expect you to know what that cover declares, considering how unbelievably, amateurishly cluttered it is). This is partly due to the usual reasons – he's got upcoming work (movies and a book) to hawk, or to be hawked around him while he appears not to care. But it's also partly due to the fact that Franco in the last few years been morphing from a fairly assembly-line Hollywood leading man into … well, “an individual” would clearly be going too far, but at least a good simulation of one. Increasingly, his antics – going back to (several) schools, studying baroquely useless things like literature, doing a turn on a daytime soap opera, putting up scandalous art exhibits, the aforementioned book – look like the kinds of things any 32-year-old guy would do if he suddenly found himself in possession of fame and money – if that guy were an individual, or maybe wanted to become one (whereas the New England Patriots, alas, can boast a perfect example of what such a guy does with fame and money if he's got no interest in being an individual: he knocks up and discards his girlfriend, buys the most famous idiot runway model currently available, and carries a man-purse in St. Tropez).

This Esquire “profile” (that's what it calls itself, though it isn't even close to being one – think more “press release with digressions”) is by Tom Chiarella, so you know you're going to get good peppy prose. And he doesn't disappoint:

Sometimes Franco gets a little hypnotic with the eye contact. What starts as a steady gaze generally transmutes into the oddly pleased squint that is his war paint, a look that allows him to play both stoner and supervillain with the same incredulous vacancy. He sighs a little, apologetic. “You probably know I have a lot of projects,” he says. “But that one is way, way off. It's just something I'm thinking about.” He whisks at something in the air then. “Off in the distance. Way off.”

These words are so bloated and vague, they almost bob in the air. Franco knows this. “Okay. I want to write a children's book.” He guts out a laugh, snorting himself off the hook. “Someday.” This is a kind of hedge – people are constantly vetting his agenda, because it is unlike the typical high-quote actor's, because it is puzzlingly arcane, because he isn't notching his belt or collecting motorcycles or figuring out new enthusiasms in laboratory drugs, because that agenda appears to have nothing to do with being a rich, laconic, and ultimately free thirty-two-year-old male.

Chiarella's article starts out with some standard interview-code-speak: we first meet Franco sitting “by a side door near a pail of mop water. There's a paperback, palm-pinched, cover down, in his right hand ...” The reason the famous James Franco is reading a paperback one-handed while standing in an alley next to a slop bucket (though Chiarella never spells it out) is because he's smoking, something he does virtually every minute he's awake. But I'll take code-speak over outright PR, which is what Sam Anderson gave us in his Franco “profile” for New York magazine, in which he hilariously tells his readers that Franco “doesn't drink, smoke, or do drugs” - somehow, Anderson's keen perceptions failed to notice that Franco was drunk, stoned, and chain-smoking during that very “profile,” but at least Chiarella doesn't outright lie.

Or maybe he does – certainly his piece as a whole flirts with being willfully false. The text – and the accompanying little fictional squib by the so-talented-he-really-ought-not-to-do-crap-like-this Ben Percy – is constructed in such a way as to encourage readers to take on faith not only that Franco is sincerely interested in all these “projects” of his (as opposed to being interested mainly in the attention they get him) but that the projects themselves aren't worthless. When a gorgeous young actor/model begins shopping around so openly for a new avenue of self-expression, we can reasonably assume the results will be worthless; if Joe Gordon-Levitt decided to write a book, for instance, that's exactly what we'd assume (although of course such predictions can be wrong; Michael Bergin, with nothing but his washboard abs to recommend him, wrote a book that was actually good) – we'd encourage him to confine his personal reinventions to acting, where at least he's got credentials. Franco in these last few years has seemed rather desperately in need of extracurricular credentials, and it's far, far from clear that he knows what work is.

Then again, it's possible that success has fueled experimentation – that happens even to ordinary non-stars. Franco's forthcoming short story collection is a genuinely good debut, and most of its work predates all this art-installation nonsense. Perhaps he should cancel his four post-doc degrees-in-progress, shutter his studio swannings, and buckle down to that most incredibly arduous of all mortal tasks: writing a second book.

It's unlikely, if only because writing is the least glamorous of all the arts – and Franco, being a handsome young man, finds a certain appeal in glamor: hence the appearance in Esquire, which started out its life exclusively as a men's fashion magazine and still pulls in the latest ads from all the big fashion industry names. We see quite a few such ads in this issue. There's Armani, swathing a distracted model in fog and confusing the known order of the universe by making him put on a pair of Michael Jackson gloves:



And there's Lincs, trying to perpetuate the delusion that young men can look heterosexual while wearing ridiculous “skinny” clothing:



But the normally level-headed Tommy Hilfiger stumbles rather badly in this issue – their latest spread contains what could only be termed a hideous fashion faux-pas:



Can the brand be salvaged? Those outfits can't be.

Rome indeed and room enough in the Penny Press!

It's been a bad week for good faith in the Penny Press. Bad enough Us Weekly ran a picture of Joe Jonas apparently preparing to kiss a girl (even the National Enquirer would've scrupled at that), worse still that National Geographic should so conspicuously lend its imprimatur to a glorified tomb-raider, but worst of all – at least from our bookish point of view here at Stevereads – is the full-blown orb-and-scepter coronation Sam Tanenhaus bestows on Jonathan Franzen's new novel Freedom in The New York Times Book Review.

The iniquity isn't that Tanenhaus liked the book – because despite appearances, he keeps his personal reactions entirely to himself in the course of a very long, glowing review. No, if he liked the book and wrote it a love-letter this long and gushing, I could live with that. I'd be disgusted, but I wouldn't be nearly as disgusted as I am by what Tanenhaus decided to do instead.

This huge encomium (titled “Peace and War,” as if there weren't already enough travesties going out to Westchester County this week) isn't the result of Tanenhaus really liking Freedom – it's the result of Tanenhaus' entirely political decision that The New York Times Book Review (of which he's the editor) should really like Jonathan Franzen. This isn't high-minded literary debate; it's the cat-fighting that precedes a small-town high school class president election. Oprah Winfrey started things by stepping waaaay outside her comfort zone to nominate Franzen's last unreadably awful doorstop, The Corrections, for her happy, embracing Book Club. Franzen played the 'inchoate integrity' card for all it was worth, and the American public gobbled it up (The Corrections surely contends with Robert Hughes' The Fatal Shore and Robert Caro's The Power Broker as the most-bought unread book of the last fifty years). Just last week, Time magazine nominated Franzen as the best novelist since Jesus Christ. Tanenhaus spotted a wave and hopped on his board.

The man's an excellent writer (those of you who haven't read his biography of Whittaker Chambers are urged in all sincerity to drop everything and do so), and that makes it all the more sadly easy to tell when he's not even present for his own review. Pretty much as soon as his first sentence, “Jonathan Franzen's new novel, 'Freedom,' like his previous one, 'The Corrections,' is a masterpiece of American fiction,” it's obvious this is going to be one of those times. All the hallmarks of boilerplate are here, and good boilerplate it is, too – but it bears almost no relation to what Tanenhaus says (or how he says it) when he's genuinely saying what he thought about a book. Instead, it's virtually bent double under the anxiety of the Reviewer's Remorse.

The Reviewer's Remorse goes something like this: I like to think of myself as an independent thinker, and I like to think I run my blog/literary review/library desk/major publishing industry taste-maker with the same amount of independent thinking. But I don't want to be one of those critics who hated Book X when it first came out and now looks like a jackass because it's gone on to become an enshrined piece of the canon. I'll do anything, literally anything, to avoid that.

Even a casual glance at history should amply demonstrate the absolute futility of the Reviewer's Remorse. Names that were venerated a hundred, fifty, or even twenty-five years ago are today nearly-forgotten footnotes. Yes, quickie laugh-getters of the “Rotten Reviews” variety routinely collect all the initial negative notices of now-respected novels like Pride & Prejudice (dissed by a Bronte sister, no less!) or Joyce's Ulysses (famously panned by Virginia Woolf). And yes, such reviews spark a certain frisson – but it's a fraudulent one: it stems from the vague idea that in literature there's a presiding true genius that will out.

Nothing could be further from the truth. The howling irony of Reviewer's Remorse is that it directly inverts the power-structure: critics don't just stand around taking guesses (some lucky, some not) at what the true greats of the literary canon are going to be in twenty-five, fifty, and a hundred years – they determine it. They always have, and they should.

But only the honest critics, and this review of Freedom is deeply, blandly dishonest. An honest critic couldn't write “Assaultive sex reverberates through 'Freedom,' and why not? Sex is the most insistent of the 'personal liberties,' and for Franzen the most equalizing. One is at a loss to think of another male American writer so at ease with – that is, so genuinely curious about – the economy of female desire: the pull and tug of attraction and revulsion, the self-canceling wants.”

Do you know what Tanenhaus means by insistent personal liberties? Why he creates the odious euphemism “assaultive sex” when he's talking about rape? What he means when he calls sex the “most equalizing” personal liberty, when that very notion flies in the face of 17,000 years of human experience? Why he equates comfort with curiosity? Why he uses the synonyms 'pull' and 'tug' in parallel with the antonyms 'attraction' and 'revulsion'? What on Earth a 'self-canceling want' is? No? Neither do I. And neither does he. The point of this kind of prose isn't to say anything – it's to sound like you're saying something. It's the smart kid in the back of the class using lazy-clever short cuts to get his homework done. And the assignment here is to make sure The New York Times Book Review experiences no Reviewer Remorse when it comes to Jonathan Franzen.

Fundamentally, this is the way a reviewer writes when he doesn't believe what he's writing. And in this case it's appropriate enough, because in Freedom Franzen has written a nearly 600-page novel in which he doesn't believe a single godforsaken word. Every particle of the book's grotesquely self-indulgent length is pure artifice, pure hypocrisy, pure lie. Franzen started out with the idea of mocking certain things – most especially the specific kind of mindlessly opinionated and entitled suburbanites with whom he spends his every waking minute and whose ranks he himself long ago joined, if indeed he was ever outside them to begin with – but he found he actually liked them instead, viewed them as genuine civilizing forces (just for clarification: you and I, no matter who we are? We're the ones who need civilizing). But rather than abandon the envisioned evisceration, he thought to turn it elaborately, I'm-smarter-than-you-can-even-see faux-satirical, pretending to hate the thing he loves in order to torture it a little. Call it assaultive fiction. And even that quasi-plan fell apart completely, probably after endless nights spent drinking and endless mid-mornings spent speed-writing to make page counts. What's left – what gets published to unprecedented fanfare this week and collects a National Book Award (at least) in a few months – is nothing at all, a rote exercise in verbiage.

It might be fitting that a book whose own author doesn't care about it at all would generate essays from reviewers who don't care about their own verdicts at all, but that doesn't mean I have to like it. When Sam Tanenhaus isn't resorting to Reviewer Remorse hedge-betting blather, he's a first-rate writer, and I prize first-rate writers: I've always wished I were one, and I consider them incredibly thin on the ground. So naturally, after trudging through Tanenhaus lines like “Franzen's world-historical preoccupations also shape, though less delicately, his big account of the home front – the seething national peace that counterpoises the foreign war,” I went in search of some sort of corrective, somebody actually talking about Freedom.

In addition to Tanenhaus, the field of American literary reviews also sports two other first-rate critics of the current fictive zeitgeist, both also named Sam: there's Sam Anderson, who writes for New York magazine, and there's Sam Sacks, who's the editor of Open Letters Monthly and yet reviewed the new Franzen for The Wall Street Journal (one can only assume they pay better, although it's hard to believe they could match the droit de siegneur). These two never let me down; Anderson is funnier than Sacks (this isn't difficult – the spinning ceiling-fan above my head is also funnier than Sacks), but Sacks has an oddly magisterial probity that no critic currently writing can quite match. Between them, they almost always manage to say everything that needs saying about any present-day male novelist (needless to say, they're both flailingly helpless when reviewing women – but then, I don't notice Jill Lepore or Nancy Franklin stepping forward to review Franzen either).

Except this time, alas. Like Tanenhaus, like most of the best critics, Anderson and Sacks are also afflicted with Reviewer Remorse – Franzen must bring it out in reviewers, what with his ostentatiously domestic purview and the odd, Howard Hughesian stretch of time between The Corrections and this new book (a stretch of time Trollope and Dickens would have disdained; a stretch of time not warranted by anything at all actually in the novel; a stretch of time that is almost always, in my experience with writers, caused by alcohol). Like Tanenhaus, neither of these other Sams wants to believe that Freedom could simply be bad, even though, like Tanenhaus, they experienced not one moment of personal pleasure while reading it (hugely significant that both Anderson and Sacks call the book addictive, with all the word connotes of involuntary and even degrading participation). In this context Anderson's rather reaching invocation of David Foster Wallace can be seen as the desperate hail-mary side-step of somebody who knows he's backing the wrong horse and is too invested (or under orders) to admit it. And that's nothing compared to what Sacks does in the Journal – for a writer as reverential of his sources as Sacks is to drag Milton into a review of Jonathan effing Franzen (Sacks also quotes William Blake, gawd help us all, just to make sure nobody gets out alive) … well, no matter what else it is, it's certainly a cry for help.

And this is just the beginning, of course. If The New York Times Book Review is comparing Franzen to Tolstoy this week, next week The Sacramento Bee will be comparing him to the author of the Book of Genesis. It's depressing, not only because the book itself is such a completely cynical waste of time but also because of what the coronation says about the American literary landscape. Franzen costs Farrar, Straus & Giroux the rough equivalent of twenty-five talented authors who've never feuded with Oprah, and this makes two novels in a row in which he's done absolutely nothing to compensate for that loss. Is the republic of letters really so hard up for good writers that it needs to go down on its knees to this lazy charlatan? On what meat doth this Franzen feed, that he hath grown so great?

Relativism Run Rampant in the Penny Press!

Keith Miller wrote a review last week in the TLS that was, as far as I can recall, utterly unique in the annals of that venerable publication. It was a review of David Shields’ Reality Hunger: A Manifesto, but that’s not the unique part; Shields’ idiotic little collage was reviewed everywhere. No, the unique part was that Miller’s review was utterly free of actual aesthetic judgement. Right there in the TLS, in precincts long known for their fiercely opinionated pronouncements on all things literary, Miller turned in a piece that was to book reviewing what abstract painting is to photography. A lazy, sniveling cop-out, in other words.

Shields, as some of you will know, composed his little book of bits and pieces from the works of other people, and he shaped it all for the purpose of making the latest point that’s obsessed his sadly deteriorated mind: that literary ownership is a bogeyman of the 20th (or even – shudder – the 19th) century, that dutiful attribution is for sissies, and that only a mix-tape of memoir and meta-fiction mini-bursts has any chance of coping with The World 2.0. I’ve come across this mulish laziness before, many times (people sententiously proclaiming that the only literature they need to know is that written by their personal friends, etc.), and it never fails to both sadden me (because such morons literally have no idea what they’re missing) and enrage me (because if you’re lazy you should just admit it and slink away, not take pride in it –or worse, try to argue that it’s not actually laziness). And I guess I just count on the TLS being saddened and enraged by pretty much the same things that sadden and enrage me. It’s a deal we’ve mostly observed for half a century, and I’ve grown quite comfortable with it.

Not this time, however. Keith Miller – a TLS regular and a very intelligent writer, regardless – starts off his piece promisingly enough, referring to Shields as “involved with the McSweeney’s axis,"  but the glimmers of hope fade pretty quickly after that. Bad enough he calls Shields’ vile,  racist book Black Planet “engaging, and, in some ways, brave” – I could swallow such a mischaracterization if it were just a small detour on the road to roasting Reality Hunger, but what follows is as mysterious as anything I’ve read in the TLS. Miller puts the pieces of a review in place, but he refuses to assemble them.

“You may or may not share Shields’s skepticism about the possibilities of the novel,” he writes.

“You may agree that we live in unprecedentedly complicated times,” he writes.

“You may accept the hip hop/collage model,” he writes, “or you may find it constraining in its own way.”

“You may feel that the issues of authorship and collaboration which Reality Hunger both debates and embodies are by no means settled,” he writes.

And there’s the concluding line of his piece:

“But Reality Hunger has little to say about style except to repeat the old macho-modernist canard that it’s something you must get beyond before you can say what you’ve got to say. You might feel you have to disagree with that, too.”

In professional circles, this is known as giving a book a pass, and I can scarcely recall a time when it was last done in the TLS. It’s not that Miller’s piece is bad – it isn’t, I doubt it could be. Like I said, he’s a reliably talented writer who always has thought-provoking things to say, as in this essay when he digresses briefly about David Foster Wallace:

This sense of basic things overlooked in the scrabble to explore elaborate ones is to be found even in the prodigiously clever and tirelessly humane Foster Wallace, whose endless, and rigorous, wrangling with himself and his characters’ selves yields, at times, an unexpected, slightly creepy flavour, a ghostly aftertaste of a judgemental, impatient, reactionary man.

That’s good, but it says very little about David Shields except obliquely. Nothing in this piece speaks directly to the two central rotten tenets of Reality Hunger: its inherent contention that you can’t find ‘reality’ in novels, and its equally obnoxious implication that if you did find it, plagiarizing it wouldn’t constitute a moral wrong. Nothing Miller writes addresses the core boring reality behind Reality Hunger, which is that Shields’ powers of concentration have addled (Beer? Pot? Video games? Middle age?) to the point where he won’t make himself pay attention to anything. Not to anything long and complicated, but to anything at all. The book is a hummingbird’s manifesto, a cretin’s credo of codified sloth, and dammit, I expect the TLS to say that, not dance around the issue with ‘you mays’ and ‘you mights.’

Fortunately, we have recourse to life-saving alternatives. When the subject is contemporary American fiction (and for all the ostentatious breadth of his plagiarized sources, Shields is basically writing about contemporary American fiction; given how deeply a pantywaist like Jonathan Franzen bores him, it’s extremely unlikely Shields has ever even heard of Anthony Trollope, and he’d probably besoil his britches if he so much as caught sight of Clarissa), especially contemporary American fiction, we can always turn to the two best critics of that genre working today, New York magazine’s Sam Anderson, and Open Letters Monthly’s own Sam Sacks. These two can be relied upon, not only to invariably find the important things to write about, but to write about the important parts of those things (and it doesn't hurt that they’ve both got what John Adams referred to as a “remarkable felicity of expression”). Anderson is the more ruthless of the two, almost always eviscerating his subject instead of merely killing it. His take on Shields:

The book’s supposed profundities – that the line between fiction and reality is unclear, that genres an be more powerful when mixed, that narrative often imposes a simplistic order on the chaos of actual life – are, to anyone who’s ever thought seriously about any of these issues, a bunch of remedial Grade-A head-slappers. And yet Shields intones them with the air of a holy man whispering the final secret of the universe from his mountaintop.

Sacks is usually more magisterial, but that can make the final summation, when it comes, all the more damning:

Obviously Mr. Shields is perfectly capable of exercising the atrophied part of his mind that shuts down when confronted by traditional books; it takes a curious self-absorption to assume that the burden of change rests with everybody else. And ultimately, despite the interesting provocations in "Reality Hunger," that's the impression it leaves: Mr. Shields is espousing a movement that would valorize his own laziness. He'd like literature, and its millions of faithful followers, to conform to his own private version of reality.

Good stuff. Glad I can read it somewhere.