On Negative Reviews

At TNR Leon Wieseltier has a truly outstanding defense of negative book reviews.

My favorite paragraph:

I was not aware that it is a heresy to hold that Freedom is not a masterpiece. There is something churlish about my friend’s insistence upon critical unanimity. Franzen’s book, after all, is fantastically popular. It is commercially immune from literary criticism. I am pleased that Franzen’s profits will accrue to a company that may be counted upon to apply them to the production of serious books by serious writers that will not attain similarly to the proportions of a pandemic. But if it is indeed a heresy to differ about Freedom, then I confess to being inclined against it. In his slyly invigorating essay on “the pleasure of hating,” Hazlitt complained that “the reputation of some books is raw and unaired,” and noted that “the popularity of the most successful writers operates to wean us from them, by the cant and fuss that is made about them, by hearing their names everlastingly repeated, and by the number of ignorant and indiscriminate admirers they draw after them.” Celebrity is not a literary value, and I do not believe in the wisdom of crowds. I think that crowds—well-read ones, too—are foolish and fickle. They are especially foolish when they regard themselves as a coterie. Their tastes need to be scrutinized with a hermeneutical hostility, because they are so easily invented and so easily manipulated. This is especially the case in a society consecrated supremely to promotion—that swoons over the pseudo-sagacity of Malcolm Gladwell, and regards people and the expressions of their souls as brands, and confuses techniques for marketing with techniques for living. The sales of Freedom say nothing about the qualities of Freedom. Has the book struck a chord? Of course. But that is anthropology, not literature; and nothing is more forgiving than anthropology.

I tend to write a whole lot more positive reviews than negative ones at least in part because there really are a lot of books that warrant more attention than they get. There is a myth that academic historians do not write well and that they focus only on arcane topics. This is silliness, but it is silliness that has not been able to puncture the myth. I avoid gratuitous negativity (in book reviews and also, more importantly, in the blind peer review process, which is riddled with flaws and ought to be reconsidered). And if I'm going to be more critical than not it is going to tend to be toward books that have gotten too much attention and thus have become overrated (see here for my personal favorite example).

Book reviewing is still important and books still matter and I suspect that even in a culture of handwringing about the alleged demise of both they will continue to flourish albeit in shifting mediums in the future. I'll happily place a bet that books, actual books with printed pages and alluring covers, will continue to endure even as other options emerge for consuming them in the much inferior downloaded form.

[We are off to Dallas for this. Hope to see some of you there.]

2008 Pulitzer Prizes

The 2008 Pulitzer Prizes have been announced. The history award went to Daniel Walker Howe's What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848, the latest entry in the Oxford History of the United States series. It is pretty clear that every time one of those books comes out it will be a strong contender for the Pulitzer, one of those awards any historian would love to have but about which most all of us are at least a little ambivalent.

The biography/autobiography prize went to Eden’s Outcasts: The Story of Louisa May Alcott and Her Father by John Matteson (W.W. Norton) and the general nonfiction prize, which as often as not serves as another history award, went to Saul Friedlander's The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945 (Harper Collins).

The Memoir Trap

It's frustrating enough being a writer with pretensions toward big-time aspirations without having to read about the recent spate of memoirs shown to be fraudulent, including, most recently, Margaret Seltzer's Love and Consequences, which gives grim but apparently false detail about growing up as a foster child and gang member in South-Central Los Angeles.

So, what's going on here? It seems like the first problem is with the publishing industry itself. There is something awry about a culture so awash in memoir, that so privileges first-person accounts over verifiable non-fiction. In their quest for the next James Frey (oops) publishers have come to privilege memoir over almost every other genre. What seems quite clear is that many of these books have relied almost wholly on their first-person vantage point for their appeal, as it seems evident that many of them would not have passed muster as fiction, and yet once we discover that they also do not work as nonfiction, what do we have? (And yes, I realize that Bleeding Red shared at least some of the attributes of memoir, but even a cursory reading indicates that it was something a bit different.)

Writing good nonfiction is hard work. The craft is every bit as difficult as writing fiction with the added burden of owing fealty to evidence. Perhaps my favorite historian, C. Vann Woodward, wrote in his preface to the first edition of The Strange Career of Jim Crow, "The twilight zone that lies between living memory and written history is one of the favorite breeding places of mythology." Would that more publishers would keep this wisdom in mind the next time they think they have struck it rich with the next groundbreaking memoir.

On Literary Agents

If in the world of writing you are a relative nobody, as I am, you are familiar with the pas de deux of dealing with agents. It's a frustrating game, because the agent holds all the cards despite the fact that it is your work that is at the center of discussion. When I was shopping Bleeding Red I had an agent for a while. At first she was enthusiastic and supportive. And then she discovered that some very big names were also publishing books on the Red Sox, and she became distant and silent. Before long, the relationship ended -- she called it off, but only after I had threatened to do so. My view is that what seemed like an easy sell and thus quick profit turned into work for her. Since then I have had tentative forays with agents, but it has usually gone nowhere, or where it has gone somewhere it has been with someone who seemed little more clued in to the world of publishing than I am. I anticipate flying solo for a while, as I'm not important enough to need an agent even if I'm self-important enough to want one.

All of these thoughts crossed my mind when I read Gina Barreca's fabulous post on literary agents at The Chronicle Review's blog Brainstorm. A generous excerpt:

Maybe it’s not impossible to get an agent who is responsive, responsible, intelligent, well-read, witty, and competent, even if you’re not selling a book that will immediately be made into a blockbuster Hollywood film. And maybe it’s not impossible for me to flap my arms and circle the moon.

Ask any writers — working authors, especially those known as “midlist,” meaning that they’ve sold books but have not had action-figures based on their characters — about their search for the perfect literary representative, and they will clutch you by the collar and, as their eyes narrow into gimlets, they’ll launch into a saga that makes the “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” sound positively catchy.

You’ll hear versions of “Although I sent my manuscript to an agent recommended by a colleague and haven’t heard back from her in 27 months, I’m afraid to send a follow-up e-mail because I’ll sound too pushy”; “My agent said even though he’s never actually read anything I’ve sent him, he’s sure he can place something as soon as he gets around to it and that I’m a valuable member of his circle of authors”; “My agent told me she loved my book, just loved it, and that I shouldn’t take another contract for a different manuscript because this one was a sure-fire-winner until, oops, two months later she read the rest of my book and decided she wouldn’t be able to sell it after all and, umm, terribly sorry about that whole not-taking-the-other-contract thing.”

My favorite illustration of the relationship between writers and agents is as follows: After a difficult day a struggling writer returns to his neighborhood and is shocked to find a cadre of police and fire trucks surrounding the smoldering remains of his house. Explaining who he was he asks, “What happened?” “Well,” one of the officer’s says, “It seems that your agent came by your house earlier today and while he was here he attacked your wife, assaulted your children, beat your dog and burned your house to the ground.” The writer is struck speechless, his jaw hanging open in disbelief…. “My agent came to my house?”

Read the whole thing. Including the comments, where there are a couple of almost-but-not-quite plausible defenses of agents.