literary wars

[jwgh]

There's been an extremely slow-moving literary argument/discussion going on in Harper's. In 1996, Harper's published an essay by Jonathan Franzen in which he blamed the fall in readership of serious literature on the tendency for it to be difficult to read. Then in 2005 Lionel Trilling posted a response, also in Harper's, titled 'Why Experimental Fiction Threatens to Destroy Publishing, Jonathan Franzen, and Life As We Know It: A Correction', which was a sort of defense and celebration of hard-to-read books.

In the current Harper's there's an essay by Cyntia Ozick titled 'Literary Entrails: The boys in the alley, the disappearing readers, and the novel's ghostly twin', which enters into this discussion.

Ozick thinks that the problem with modern-day literature is that there isn't enough literary criticism, which she distinguishes from reviews, reviews being focussed on whether books are good or bad while lit crit tries to find links between books, if I understand the essay correctly.

None of this is particularly important, but it is background for this quotation, which I was amused by, because it seems like an unusually nasty and unmotivated attack on Amazon's reviewing system, and also for another reason:

Less innocent is the rise of the non-professional reviewer on Amazon -- though "rise" suggests an ascent, whereas this computerized exploitation, through commerce and cynicism, of typically unlettered exhibitionists signals a new low in public responsibility. Unlike the valued book club reviewer, who may be cozily challenged by companionable discourse, Amazon's "customer reviewer" goes uncontested and unedited: the customer is always right. And the customer, the star of this shoddy procedure, controls the number of stars that reward or denigrate writers. Amazon's unspoken credo is that anyone, or everyone, is well suited to make literary judgments -- so that a reader of chick lit (the term defines the reader), will howl with impatience at any serious literary fiction she may have blundered into. Here is "Peggy of Sacramento (see my other reviews)" grudgingly granting one ill-intentioned star to a demanding contemporary novel: "boring slowness, hard going, characters not even a mother could love." Or Tim: "A thoroughly depressing book. The home life was not a pleasant atmosphere in which to raise children."¹ Most customer reviewers, though clearly tough customers when it comes to awarding stars, are not tough enough -- or well-read enough -- for tragic realism or psychological complexity. Amazon encourages naive and unqualified readers who look for easy prose and uplifting endings to expose their insipidities to a mass audience.

Wow. OK.

As I said, I was impressed by how mean this passage is, and of course by its elitism (I think the phrase 'unqualified readers' is pretty funny), but I also was a little puzzled by the quoted reviews; to me they didn't seem very typical of Amazon reviews.

Oh, but wait, what's that footnote?

¹ These are, admittedly, inventions, but with recognizable verisimilitude.

I'm not sure why it's necessary to make up stupid Amazon reviews when the real thing can be found so readily. Possibly copyright or other legal concerns?

A cynical person might wonder if Ozick herself had gotten rated poorly on Amazon at some point. (However, most of her books get 4-5 stars.)

Comments

[urbeatle.livejournal.com]

Looking at that paragraph, I can already tell I wouldn't like her books. She's a pompous blow-hard. Writing, for her, is *about* her. It's a way to make herself feel important, "learned". Which is why she makes such a big deal about "unlettered exhibitionists".

... Which, really, is probably why literature is in decline. Not because it's too hard, but because it's too hard for the wrong reasons. It's mental masturbation. It's writers trying to make themselves feel clever, much smarter than the reader. If a reader is smart enough to figure out someone's novel, then a reader is smart enough to figure out how condescendingly it was written, and probably won't enjoy it.

Which sort of ties into that movie I just posted about, "The Lady in the Water". There's nothing difficult about the movie, but it has the same attitude: "I am so important, I am going to make a movie about how highly I think of myself. And I'm too high and mighty to be worried about things like plot, character, or realistic dialogue."

[jwgh]

Well, I wouldn't necessarily judge a writer's entire body of work based on a single essay in Harper's. But it's true that in the essay she doesn't seem to think that readers and their responses to a work are a particularly important way to think about literature.

I think that Franzen's original essay argued that one problem that literature faces is that it's pretty easy to get entertained elsewhere, so if you make your own work too inaccessible people will just go someplace else to spend their time.

Regarding Franzen: he's the guy who had his book The Corrections selected as Oprah's 'Book of the Month' (in 2001, a few years after his Harper's essay), then made some snotty comments about it and was disinvited from her TV show. He did later get to be on the Simpsons, though.

I think that all three essays express legitimate points of view, although I mostly found them to be beside the point. (John Barth has noted that he has found that he enjoys books by authors who completely disagree with each other about what literature should be about, and has come to the conclusion that any theory of literature that results in good writing is OK with him; hopefully I am not doing him too much of a disservice with this paraphrase.)

[jwgh]

(I agree that taking yourself too seriously is usually deadly, but on the other hand there are people who manage to do great things despite it. M. Night apparently not being among them, though -- he's no Kubrick, I guess.)

[pjamesharvey.livejournal.com]

Writing, for her, is *about* her. It's a way to make herself feel important, "learned".

And that's how I see the majority of the Amazon reviews, and particularly those written by 'top' reviewers.

[doctroid.livejournal.com]

I shouldn't comment, because I'm an unqualified reader. Still, it seems to me the whole concept of "literature" is largely an invention of the past couple hundred years. It's a cliché but a truism that Shakespeare wasn't out to write great literature, he was trying to make a buck turning out plays to entertain the plebes. And I think all the great writers up until about the twentieth century were doing one of two things: trying to write entertainment, or writing pretty much solely for themselves with no need or expectation of adulation from anyone else.

It's when you combine a disdain for entertainment with an attitude that you deserve to be lauded by your peers for your efforts that you get two things: unreadable dreck, and an audience that looks elsewhere for something to occupy them.

[rimrunner.livejournal.com]

For someone who seems to pride herself on her acumen, she has managed to entirely misinterpret the purpose of customer reviews, which is to sell books. Amazon abandoned the idea of being a tastemaker a good six years ago (not coincidentally, that's about when I was laid off from their editorial department).

Editorial reviews, whether written in house or quoted from recognized critical sources, turned out to have a fairly negligible effect on what sold on Amazon (getting nominated for Oprah's book club being a notable exception to this rule). Customer reviews had a much greater impact.

Given that Amazon has to pay for editorial content, whereas with customer reviews they get content from people who have paid them, it's easy to see the rationale for their decision.

I'm all for literary criticism, but I'm unconvinced that it ever translates into large sales.

[jwgh]

The slam against Amazon reviews I quoted doesn't actually have much to do with the rest of the essay, which was one of the reasons I was so impressed by it. Overall it doesn't seem like she's all that concerned about large sales.

[palecur.livejournal.com]

It's not Harper's, but this discussion made me immediately think of A Reader's Manifesto, which covers a lot of similar ground from a position opposite Ozick's. I spent most of the time reading Myers' essay going 'Yes!' or 'yes, dammit!' at the screen.

I read a good bit of Ozick in college, as part of several writer's workshops I took with T. C. Boyle. Her work is mannered and stilted, but there's underlying talent there trying to get out. That description also applies, though with more talent and less stiltedness, to Boyle's own work -- occasionally he forgets that he's supposed to be a Lit'rary Auteur and accidentally manages to just plain tell a good story.

[jwgh]

Franzen's essay was similar, I think (which may or may not be surprising to people who have read Franzen's fiction). The reasons that I have some trouble taking those sorts of essays seriously are: (1) the idea seems to be that the alternative to writing experimental fiction is writing straightforward fiction, but presumably the experimental aspects are exactly what draws at least some of these writers into writing at all -- and while in some cases it might be better to have not written anything at all, (2) I actually enjoy some of the books in question.

I think that if people are motivated to write, in whatever form, then that's OK with me (although I reserve the right to criticize, dislike, or ignore the result).

This probably means that I am part of the problem.

[urbeatle.livejournal.com]

I think "experimental" is a trap word. They are saying people find it hard to read the books because they are "experimental". But "experimental" could mean lots of things.

Honestly, I think a lot of books are just poorly written. Or written for a specific audience, only the writer is not aware how limited that audience is.

[jwgh]

Literary fiction is, I believe, considered a niche genre in publishing. I'm not sure how many authors consider it so, though.

[sunburn.livejournal.com]

heh! My first encounter with TC Boyle was the time I attended a live recording of "Selected Shorts," a public radio show where marginally-to-very-famous people read short stories. In this case, it was read by Isiah Scheffer (sp), the show's host, and it was an incredibly funny story about Lassie, who was sick and goddamn tired of saving little Timmy from the fact that he couldn't walk by a well without falling in.

Now, obviously all authors have better intro works and more representative ones than others, but I couldn't get into a single page of TC Boyle after that. Tried only a couple of times, and that was years ago, so things could've changed, but still.

[majorzed.livejournal.com]

A timely story in the local newspaper here.