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Monday, Nov 23, 2009
The calibration of literary and commercial coverage is a volatile subject among book people, especially when it concerns the biggest review section in the country. Although the Times' position as the central arbiter of literary culture has diminished over the years, it's the most recognized and widely read book review section in the country. Being the biggest always invites envy and criticism, though the crude tone in the Book Babes article seemed to herald a new era.
The book editor quoted earlier suggests that Keller and Erlanger's sense of what was wrong with the Book Review stemmed from the rarefied atmosphere of life at the Times: "It's probably people they know that complain that way about the book section. It's the New York parochial view; they think these opinions are universal because everyone they know holds them, but they're wrong. They just don't get out of their limited sphere often enough."
One of the two Book Babes, Margo Hammond of the St. Petersburg (Fla.) Times, was surprised at the way the article was interpreted. A friend of Keller's since both were Washington journalists, Hammond insists she never intended to sandbag the two editors or paint an alarmist picture of the Times leadership. In fact, she says she supports many of Keller and Erlanger's intentions, and believes they are clearly interested in improving the section rather than gelding it.
"It's definitely important to use books as a springboard for political and cultural discussion," she says. "And providing the service to people who are saying 'What should I pick up at the airport?' is a perfectly valid activity for a newspaper."
Not everyone agrees. Author and critic John Leonard, a former Times Book Review chief whose reign from 1971 to 1975 is often remembered as a high-water mark, found Keller's comments especially troubling. "To seriously propose not paying attention to first novels is ludicrous," he says. "It amounts to rampant stupidity. Criticism is discovery, not a book report or news. It means someone is doing something with language that will change the way we think and see." He continues: "Brilliance comes from the peripheral or from the margins. You have to listen for it and call it to the attention of the readers."
Erlanger, who has been the Times' culture editor for just over a year, explains in an interview that his "shit" comment was taken from a longer conversation discussing his literary taste. The quotes in the Book Babes piece, he insists, "were selected to fit a thesis, a thesis I didn't create. It wasn't in the spirit of what I was talking about. There are bad movies, bad books, a lot of disposable media. An avalanche of bad books comes out every year. Even publishers recognize that."
As for the question of whether Times critics have lavished praise on undeserving books, Erlanger still thinks the paper should "discern better and be a little more stinting with our praise." He says he hopes to bring more urgency to book coverage as well as good political and cultural commentary. Review coverage won't shrink, he insists; the daily paper has resurrected its Saturday review, which tends to be more focused on ideas. And as to any heavy-handed decrees from above, he says that the Times' two main daily book critics, Michiko Kakutani and Janet Maslin, have never been micromanaged: "I just leave them alone to do their jobs."
The Poynter piece, Erlanger goes on, "made us sound like all we wanted to do is review political pamphlets, which is not true at all. Our intention is to revamp and expand. Why would we want to make it worse? It's too important to the publishing industry and too important to serious readers."
One book review editor who asked to remain anonymous opines that the editors' comments, even taken in the most sympathetic light, suggest that they don't understand their own core readership, a base of literary readers whose support "is to the Book Review as the Christian right is to the conservatives."
"They don't know what they're doing," this editor says. "They don't know the kind of people who buy books. They are mostly women, not Bill Keller and Steve Erlanger. They don't read 'The Perfect Storm' or thrillers."
To many observers, the idea that the book section will be skewed in favor of nonfiction titles and increased attention to popular mass-market books didn't seem like news. "Really, that's the way it already is," says Dennis Loy Johnson, publisher of Melville House Books and editor of the literary blog MobyLives. "That kind of makes it official now, institutionalized. It's not a revelation, but it's depressing that fiction and poetry mean less and less in our leading publication."
The idea of changing the Book Review, at least in the abstract, is widely appreciated; many observers suggest that except for individual instances of brilliant reviewing, the section as a whole has lost most of the vibrancy it once had. "It's changed into something that doesn't matter anymore; it's just dull and formulaic," says Cader. "You don't hear people talking about reviews there. You don't hear of booksellers selling out after a book was on their front page."
"The Times has lost ground in terms of setting a national reading agenda," says Charlotte Abbott, the book news editor at Publishers Weekly. "The cases where it has made national bestsellers are far fewer than 10 years ago. It's not necessarily the editorial fault of the Times, but the industry has changed."
A representative example might be the changes that the Times' bestseller list has faced. Through the 1980s it was the only consumer list of any importance, an instant badge of credibility for any book that was stamped with a "New York Times Bestseller" label. Yet during the '90s technological advances enabled other papers -- from USA Today to the Wall Street Journal -- to create their own bestseller lists, which used different methods to crunch the data. Big chain stores like Barnes & Noble and Borders have their own bestseller lists and use them as the basis for discounted sales. While the Times' bestseller list ranks the previous week's sales, Amazon's lists calculate up-to-the-hour sales information. The advent of BookScan, with its point-of-sale technology that records sales at 80 percent of retail bookselling outlets, can provide daily sales data from specific locations or stores around the country.
