This was originally supposed to be just two paragraphs, and expanded into something else. Since this is a very short essay and one drenched in opinion the way a good Tres Leches cake is soaked in several kinds of milk, I will allow myself the luxury of not providing a single graph or poll to prove my points. I’ve been thinking a lot about writing and publishing these days, and will have a slew of essays on the subject. If anything in this short work seems not quite fleshed out or unclear, do feel free to write and ask for clarifications. Just try not to be too “Jane, you ignorant slut” about it.
There has been a lot of chatter about the demise of books or, rather, of books as part of public imagination or, rather, of book review sections and publications. Much hand-wringing and many columns are devoted to the idea that, oh, woe, people simply aren’t reading anymore. A certain class of commentators has fixated on the idea that younger generations are functionally illiterate. The fact that book review sections in magazines and newspapers are fast disappearing has solidified some people’s sense that books are over.
Not all of what is claimed to be happening is a fact, and much of the literature on these topics ought not to be taken seriously — nearly all of it exists to drive up readership of the worst magazine in the world,The Atlantic, where these claims frequently appear. People are reading, but they may not be devouring what members of the literati on Twitter and Substack think they should be absorbed in.1These “literati” exist mostly in their own heads: I use the term to signify a very loose conglomeration of people who imagine themselves as online Bloomsburys. They are reading lots of romance, apparently, and this has caused much hair-pulling and anguish among self-styled critics who spend too much time worrying about tastes. Readers are also devouring poetry, and detective novels, and books about tech industries. Given our current times, a turn to escapist fiction — involving werewolves with inordinately strange and large penises — is entirely warranted, as it would have been in more peaceful times (to which, alas, we may never return, so let’s just keep on stroking the Barbed Phallus).
The decline of book review sections in U.S-based newspapers and magazines is not the end of them, but they mark a new beginning. I do agree with Becca Rothfeld, in a recent Current Affairs podcast, that reviews in newspapers like the Washington Post (where she was until recently the nonfiction book critic) have been a way for readers to encounter material they might otherwise never read. I think that function will be served again, and in similar publications. I will also argue that a glut in a certain kind of book review and a shift in its form and function are major reasons why newspapers and some magazines have been cutting out their review sections.
Book reviews in newspapers and general interest magazines were always meant to do no more than review books: they let the reader know if a novel or prose work was worth the money and time. Often, book reviewers’ careers spanned generations — and that was not always a good thing, as the overly powerful tenure of Michiko Kakutani at the New York Times showed us. Kakutani, who sometimes wrote embarrassingly awkward reviews in the voices of literary characters, maintained her hold as long as she did because she emerged in an era when getting a review in the NYT meant something. But in other publications, including hundreds of local newspapers, a book reviewer was often a trusted member of the community as well as a reviewer. Where a Kakutani review was a talk of the town for all the wrong reasons, a local paper’s review was meant to be a guide. In effect, a critic was simply saying, “Here’s what the book is about, and what I think about it. You can choose to read it, or not.” In the absence of toxic social media platforms, people neither had — nor wanted, I suspect — places to rage against what was simply offered as a learned opinion.
The gradual disappearance of local newspapers has meant that this kind of critic no longer exists.2Both the Post and the Times are, strictly speaking, local papers but they function as national publications. The near-collapse of academia has meant that people with advanced degrees in literature or film studies now flail around looking for employment, and they often end up as book or film critics. As I wrote in “When Critics Turn to Cultural Studies, and Fail,” this has meant a shift in the style and intent of reviews: television critics at the New Yorker and Vulture proved incapable of simply reviewing Ryan Murphy’s The Beauty because they felt the need to demonstrate their fluency in the language of academic cultural studies. In New York, the magazine that hosts Vulture, Andrea Long Chu’s book reviews are much anticipated but not for any insights on the book in question: readers are eager to see what bitingly sarcastic views Chu might bring to the text in question. A Chu review is not a review but a social event, a happening, a performance even.
And this is not what most readers want. There is a huge difference between readers who buy books and discuss them with each other, and readers who only talk about the most recent and infamous review of a book — without bothering to spend any money on the actual text to see if they agree or not. Their interest does not lie in the book, but in letting others know that they read that review. These people are not serious readers: they are just overgrown, wanna-be Cool Kids. Too many authors today, especially on the left, don’t understand the difference, and only cater to the latter.
The Washington Post recently shuttered its entire book review section, and Rothfeld is now at the New Yorker which will benefit from her work. When people mourned the loss of the Post’s section, I hopped over to the paper to take a look at what other reviewers had written. Apart from a couple of exceptions like Rothfeld and Michael Dirda, their work was bland and uninteresting — much like what appears in the New York Times Book Review. What is missing from most book reviews is a real passion for the subject of criticism itself, and reviewers are usually too scared to really express an opinion — which defeats the point of a review.
We could, if we choose, decide that the decline in book review sections is related to the fact that people are not reading as many books as they used to. And, yes, certainly, we should also look squarely at figures like the Post’s owner Jeff Bezos, who bought a newspaper in a Medici-style act of patronage but with none of the actual, lasting support). But critics and pundits of all sorts may want to wrestle with another uncomfortable fact: a lot of books are absolute crap and they are that way because book are, increasingly, being written for critics, reviewers, and friends of authors — not for readers.
I have lost count of how many bad memoirs, novels, and nonfiction books I have read in the last year alone. Many of them were much-applauded in several reviews and blurbed mightily by Very Famous People, many of whom were inevitably friends of the author or at least in their circles (it does not take much detective work to discern this from various acknowledgements sections). Writers these days are writing to and for each other and fellow critics, not strangers. If you are only writing to your friends and the critics in your circle, why pretend that you want anyone else to read your book? I take seriously Rothfeld’s point that book reviews in mainstream outlets like the Post can open up reading worlds for readers: but what happens when the books themselves don’t bother to acknowledge readers?
I suspect — and, again, this is entirely unverifiable — that readers are more than a little fed up with contemporary books and writers. Meanwhile, faux literary circles on social media and Substack sustain controversies about meaningless and non-existent issues: No One Is Reading! Teens Are Illiterate! What Is Up with Barbed Penises! Do You Understand the Difference between a Penis and a Phallus? Writers, meanwhile, are outraged that their books, described in flowery terms by professors moonlighting for almost no money in niche book publications, haven’t been picked up by tens of thousands of readers. I regularly get notifications from one such outlet, encouraging me to read “the five best reviews this week.”
Not the five best books, but the five best reviews. They don’t even pretend that the books matter.
The book review world has been bloated for a long time and is now exploding all around us. That may be the best thing that happens to publishing. Perhaps we can take what matters from the ruins and build a new literary structure, one that actually emphasises books.
See also:
When Critics Turn to Cultural Studies, and Fail
The NYT Book Review Is Everything Book Criticism Shouldn’t Be
Is There a Place for the Small Novel?
Image: Berthe Morisot, La Lecture (Reading), (1888).
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