The Imaginary Class War Continues

You know, I go out of my way to praise Book Babe Elllen last week, at least in comparison to her compatriot Margo, and what does she do? She undercuts me by opening this week's column with...a joke about the chicken they serve on airplanes. Which only goes to show one of my hunches about these gals was right: They're trapped at least as far back as the '80s, more likely the '70s.

Anyway, this week, they chat with Grove Press editor Morgan Entrekin and Random House corporate spokesman Stuart Applebaum, which is apparently supposed to count as some referendum on the contemporary publishing industry. Again, though, I'm moved to ask: Why do the Book Babes seem to have an aversion to interviewing women who work in publishing? There certainly aren't any shortage of them, and in positions just as good if not better than Entrekin's and Applebaum's. So why can't the Babes ever seem to get in touch with one?

Ellen, who I used to think offered some sensible counterpoint to Margo's antielitist binges, succumbs to the dark side this week:

What's a reviewer to do? Well, maybe the right answer is: Do NOT defend the status quo. We may be so inside the Book Beltway that we're part of the problem instead of the solution. We write too much about marginal books that enhance book publishing's precious image, and too little about the form and substance of fiction that catches the popular imagination.

"Marginal books that enhance book publishing's precious image"? I challenge Ellen to name one such book that's received what could even remotely be construed as "too much" attention from the press in the last few years...and, as I've said elsewhere, I'll spot her Mark Danielewski's House of Leaves, although that didn't exactly tank commercially. But let's look at the authors deemed to have written "Books of the Times" by the paper of record so far this week: George Pelecanos, Edwige Danticat, Chang-Rae Lee, and Tom Perrotta. Has any of them written a "marginal book" lately? (Sunday's cover story on William T. Vollmann's gargantuan meditation on violence might have counted, but it's not a work of fiction.) She'll later add:

What future would Siskel and Ebert have had if they confined their bull sessions to art films? And, with regard to fiction, aren't most book pages doing something equivalent?

To answer the second question first, not as far as I can tell. As for the first, well, they'd probably end up like fellow Chicagoan Jonathan Rosenbaum, who seems to have done fine for himself at the edges. There are worse fates than not having your own TV show, waving your thumb in the air until it becomes a cliché.

Margo chimes in:

What should concern us is how the public is able to learn about the good books that are out there.

Everything she's said before, though, would seem to equate "good" with "likely to be bought by lots and lots of people" and oppose it to "marginal" or "precious," a false dichotomy to say the least--and one that would consign many "good" writers to even more undeserved obscurity. And though I freely admit I may be building off an erroneous interpretation, I'd like to suggest that the role of the book reviewer isn't that of consumer advocate, but cultural critic. The former is what most film reviewing in this country has become, perhaps to the short-term benefit of consumers but also perhaps to long-term detriment. After all, when a film like, say, The Passion of the Christ comes along, we need people who can do more than recommend whether we should go see it or not...and it's worth pointing out that the majority of the truly insightful essays I've read so far on the film have come not from movie critics, but folks like Christopher Hitchens and Leon Wieseltier. Maybe Charles Taylor's right when they quote him as saying that book reviewers can get away with writing about what the majority of people aren't reading. But I also think it would be quite wrong to imply that that's a bad thing. Forget the overblown hoohaa about "marginalized books in a marginalized medium" for a second, and ask yourself this: does something count as "news" if everybody's doing it, or should reporters keep their eyes open for the unique occurrences?

UPDATE: Ed not only sinks his teeth into this column quite effectively, he's announced that he'll be starting his own Book Babes Watch, so I think I'll absolve myself of full coverage of this issue and steer you over to him from now on. Oh, and if Book Babe Margo isn't married yet, and is looking for a man, we may have found the perfect match, as The Telegraph literary columnist reports that the paper's book reviewer, Harry Mount (stop snickering, you!) found David Mitchell's latest, Cloud Atlas, "wilfully confusing and impenetrable" and consequently won't finish it and won't review it. This flies in the face of most of his British peers, who have posted glowing write-ups throughout the nation's book pages.