Maybe I Just Have Better Bookmarks

Jonathan Gold chips in for the LA Weekly literary supplement with a sort-of defense of Bergdorf Blondes. Though he's reasonably convinced Plum Sykes has talent and style, he's also convinced the novel is "a certain kind of girl’s book, about a certain kind of girl’s obsessions." But what really seems to interest him is the backlash from jealous writers, starting with "Bookslut, Moby Lives and other blogs obsessed with short-story collections by foxy New Yorker assistants, slight novels by recent Bennington grads, and thrillers 'written' by supermodels who can’t be bothered even to read the books published under their names."

But here's the thing--putting aside for the moment whether Bookslut and Moby Lives really care about those kinds of books, or whether any bookblogger does--and just what supermodel is out there "writing" thrillers, anyway?--Moby Lives has never, according to Google, so much as mentioned Sykes' name, and Bookslut has merely passed on two items from the British press. Actually, to his credit, Gold doesn't explicitly state that either blog commented on Sykes, just that they set the tone for the reaction against her. But Gold offers no examples of this alleged online savagery against Sykes, including no supporting evidence for his contention that "the book proposal — the proposal! — was reproduced and hacked apart on the Internet a year before the book even came out." Evidence that should have been easy to find and print; and if space were a consideration, some of Gold's own overlong scene-setting could have taken the hit.

On the other hand, the one review he does quote is the NYTBR smackdown by Choire Sicha--who is a blogger, and a famous one at that...but Gold doesn't mention it, even though it's the strongest evidence yet for his weak thesis. The only reason I can think of for the omission is that since Sicha wasn't bylined as a blogger, Gold didn't know he was one. (And yet Gold didn't seem to have any problem appropriating Sicha's peasants-in-revolt imagery. Go figure.) No, it seems that what we have here is the blogger as straw man. Sure, plenty of literary blogs, including this one, have passed along the juiciest reviews and interviews from the Bergdorf Blondes news cycle. But it's not because we're all MFA-carrying stuffed shirts...and, hell, some of us not only liked the book, we compared her favorably to somebody besides another chick-lit writer. Gold sees traces of Amis, I see traces of Wodehouse...so we agree on Sykes' potential. We just don't see eye-to-eye on how other people have seen it.