State of the Art
Or; One Last BookExpo-Related Post, I Swear

expanded from a 6/10 entry

Dan Green considers Laura Miller's latest NYTBR column in light of the recent Book Babes panel, making some very excellent points much more concisely than I've been able to do to date.

The Babes themselves recap what they learned last week, and it's hard not to agree with Ellen's newly found conviction that "book review sections--as they now exist--are dinosaurs." Of course, she comes to that conclusion in the column's typically scatterbrained, contradictory, and to my eyes alarmist fashion. Case in point: in one paragraph, she declares, "First, book sections are too rarefied. Often, they're talking about the books that sell 10,000 copies at best." In the paragraph immediately following, we're told, "Second, book sections are irrevelant. They're often talking about the same books as The NYTBR, Entertainment Weekly, etc., while adding little." Setting aside the idea that writing about "books that sell 10,000 copies at best" makes one "rarefied," one is left wondering how a book section can be simultaneously elitist and a slave to fashion.

I don't happen to believe that book sections are necessarily dinosaurs, in part because of broader disagreements with the Babes about how such sections successfully fulfill their mandate--or, for that matter, what that mandate might be. For example, I don't think it's especially outrageous that a book reviewer for a major paper might not have turned his or her critical attention on The DaVinci Code when it first came out, leaving it to cultural reporters to follow up on the "phenomenon" of its runaway sales. And I'd strongly disagree with the characterization of book sections as "rarefied;" though some clearly deal on a regular basis with books that aim above the middlebrow, my experience of most mainstream American newspaper book reviews is that they present "literary" books as accessibly as possible.

I find myself increasingly wondering if the problem lies with book reviewers and their editors, specifically with their ability to negotiate office politics and stand up for the relevance of their coverage as something fundamentally different than horoscopes, i.e. a sop thrown to a certain demographic to keep them coming back for more, and as something more than the consumer guides that TV and film sections have increasingly become. And I think Ellen's right in her glancing admission that bookblogs, the better ones anway, are doing a more effective job than many (but not all) book review sections of making that case, of arguing that books do have relevance and are worth talking about. Is it because the online medium fosters back-and-forth conversation? Is it because we have more space to write at greater length about more books? Probably a little of both with other factors besides. But I suspect that if book reviewers spent less time worrying about how to maintain their "relevance" and realized that they'll never be as influential as Oprah, they could get on with developing a genuinely relevant and impressive body of work that conveys enthusiasm for reading, and for reading well, that wouldn't smack of elitism.