Don't Forget the Scorn Unleashed on John Irving!

AP book reporter Hillel Italie considers "the lack of great fiction" this year, with soundbites from industry insiders like HarperCollins' Jonathan Burnham:

"Looking across the landscape, there were supposed to be some literary novels that blew everybody away. But for various reasons they didn't quite perform."

Can we really assume a lack of aesthetic success from a lack of financial success? Or when Burnham says "they didn't quite perform," does he mean something closer to what Italie gets at by observing that even "anticipated novels such as Michael Cunningham's Specimen Days and Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close received mixed reviews at best and the fall doesn't look a lot better"?

"I think a lot of editors will tell you that 2004 and 2005 haven't been very good for fiction acquisitions. There weren't a lot of huge auctions or books that publishers got really excited about," says Geoff Shandler, editor in chief of Little, Brown and Co. "I'm afraid I must agree with that," says HarperCollins' Burnham, who adds that the number of "standout literary debuts have been disappointing." Notes [John] Sterling [of Henry Holt]: "There were no dazzling debuts."

From this,we can infer that Curtis Sittenfeld's Prep wasn't literary and all that hoopla didn't translate into a "dazzling debut." Now, I'm not buying that premise any more than you are--and before you naysayers point out that Sittenfeld got her share of pans, let's remember that no book gets universal acclaim; even critical darlings like The Plot Against America got dissed in certain circles. So this idea that books that get bad reviews "didn't quite perform" strikes me as somewhat odd.

And as far as the fall's concerned, I don't know about you, but I've got my eye on Paul Auster and Rick Moody, just for starters.