We Are All Book Banners Now

Somebody found a book in Amazon’s Kindle Store Wednesday. I’m not going to tell you what the book is, but I will tell you that it is sympathetic towards what may well be the only truly universal taboo in Western sexuality, so you can pretty much guess at how disgusting it is, and if I owned a bookstore, I would have absolutely no qualms about not carrying it or ordering it in. It’s not a First Amendment issue, because a corporation is not a government. When I worked at Amazon in the late 1990s, however, there was an absolute commitment to providing customers with access to any (legally published) book they wanted, and a firm line drawn against recognizing demands that Amazon stop making any given book available.

“We don’t think customers want us picking what we think is appropriate for them to read” was the official response in 2007, when a similar controversy erupted over the sale of dogfighting-themed magazines and videos—which tied in with the attitude I described as prevailing when I was an employee: “If you give in on the really blatant ‘boylove’ stuff, the reasoning ran, eventually somebody comes after you for the Jock Sturges and Sally Mann books, so you had to keep the goalposts all the way at the end of the field to keep everything in play.” If you give in to one demand to suppress a book from inventory, you invite future demands, and once you’ve set the precedent, it makes it that much harder for you to tell the next person “No.”

Because, make no mistake about it: While this isn’t a First Amendment issue, everybody who began demanding Amazon stop carrying that book was, at the level of intentionality, the equivalent of a book banner. If you don’t think so, ask yourself this question: How would you react if your public library carried that book? “I am doing exactly what I MOST hate about book banners,” Ana from The Book Smugglers admitted. And Harry Markov conceded the dilemma: “if I demand to censor it, I betray the principle I stand behind. If I don’t demand something be done about this book, then I betray the values I have been brought up with. In this situation I feel so helpless.”

So, yes, it’s instructive to watch people who would ordinarily deplore book banning confront a book that genuinely appalls them, and for those who value the suspension of moral judgment in the interest of customer satisfaction, it was encouraging to see Amazon initially stand by its position of carrying everything for everybody, even as offended consumers threatened boycotts—which are themselves a perfectly fine consumer response. (If you think a company is doing something you can’t support, by all means stop supporting them.) The problem was that, as the day progressed, thousands of consumers started making those demands, and then the mainstream press started to fan the flames.

Fortunately, for Amazon, a loophole existed: Because the Kindle edition (the only available edition of the book, as far as anybody can determine) was self-published through technology that Amazon provides, it was able to fall back on “Digital Content Guidelines” which state, in part: “What we deem offensive is probably about what you would expect. Amazon Digital Services, Inc. reserves the right to determine the appropriateness of Titles sold on our site.” At least I assume that’s the loophole Amazon used; the company never actually said anything about their decision to yank the title from its inventory late Wednesday night, and as of Thursday night still hadn’t said anything. It just happened.

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12 November 2010 | theory |

Read This: The Instructions

I’ve got another review at Shelf Awareness this morning, in which I express great enthusiasm for Adam Levin’s debut novel, The Instructions. it’s well over a thousand pages long, but it’s totally worth it. Imagine if the perpetrators of the massacre at Columbine had been religious zealots who’d studied counterinsurgency tactics, and you’ve come a little bit towards understanding Gideon Maccabee, a 10-year-old boy genius stuck in “The Cage,” the room where his junior high school sticks all its troubled or dangerous students, and the four days in which he gathers his classmates together as “The Side of Damage” and wreaks utter and total havoc. As I told Shelf Awareness readers, Gideon’s voice is a bit like a 21st-century A Clockwork Orange, but with some strong influence from George Saunders—I’m thinking here especially of the way in which Saunders invests absurd situations with emotional authenticity. (Somebody’s going to mention Chuck Palahniuk, too, and Levin’s totally anticipated that.) It’s a profoundly disturbing novel, all the more so perhaps for being one of the smartest novels I’ve read this year.

And The Instructions is already shaping up to be one of those novels that divides literary critics. Maud Newton was impressed, describing it as “dark, funny, and deeply provocative,” while Joshua Cohen dismissed it as “a very long joke: a setup that lacks a punch line.” There’s a twist to Cohen’s review, though, and he lays the issue out in his opening line: “Who better to review a 1,000-page Jewish book that comes out in the fall than the author of an 800-page Jewish book that came out in the spring?” (I haven’t read Witz yet, but I do have it out on my bookcase where I can see it, daring me.) Well, some people might be able to think of several better candidates; as Jason Diamond observed in Jewcy:

“What bothers me is the ethics question: Cohen obviously has a stake in all this, so was it fair to let him review Levin’s book? Wouldn’t another critic have been more appropriate to tackle The Instructions? Maybe a critic shouldn’t be able to come out and try to essentially advertise his own book in one of the most respected forums around. To put it in really simple terms: It’s almost like they let the author of Twilight review the Vampire Diaries.”

My own take? The New York Times Book Review knew exactly what it was doing when it selected Cohen to review Levin, and my suspicion is that they were hoping to generate exactly the sort of “controversy” that has indeed taken place. I’ve long believed that the NYTBR deliberately sets out to gin up literary controversies perhaps under the misguided assumption that being the only newspaper book review section that people still talk about is the same thing as being the only newspaper book review section that matters. In this specific case, I think Cohen is wrong, and wrong in a very simplistic way—by reducing the voice of The Instructions to a “unseemly and disastrous” imitation of David Foster Wallace (“Levin’s tutelary goy”), Cohen misses out on all the other elements I mentioned above. His attempt to dismiss The Instructions as “the Jewish novel you’ll never finish” will, I hope, prove to be a failure.

11 November 2010 | read this, theory |