The Beam in My Own Reading Eye

In the summer of 2010, the New York Times penchant for Great White Male Novelists was a major topic of discussion, spurred by vocal criticism from Jennifer Weiner and Jodi Picoult, among others, of the tendency for the Times to review certain types of writers over other types—men over women in general, but even within the “literary over commercial” framework, when the Times deigned to notice commercial fiction, it was almost overwhelmingly male-written. I’ve written about the Times‘ rebuttal to the data, which was Sam Tanenhaus’s insistence that his section is focused on “that fiction that really will endure,” and why I find that rationale less than compelling; I’ve also written about why I think what types of books get review coverage matters, along with the ways that coverage is handled.

So, in early 2012, Jennifer Weiner decided to look at the Times book coverage for 2011, to see what changes the paper might have made in its handling of women writers. The needle moved slightly; while 38 percent of the fiction covered between July 2008 and August 2010 was written by women, in the 2011 calendar year, women could now claim nearly 41 percent of the coverage. Unfortunately, when it came to the writers upon whom the Times chooses to dwell, designating them as culturally significant by virtue of coverage in both the daily arts section and the Sunday book review magazine plus some sort of profile, only one out of the eleven so blessed was a woman.

(Outside the scope of Jennifer’s analysis, but perhaps worth mentioning: Only one of those writers, Haruki Murakami, was of non-“white” ethnicity.)

The reaction to Jennifer’s statistical breakdown was predictable. Salon wrote a particularly insipid article about how male “midlist” novelists were the real victims—this article was seriously so terrible that I’m not going to give it the benefit of a link; instead, you can read John Scalzi’s explanation of why it’s “the most incoherent piece of enviously fumbly writer spew” he’d seen in some time. Later, when the Huffington Post picked up on Jennifer’s story, an anonymous female staffer at The New Republic used the book section’s Twitter account to accuse Jennifer of “[making] mountains out of molehills” and condescendingly ask if she was calling for “affirmative action” in the book pages. She then went on to declare, “Literary criticism can’t fall victim to numbers games. A review section should be a well-rounded meritocracy.” She further dismissed Jennifer’s statistics as “an anecdotal barometer, [and] not a measure of the state of criticism,” then, when I entered the debate, informed me that “evaluating the numbers is a silly way to get at the complicated business of literary crit.”

My basic point in that back-and-forth, which she first refused to acknowledge and then declared was “a much larger question than I can answer,” was that book critics, like everybody else, have culturally embedded biases which, when left unchecked, tend to reinforce the status quo. In this case, no matter how often prominent figures in the world of literary criticism insist gender plays no role in their decisions about what to review, male writers consistently get the better deal. And we’re not just talking about The New York Times—according to a Boston Phoenix article, NPR’s book coverage is even more imbalanced. As Eugenia Williamson writes:

“The truth is that major publishers put out more books written by men than women. Print publications write more about books written by men. NPR discusses more books written by men. Unsurprisingly, the best seller list is dominated by books written by men: men outnumbered women 25 to 11 on last year’s number-one-best-seller fiction charts. And to be honest, I’m not innocent of this either—in the last calendar year, of the 76 books I wrote about, 42 were by men and only 34 were by women.

Clearly, female novelists have neither the cultural capital nor the financial capital that male novelists do. When will people face up to that? And when will it change?”

(more…)

27 January 2012 | theory |

Nancy Pearl’s Amazon Expedition

When I wrote my notes towards an ambassador of literature, and mentioned Seattle librarian Nancy Pearl, I’d forgotten that she’d been the inspiration for Archie McPhee’s Librarian Action Figure back in the day. I also didn’t realize that Pearl would be back in the news so soon: On January 11, Amazon.com sent out a press release, announcing that she’ll be curating a “Book Lust Rediscoveries” series, named after her previous collections of reading recommendations. The way it works is this: Nancy Pearl will select approximately six out-of-print titles each year; Amazon.com will acquire the rights to those books and then republish them for the Kindle (and as print-on-demand trade paperbacks).

The series begins with Merle Miller’s A Gay and Melancholy Sound, which looks like one of those sprawling novels about coping with alienation in post-war America—you know, the kind where you wouldn’t be surprised if Douglas Sirk or Vincente Minelli had turned it into a Technicolor blowout—and was first published in 1961. (But, hey, for $5.99 on the Kindle, I may well wind up giving it a try.) Then there Rhian Ellis’s After Life, a psychological thriller published in 2000. So, from the onset, it seems like Pearl is doing exactly the sort of thing I praised her for in that previous post: She digs just that much deeper to come up with the cool book you haven’t heard about, and now, with Amazon’s backing, she’s in a better position than ever to both call people’s attention to that book and make it easier for them to read it.

Because Pearl is working with Amazon, it’s not unexpected that a backlash would occur even before the deal was official; as Seattle’s indie newspaper The Stranger put it, “many of the local librarians and independent booksellers who supported her… will feel disappointed, and even betrayed.” There are legitimate concerns about Amazon’s behavior as a bookseller, both with regard to how it deals with competition and how it is attempting to wield influence over book publishers—in particular, with respect to this issue, I’d say there’s a reasonable argument to be made against one mega-corporation accruing too much cultural influence. (As in, today it looks like Amazon’s creating a more diverse literary market, but what happens if they eliminate enough competition that some of that diversity dries up?)

It’s too easy to brand Pearl a “sell-out,” though, not to mention that it’s a sanctimonious putdown. Is everybody who’s gone to work for, or cut deals with, Amazon’s publishing division in the last year a sellout? Well, how big does a publishing company have to be before working there, or signing a book deal with them, makes you a sellout? I’ve thought a lot about this over the years, “that old punk rock question of authenticity versus assimilation” as I said in an interview during the early book blog boom. I’ve come to believe that fetishizing “authenticity” is self-destructive; cutting yourself off from the potential to wield cultural influence in the matters about which you’re most passionate just because somebody, somewhere might decide you’ve been “co-opted” is a sucker’s move.

(That’s not to say we should all go work for the mega-corporations. When I talk about fetishizing authenticity, I’m not saying every effort to live with integrity is self-absorbed or arrogant. Sometimes the terms you’re being offered are truly unacceptable, ask you to make too many compromises, and should be rejected. Sincere, reflective consideration of your values is not the same thing as a knee-jerk rejection in the name of “keeping it real.”)

All of which is a roundabout way of saying that, when I see Book Lust Rediscoveries, I see a woman who has dedicated her professional career to encouraging people not just to read the books she thinks are wonderful, but to read broadly enough to discover their own wonderful books, and who’s been presented with the resources to take that mission to a higher level—not just to reach a new audience (albeit one that no doubt overlaps substantially with her existing NPR fan base) but to obtain for that audience some books that were previously unavailable to them. Whether or not the specifics of Nancy Pearl’s deal with Amazon would make you or me comfortable, she obviously believes it’s the right deal for her. So let’s see what happens, and what other books will come back into print as a result.

13 January 2012 | theory |