Reviews Can Be Saved
A quick rejoinder to the NY Times.
Very recently, the New York Times book critic Dwight Garner wondered where, exactly, book review coverage had gone. “Only yesterday, it seems, nearly every American newspaper, dozens and dozens of them, even in midsize cities, ran book reviews by local critics,” Garner wrote. “The alternative weeklies (I wrote for many of these) had feisty and clamorous and occasionally nutty book sections.”
“Time, Newsweek and other weeklies had serious critics who mattered to the conversation and knocked their heads together like bighorn rams. So much of this is gone. The strangulation sounds of early dial-up should have served as warning.”
Indeed, this is something we’ve long lamented at The Metropolitan Review. The collapse of this critical ecosystem is very real. This is why, of course, TMR exists in the first place.
As exciting as it was to read a critic of Garner’s stature diagnose the crisis, it was frustrating too — he doesn’t propose any solutions. The Times could review more books, especially those by authors with independent presses. Garner could highlight, too, the many smaller publications and individual Substacks trying to pick up the slack.
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When I was Fiction Editor at the late Hungry Mind Review, we hired Garner to write for us. He in turn hired me when Salon started up. I reviewed Ethan Hawke’s novel. When Dwight got it, he said he was sorry, he’d pay me, but couldn’t run it. Why? I hadn’t liked it. He said he should have “hired a Hawke-head.” This was at the same time I was ghost-writing reviews at Elle, where I was told to find out what everybody else was saying, then do a variation on that. Every time a reputation is reviewed and not the book, every time consensus wins out over dissent, the foundation of book-reviewing is weakened. That it’s near collapse now does not surprise me in the least.
And of course, the loss isn’t just amount, but attention. Attention is needed to take books seriously enough as something worth reading and writing about. Encouraging to see The Metropolitan Review trying to recapture that attention.