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A Literary Rumble

posted by Kate Good on 09/08/10 at 12:28 PM

Anyone who thinks that the book world is on life support might want to reconsider after the highly publicized debate that has captured the literary world over the last two weeks. Sparks started to fly when author Jonathan Franzen landed on the cover of Time magazine (the first author to appear there in over a decade), thanks to the publication of his new novel, Freedom. The fanfare continued over the next week as Freedom received glowing reviews almost everywhere, including not one, but two, reviews in The New York Times.
 
Many people in the publishing world noticed the coverage and shrugged because, after all, it is not unusual for the same small group of critics to fawn over the same tiny group of literary writers. But two bestselling authors, Jodi Picoult and Jennifer Weiner, both of whom have sold millions of books without a hint of critical coverage from The New York Times, decided to take a stand. First on Twitter (@JenniferWeiner and @JodiPicoult) and then through blogs, the HuffingtonPost and, well, everywhere that still covers books, they took issue with the way they're treated by The Times, the newspaper with the most powerful book review section in the country.
 
The debate is witty, smart, and as extremely well-written as one might expect when a few high-powered novelists and critics start to rumble (and well worth Googling, if you're interested in the blow-by-blow coverage). It isn't an argument about who is the better writer. Neither Weiner nor Picoult take issue with Franzen's considerable ability as a writer. Rather, they were reacting to the way most book critics focus on only a sliver of the books published each year.
 
Three-fourths of the books sold today are loosely classified as commercial fiction, an enormous hodgepodge of a category that includes anything from Jodi Picoult and Jennifer Weiner to Stephen King and John Grisham. In contrast, literary fiction, the remaining books that supposedly have greater literary merit than their popular counterparts, sells only a fraction of the number of books each year, with one or two blockbusters dominating the category.
 
Yet, the vast majority of the reviews from serious critics (including those at The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker and The Boston Globe, to name a few) ignore commercial fiction and instead, focus their powerful gaze over and over again on literary fiction.
 
It's easy to chalk up this critical oversight as just another sign that professional critics are simply making themselves irrelevant. After all, most newspapers have dropped book reviews from their shrinking pages.
 
But I wish critics weren't making it so easy to ignore their importance. We need intelligent, well-read people to set the bar high, to act as advocates for readers by pushing writers to excel rather than just get by. But by heavily favoring literary fiction, critics aren't pushing commercial writers to produce their best work.
 
And too often, literary writers coast on the critics' praise. Let's be honest, most of us have picked up a novel touted by critics as the next great American novel only to discover that it’s a poorly written cliché. 
 
Critics and publishers often argue that literary fiction needs the boost from critics in order to sell more books, since commercial fiction is selling just fine without the critics' help. But I would argue that many critics have diminished their audience and therefore their influence with their single-minded focusing on literary fiction.  Popular magazines like People and Entertainment Weekly have developed large, popular book review sections that focus on both commercial and literary fiction. These pages, with their mix of books that attract a larger readership, have become much more influential to the average reader, than even The New York Times.  
 
What, if anything, will this week's debate change?  It's hard to know. Will John Grisham or Jennifer Weiner end up on the cover of Time or The New York Times book review anytime soon? It's unlikely. Will commercial writers continue to insist that they are taken as seriously as their literary counterparts? You bet. After all, the book business, like so many industries, is in the midst of transformation where the norm is no longer quietly accepted. It's nice to see that the book world is still alive and kicking.

Good_kate Kate Good lives in Lancaster City, Pa.  She is a member of Blossom Hill Mennonite Church, Lancaster. She is assistant publisher at Good Books.