During one of the more colorful marital blowups of the American literary world, the novelist Mary McCarthy hurled a memorable insult at the Vanity Fair critic Edmund Wilson when they divorced in 1946. She called him “just a two-bit book reviewer.”
Such a barb landed with a little more force during that flush time when every newspaper from Scranton to Sacramento had at least a small Sunday section dedicated to the assessment of new books. Their combined circulation approached fifty million: one hard copy for every three people.
The book reviewer of eighty years ago rarely became as famous as Wilson or McCarthy. They were usually paid peanuts on a temporary contract, perhaps justifying the latter’s “two-bit” jab, and almost never had to face an angry author at a cocktail party because they were never invited. But the mid-20th century was also a time when the professional class of reviewers had significant power not just to affect the fortunes of a given title but to set a baseline for taste across the midsection of the country.
Not everyone loved the seeming homogeneity of the American critical consensus as shaped by the newspaper book review section. Elizabeth Hardwick, who had a lot in common with Mary McCarthy on the subject, likened their collective labor to “busy hands working to shape it all into a small, fat ball of weekly butter.” Her disparagement of the bland and generally positive voices coming out of the E section each Sunday, as rendered in a 1959 essay for Harper’s entitled “The Decline of Book Reviewing,” famously helped jump start the more tart-tongued, essayistic and erudite New York Review of Books.
The cultural role of the book reviewer is, of course, much different today, though no less disparaged by those inclined to feel hurt or disappointment at their critical verdicts. The polity of criticism has become less of a representative democracy with a professional class to channel the will of the public and more of an outright free-for-all, with the piles of multi-starred squibs on Goodreads and Amazon forming what passes for a consensus. Bad motives, hidden prejudices, and bitchy egotism have always been pitfalls for those who review books – so much more for those who do it for free and under the cover of electronic anonymity. Finding a genuinely incisive view of a book requires wading through a surfeit of irrelevant complaints about delivery logistics and typesetting.
Meanwhile the once-mighty newspaper book reviews have all but disappeared. The days when a paperback cover would proudly fly the opinions of The Albuquerque Journal or The Denver Post are as much a piece of history as MS-DOS. It is perhaps yet another measurement of what political economists call “the big sort” – the cleaving apart of the country into urban and rural tribes with corresponding politics – that the only U.S. newspaper with a healthy and functioning book review section is The New York Times: one that can still elevate one of the small titles given no other publicity and shine light on it. The Washington Post, Wall Street Journal and Los Angeles Times will occasionally weigh in with an old-fashioned straight review but their focus now tends to be drawn toward big-ticket books that already have a publisher’s muscle behind them. The number of book critics given W-2 paychecks and health care benefits is now down to just five.
As for the rest of U.S. newspapers, with a combined circulation of 21 million, you might see very occasional syndicated takes, if at all. The local bookworm with an easy chair, a garage stuffed full of publisher galleys and a features editor they see for lunch once a year – that person is now skimming Goodreads, shaking their heads.
Into this huge gap has stepped what might be called the civic book review, of which the Pittsburgh Review of Books stands as one of the outstanding examples. Almost every long time Pittsburgher can tell you about the hole that was left in the metropolitan heart by the demise of the Press and the zombification of the Post-Gazette. Yet the demise of the physical newspaper as a cultural organ leaves a tremendous opportunity for those with a certain sensibility and drive to say something important that doesn’t require access to a million-dollar offset printing press and the hierarchy of editors who guard it. Anybody with a Godaddy account and a working knowledge of WordPress can set up a book review site and fill it as they please with every last musing. What separates the ones worth reading from those full of drivel is, in some sense, the ultimate meritocracy. “Our credibility is everything,” is a phrase beloved of old-time newspaper publishers (who were ultimately kidding themselves – staying on the right side of the car dealers and grocery chains who bought all those expensive ads were the real everything to them).
With an expectation that content should always be free – the many cheapskates among us will simply go to Amazon reviews when confronted with a paywall – the key to staying relevant and vibrant among readers is the production of material that doesn’t just assess a book but helps decipher a culture in transition. Such is the job description of the Pittsburgh Review of Books, the Seattle Book Review, the Los Angeles Review of Books (where I have been an editor for more than a decade) and the many other civic reviews which may now exist only as business plans on a laptop.
Among those who thought book reviewers were “two-bit” and expendable little nuisances was the English poet William Wordsworth, who thought “that if the quantity of time consumed in writing critiques on the works of others were given to original composition, of whatever kind it might be, it would be much better employed.” He got a rejoinder, of sorts, a few decades later from the critic Matthew Arnold, who in an 1865 essay called “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time,” pointed out that these two-bit scribblers were doing far more work than telling readers whether they should buy a book or not. If they were really doing their jobs, they were locating that book’s message in the vast web of conversation and argument that we call, for lack of a better word, a national civilization. The business of a top-notch critic, Arnold thought, was “simply to know the best that is known and thought in the world, and by in its turn making this known, to create a current of true and fresh ideas.” This is how people recognize and understand themselves.
Arnold’s formulation has sometimes been rendered as “the best of what has been thought and said,” and has been frequently held out as the precise distillation of a humanities education. Losing book reviews entirely would be more than just the life reassignments of a bunch of nitpicking nerds with tote bags. It would be to lose sight of the unfolding conversation that really matters – the one happening underneath all the political shouting, popup ads, and broadcast noise. May the Pittsburgh Review of Books continue and thrive in its guardianship of the most important talk of all.
