Bellow’s regrets

Slate’s political columnist Timothy Noah takes umbrage with author and book editor Adam Bellow’s response to a two-year-old column about the Coulter-ization of conservative-leaning books in the U.S. Bellow, who edited two of the books cited in the column, hits back in a piece in the summer issue of World Affairs. But it’s not quite the riposte it might have been – while shrugging off Noah’s criticisms that the current crop of conservative tomes borrow too liberally (pun intended) from right-wing commentator Ann Coulter’s shrill style, Bellow also concedes that the contemporary conservative dialogue ain’t what it used to be.

Granted, Bellow’s piece is about more than just Noah’s column, but regardless, it seems Noah comes out on top in this battle of wits:

Whether Bellow will go to hell for publishing either work is not a question that interests me. I’ve interviewed him by phone a couple of times—we’ve never met face to face—and I found him congenial and intelligent. (Also—full disclosure—when I first started writing this column, he sent a complimentary “if you ever want to write a book” note.) Unlike [...] Bellow, I experience no distress when I contemplate conservatism’s intellectual bankruptcy. Not my religion, and therefore not my problem. But I’m not too fine a person to enjoy Bellow’s torment and vacillation in reaction to something I wrote. Yup, it sucks to be a conservative today. Have a Maalox on me, pal.

Laura Miller, Granta, and immigrant lit (and James Wood)

Granta‘s new “Best of Young American Novelists 2” issue is now out (the followup to a 1996 issue), and The Los Angeles Times looks at the under-35 authors who made the cut this time, noting that “many of the list’s 21 writers were raised abroad or are nonwhite. Are stories of transnational identity where the literary action is these days?” Taking the counterpoint is Salon critic Laura Miller, who tells the Times, “Writing about immigrants saves you from having to write about mass culture.”

“American novels have an extremely ambivalent relationship to mass culture and have a very difficult time coming to terms with it,” she said. “Because it’s supposed to be the opposite of all the things that people want from literature. People would just rather avoid it,” and writing about ethnicity or migration allows them to.

Those comments have already drawn some fire from Bookslut, and while Quillblog has never understood the obsessive antipathy some litbloggers seem to bear for Miller, she is guilty of a pretty big generalization here. Undoubtedly, many “transnational” writers come by their subjects honestly, should write about what they want to write about, etc.

On the other hand, Miller probably isn’t talking total nonsense either. Didn’t another much more celebrated critic, James Wood, sort of say the same thing in a review of Monica Ali’s Brick Lane a while back?

[Literature with immigration themes has a] momentous service to perform, which is to return fiction to its nineteenth-century gravity. This it does by re-importing into the Western novel traditional societies, with their ties of marriage, burdens of religion, obligations of civic duty, and pressures of propriety — and thereby restoring to the novel form some of the old oppressions that it was created to comprehend and to resist and in some measure to escape.

Wood’s position is admiring rather than fretful – he loved Brick Lane – but to Quillblog it sure sounds like a wish to retreat to the good old days when fiction was both simpler and more substantial.

NYTBR‘s Tanenhaus vs. the litbloggers

Knight News writer Michael Orbach has a longish interview with New York Times Book Review editor Sam Tanenhaus about the premises and methodology that go into the section. Though many litbloggers’ occasionally over-the-top anger about the Times focuses on Tanenhaus, he notes that it’s five “preview editors” who mainly decide what books make it in, by

evaluating each book individually, but in the context of their sometimes alarmingly complete knowledge of what else there is. If a writer is not bringing something new to the conversation or is not very well-established with a following, long-awaited book, or has really superb narrative or analytical skills, there’s a good chance the book won’t get reviewed. The same applies with variations to every book we do. There are a lot of books on Darwin and religion; we can’t review everyone. There are many first novels; we can’t review them all. For a first novel to be reviewed it has to seem strikingly good; that’s always been the case and that always will be. It’s unfortunate, but that’s how we do it.

The Q&A also touches on non-fiction versus fiction, what makes “original fiction,” and what makes a good review. Tanenhaus doesn’t have a lot of clear answers, though; whether that reflects well or badly upon him is up to the reader.

Orbach also talks to other Times Book Review staffers, including Dwight Garner, Liesl Schillinger, and Rachel Donadio.

Oh, and speaking of litbloggers, Tanenhaus isn’t all that impressed by them:

If they think that we don’t do enough fiction, well why aren’t you using your blog to write about those novels and say interesting things about them? Why not just tell us about all those books? It seems very parasitical after a while and the sort of echo chamber-ish and they get so much wrong. They’re so misinformed about so many things that it seems unfruitful to pay attention. They really don’t get what we do, or how we do it, and they don’t really want to know because if they do it would kind of undermine the attacks and all the rest. For instance, there was someone who was complaining that we weren’t using David Orr more often and that it was because I had some problems with Orr. I’m the guy who gave Orr a column and the reason why he wasn’t writing was because his father was seriously ill and he’d gotten some gig in Princeton. That’s why you weren’t seeing him more.

And so on. Predictably, this has provoked some responses from litbloggers (like Galleycat and The Literary Saloon), which range from correctly pointing out some inconsistencies in Tanenhaus’s position to, well, a little frothing. For example, Edward Champion scores some good points, but does his own credibility no favours when he tries to defend himself:

Let’s go back to the post about David Orr that Tanenhaus is mentioning:

“I have no idea what’s made Orr’s work sparse in the NYTBR these days. Perhaps it’s Sammy T’s tone-deaf editorialship.” [Emphasis added]

“I have no idea” should be pretty clear that I had no idea. Then again, when you’re a guy cowering from bloggers, perhaps a cigar isn’t a cigar. My speculation doesn’t impute that Tanenhaus had any problems with Orr, nor is the word “problems” contained in my post.

No, not at all. You’d have to be crazy to infer that. Sheesh.

American publishing took a nosedive last year

Many media outlets, including Publishers Weekly, the L.A. Times, and Yahoo! News, unveiled yesterday the drop in output the American publishing industry showed in 2005. The number of new books and new editions of old works published last year fell by almost 10%, with even the biggies – new titles from the largest houses – falling by almost 5%.

“In 2005, publishers were more cautious and disciplined when it came to their lists,” said Gary Aiello, chief operating officer of Bowker, who compiled the statistics. “We see that trend continuing in 2006. The price of paper has already gone up twice this year, and publishers, especially the small ones, will have to think very carefully about what to publish.”

Bowker consultant Andrew Grabois said, “Publishers are coming to the conclusion, rightly or wrongly, that the market cannot handle 200,000 books each year.” He compared the industry’s former publishing-happy tactics to “throwing spaghetti against the wall and hoping something would stick.”

Looks like their spaghetti-flingin’ days are over, folks – Bowker predicts declines in history, biography, children’s books, technology, and even religion, a category that has been selling like hotcakes recently.

Related links:
Read the Yahoo! News article

Slouching toward Bethlehem

A proposed anti-hate law aimed at stamping out religious intolerance in Britain has a number of prominent artists and intellectuals worrying that their ability to freely criticize religion will be threatened if the law passes. According to Philip Pullman and Monica Ali, two of the authors of an essay on the Guardian site, the proposed legislation does not distinguish between legitimate criticism of religious ideas and the deliberate inciting of hatred toward a specific faith group. This could open the door to an attack by conservative religious groups on anyone who criticizes their beliefs or agendas. “The inevitable consequence for literature,” Pullman argues, “will be that publishing decisions will increasingly be made not by editors, as they used to be; nor by accountants, as they now are; but by lawyers.”

Related links:
Read the Guardian essay

Inside the wardrobe

New Yorker writer Alan Gopnik uses the occasion of two relatively recent biographies of C.S. Lewis to discuss the author and Christian apologist’s reputation in the U.S. and U.K. The essay is also timed to give readers plenty to think about before the much anticipated release of the first of the Narnia films this Christmas season. Gopnik discusses Lewis’s harrowing experiences in the First World War, his even more harrowing experiences at a sadistic British boarding school, and his strange conversion to Chrisitianity after an all-night discussion with fellow Oxford professor J.R.R. Tolkien, and how all of these events influenced the Narnia series and Lewis’s unique take on religion and mythology.

Related links:
Read Adam Gopnik’s essay in The New Yorker