The Danger of the Literary Lament

On Dwight Garner, the NY Times, and the state of the book review

Colossus, my new novel, is out now. You can order it wherever books are sold! The reviews are coming in and they’re strong. “Colossus earns its grand title. . . Family secrets are nothing new to family saga novels, but I don’t think I’ve ever read one with such diabolical ingenuity,” Hugh Blanton wrote in Quadrant Magazine, one of the leading Australian publications.

In Compact, Stephen Adubato wrote that “I couldn’t help but continue reading as I walked from the subway onto the street, deterred neither by the raindrops ruining the book’s pages nor the pedestrians glaring at me. Indeed, there’s something about reading a Ross Barkan novel while riding the subway—or walking the streets—in New York that adds to the effect of the plot.”

On May 11th, I will celebrate the formal launch of Colossus with Shadi Hamid in Manhattan. Tickets are still available. Get one now.

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Dwight Garner is the most prominent book critic at the New York Times which makes him, arguably, the most influential book critic in America. Book coverage has declined drastically as newspapers have shrunk or shuttered altogether, and the Times is one of the very last newspapers to maintain a standalone book review section. It is, as the critic Jan Harayda has argued, a flawed enterprise, and it has lost some of its intellectual heft. Garner, in my view, isn’t to blame; he writes with discernment, and his prose is muscular. I might not always agree with him, but I will read him.

I can only nod along to his latest column, which laments the great decline of book coverage in the United States. “Only yesterday, it seems, nearly every American newspaper, dozens and dozens of them, even in midsize cities, ran book reviews by local critics. The alternative weeklies (I wrote for many of these) had feisty and clamorous and occasionally nutty book sections. ‘Sometimes an off-the-wall review,’ Norman Mailer said, ‘can be as nourishing as a wild game dinner.’” Garner writes. “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. The death of the Washington Post’s Book World only made that clearer. To understand the decline of newspaper reviews, one only needs to pick up a semi-prominent novel from the twentieth century and see the sheer number of review blurbs on the front and back covers. Major newspapers in Cleveland, Detroit, Miami, St. Louis, and San Francisco might all have weighed in on a book. Many of these cities also had smaller newspapers and magazines that would have written reviews. Not all of these works of criticism were of high quality, but they guaranteed many novels would, in some form, exist in the public square, since a newspaper or magazine review would be included in a package that featured hard news, sports, the crossword, and movie times. A casual American reader would be exposed to literary criticism, and literature itself might have a more democratic quality; writing about a novel, certainly, wasn’t such a specialized or cloistered activity.

There’s nothing in Garner’s column that I would argue against. “It’s a grim business to linger on the numbers,” Garner continues. “In the 1960s, a good first novel might receive 90 individual newspaper reviews in America and England, the novelist Reynolds Price wrote in his memoir “Ardent Spirits.” By 2009, the year “Ardent Spirits” was issued, he reckoned the number was 20 at best. What would it be now? Two? Three?” Three, for some, if you’re lucky. This is the state of affairs. There aren’t anywhere near 90 newspapers left that would review a novel, let alone a first novel. Review coverage in the top publications is limited to writers who have already achieved prominence. Someone like Ben Lerner or Lena Dunham can expect copious engagement while the vast number of published writers are ignored entirely. The critics that remain, many of them freelance, know that to pitch on an author who is not famous is to expect rejection from an editor. More often than not, if the editor is to commission any kind of literary piece, they want it to belong to an already known discourse or debate. Or, maybe, the novel can be worked into a larger essay on a tangentially related topic. The standalone book review is on life support.

None of this is news. My less charitable question of Garner might be what purpose, really, does this column serve? Garner writes about a book every week. If most literate people know book coverage has declined, why use precious review space on a prolonged lament that breaks no new ground? The best argument I can summon is that Garner alerts the casual reader to a crisis. Your uncle in Westchester or Los Angeles who reads the Times fairly regularly, gets their news alerts, and browses book coverage might be surprised to learn about how much the landscape has withered. Garner, then, provides a public service. But what else? What’s new here? What should we do about it?

I’ve written plenty on cultural decline. I am a novelist, a journalist, and a critic. It is important to diagnose what ails us, and to not run away from it. But we’re now more than halfway through the 2020s. What irked me about Garner’s column is that it would have been more useful four or five years ago. It would not have seemed, at least, so obvious. And it could not be blamed for ignoring what’s come to the fore since. There are, in fact, a number of new little magazines that have sprung up to address, in their own way, this decline of criticism. There is my own, The Metropolitan Review. There is the Whitney Review of New Writing. There’s Souvenir, Zona Motel, the Cleveland Review of Books, Toronto Review, Heavy Traffic, and a host of others. The Nation saved Bookforum. In a paragraph, Garner might have named some of them, and thus, in a small way, contributed to a critical revival. But that’s not really the point, or one that should consume us too much. It’s not up to the Times, truly, to nurture other publications along. What matters more, for anyone who feels the need to lament decline—who is willing to admit the cultural landscape is not as robust as it should be—is what comes after critique. A more complete column from Garner might have mentioned Substack directly, and the growing number of independent critics willing to engage with new novels. On Substack alone, my new novel has been reviewed by John Pistelli, Alexander Sorondo, Kazuo Robinson, and Adam Fleming Petty, with more on the way. On Substack, self-published and independent works have a far greater chance at exposure. I’ve seen that with novels like Daniel Falatko’s The Wayback Machine, Peter Schull’s Why Teach?, Alex Muka’s Hell or Hangover, Pistelli’s Major Arcana, and Sorondo’s Cubafruit. A new ecosystem takes shape.

I don’t think a critic like Garner should avoid lamentations or pretend all is sunny in the kingdom. His failing is more the failing of a lot of mainstream journalism—there are rarely actionable solutions proffered for a crisis. A problem is shown, but a reader is not told how it might be fixed. There is no way forward. A reader must be told bad news and be left to ruminate on it until the next burst of bad news. Garner might have offered an answer to the decline of book reviewing. He might have spotlighted those attempting to resurrect criticism. He might have used his column space to write more on books—he writes once a week, and only on a single book. A year ago, I had the great thrill of Sam Sacks in the Wall Street Journal reviewing my novel, Glass Century. I give credit to Sacks, of course, for writing on a book that was published by a very small press—Garner and his colleagues rarely do this—and I think it was possible because Sacks, in his column, will write about multiple books. My review was one of three in that particular edition of the Journal. What if there were multiple Times book review columnists who wrote on, each week, three books? What if the Times made an effort to review more novels, and more that were not published by the same few conglomerates? What if, instead of acquiescing to publicity machines, the Times simply resisted them?

That might be a fantasy. It’s worth asking these questions, though, in light of the Garner column. A door has been flung open. A Times columnist can’t exactly critique the organization that pays his salary. That’s what a public editor is supposed to be for, and the Gray Lady eliminated that role years ago. It would be nice if we could hear some of Garner’s unvarnished thoughts on his employer. Getting beyond him, I am more interested in the new. What is happening in literature today? Where are the new movements coming from? What can be built? If you are an artist, how are you helping us to move beyond this stasis and decline? And if a critic, what are you championing? What sort of art would you like to see in existence? What are you demanding? It’s not incumbent on Garner, obviously, to go out and start a magazine. I can tell you that isn’t very easy. What would have been worthwhile, for this column and others like it, is to articulate a vision for a better cultural condition, one you would like to see realized. Offer a north star, aesthetic or otherwise. If that isn’t present, the reader—the young one, especially—only experiences paralysis. The culture, that way, does get stuck. We are too backward-facing already. The Metropolitan Review has run its fair share of retrospectives, but I’ve been in the mood, of late, to crack down on them. There is always going to be another anniversary of a great old work of art. There is always another famous dead writer we can celebrate. I’m as guilty of this as anyone, as I begin work, for this Substack, on an essay celebrating the 60th anniversary of Pet Sounds. But I want new musical horizons, too. Imagine if the rock musicians of the 1960s spent much of their day fixating on the pop of the 1940s. As a culture, we need less mimesis and less retrogression. A lot of this is the fault of the algorithmic internet, which rewards copycat trends and wearying groupthink. Cultural nostalgia is nothing new, though it can feel especially repressive these days. That, perhaps, is what stuck in my craw about the Garner column. There’s a point where nostalgia becomes useless. It doesn’t promise a better or even different tomorrow. One can get drunk on it, drown in it, fetishize every last dead era; I know I’ve done it. It is easy enough to do. And it’s well-intentioned; I’m not here to demonize the nostalgic impulse. The aesthetic of The Metropolitan Review draws on it enough. What I want now is a world beyond it. We’re here, we’re alive. We have agency as human beings. The United States is still too rich and too vast and too multifarious to not inculcate cultural greatness. There is still a tremendous amount of talent out there, and belief. A belief, ultimately, in the exalted presence of art in human existence. If we are divine, art is evidence of that. Brian Wilson once said that music is God’s voice, and that makes sense to me, even in my most agnostic moments. Music, writing, film, painting—we keep doing it, and we must not let the machines create for us. If we do, we’ll be stuck for good. All we will have left is nostalgia. What a sad little species we’ll be then. Let’s pray that day never comes.