Agaat by Marlene van Niekerk
The Weather Fifteen Years Ago by Wolf Haas
Your Face This Spring in One Week
Trim the Fat
Bring Back the Mass Market Paperback!
Reality Hunger
About a Mountain — Read It
The Literary Saloon links me to this bit of wisdom:
Unlike The New Yorker or the New York Review of Books, in both of which the objective is to deliver the "definitive review" of a book, Tanenhaus explained that The New York Times Book Review has an obligation to publish the review that — for its timeliness and "consumer report" style — will be most important to a book’s commercial success or failure.
A couple things confuse me here. First, what is this "definitive review"? It would seem to me, book reviews being akin to the provoberial first draft of history, "definitive review" would be an oxymoron.
And yet, if I cannot get behind aiming toward the definitive review, I am even less inclined to aim for the review that "will be most important to a book’s commercial success or failure."
I’ve taught a course on bookreviewing where we look at these kinds of things. I would make the distinction in terms of perceived audience. However “general” The New Yorker and NYRB may be in comparison to academic journals, they still address themselves in their book reviews more clearly to the literati than to the average Joe or Joanne who’s just trying to figure out what book to read. The NYRB is not trying to appeal to the average reader but to the readers who will ultimately establish a book’s critical reputation. You’re right that it’s a first draft of literary history, but it is, by and large, this group or professional scholars, critics, and writers who establish the second draft of literary history as well.
There’s a great essay on this process by Richard Ohmann, “The Shaping of a Canon: American Fiction, 1960-1975.” It’s only available online via J-STOR and other proprietary databases, but there’s a decent summary of the argument here. Essentially Ohmann argues that the combination of appeals to more general literary readers by the NYT is the single most important factor in establishing a book’s status as a best-seller, while other reviews in places like NYRB establish it’s critical reputation since these are the reviews most read by English professors.
Peter,
I’d agree with a lot of what you say here, although I’ve long thought that the NYRB’s reputation of appealing to someone “above” the average reader just doesn’t make sense any more. Really, I don’t think the fiction coverage there is that much more complex than what you would find in a well-written Times review. (Maybe Ohmann covers this in his paper, but it says something that the NYRB was started in response to a prolonged absense of the NYTBR.)
Also, I think that the amount of fiction covered these days by the NYRB in particular (but also similar pages) would change its role as an establisher of critical reputations–from 1960 to 1975, the situation was different.
As for the role the NTY plays in making abook a best-seller: I’d be very surprised if a NYT review could make or break a book these days.
Yes, Ohmann may be pretty dated at this stage of the game. And I don’t know enough about publishing to know whether the NYTBR plays the same role it did for Ohmann–my guess is that massive publicity serves more to make or break a book in terms of sales than any particular review. Perhaps, too, viral publicity and other kinds of reviews on the web go further than word of mouth could possibly have done 25 years ago.
Still, you look at the NYTBR and they cover all kinds of things not touched by NYRB–genre fiction in mystery romance, chick lit, etcetera. And individual books are generally given reviews as to whether they are good or bad instances of that particular genre. The NYRB almost never even touches this kind of thing, and when it does it tends to be couched in a more cultural studies type of approach. What is the cultural significance of this genre and this particular instance of the genre? Not whether its a good or bad romance, or mystery, or western.
So I still think there’s an appeal being made to different readers, if only implicitly in what’s covered in the reviews themselves. The NYTBR tends to be more about what you should go out to get at your local Barnes and Noble next month. There’s some of that in NYRB, but to my mind the focus is more on an audience that wouldn’t be caught dead talking about the latest romance at a cocktail party. NYTBR is what English professors hope their graduates will bother to read after they graduate; NYRB is what professors display prominently on their desks to score points with their colleagues. Ha!
Perhaps its obvious that I subscribe–and prominently display–NYRB and Bookforum. NYTBR, alas, online only.