Marketing the Bolano
Graphs, Maps, Trees
The fact that Lev Grossman can write this with an (apparently) straight face makes me wonder if irony isn’t resting deep in a chilly grave.
In every generation the literary world needs to crank out certain stories about writers, the same ones every time: the Wunderkind, the Outsider, the Mad Genius, the Somber Master, and so on. The machinery of literary fame has seized upon this guy to star in one of its stories. The machinery (with which I, as a literary journalist, am complicit) needs to fill a certain-shaped slot, and it has grabbed this guy and crammed him into the slot, even though in fact he’s largely without the talent he would need to be qualified to fill it. But it’s too late. We have collectively invested in the idea that he is great, and we can’t go back, because it would be too much trouble. We’re stuck with him. And thus every time this author publishes a book it will be a Great Event, and everybody will have to read the book, and labor mightily to find something in it, anything at all, to praise, even though there just isn’t much. I wish I could put up my hand and say, you know, I hate to be the one to point this out, but this guy’s work is actually not amazing? And maybe we should all just step back, re-assess, and re-assign him to his proper place in obscurity?
But there’s no point. It’s too late. The machinery grinds on while other, better books are passed over. It’s enough to make you despair. In fact I do despair sometimes, at what a totally broken culture we live in.
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He says, “I’ve given up writing really nasty reviews”. Then he’s a useless critic.
It seems pretty clear that he’s talking about Eggers. Haven’t flipped through (I have no desire to read it) “Hologram…,” but Eggers has been phoning it in for years after making his name doing DFW-lite. “Zeitoun” was damn embarrassing, but yet the accolades.
[...] Hate This Article So Much: or Lev Grossman oils the grinding machinery Scott Esposito tossed this softball up at Conversational Reading earlier and I feel compelled to join him in giving it a Baseball [...]
You invest too much energy hating Grossman. Who even reads Time magazine anymore?
If I didn’t know the author, I might think this satire.