Marketing the Bolano
Graphs, Maps, Trees
Cynthia Ozick is an incredible writer and a smart critic, but she should really stop talking about Amazon reviews. She’s clearly just making things up:
But, Ozick noted, Amazon reviewers hold two principles in common: “First, a book, whether nonfiction or fiction, must supply ‘uplift.’ Who wants to spend hours on a downer? And even more demandingly, the characters in a novel must be likable. Uplift and pleasantness: is this an acceptable definition of what we mean by literature? If so, then King Lear and Hamlet aren’t literature, Sister Carrie isn’t literature, Middlemarch isn’t literature, nearly everything by Chekhov isn’t literature, and on and on and on.”
Okay then, let’s look at the Amazon reviews for Middlemarch:
The subsequent examination of marriage as a partnership in hell is written with stunning modernity. Eliot not only creates the disastrous marriage of Dorothea to Casaubon, but also pairs, as a comparison, Lydgate, a doctor and his frivolous, vain, uncaring wife. The relationship of marriage to society is never more well drawn, but the internal suffering of people trapped in loveless marriage is written with sympathy and cunning insight. Eliot herself had a live-in relationship with Henry Lewes, who could not divorce his wife. She undoubtedly wrote from personal experience. The insight into human nature, such as jealousy, disappointment, recrimination, loss of trust and a feeling of desperation are themes that anyone who has ever been in a relationship will recognize as truth. If you find classic literature hard going, watch the mini-series created based on the book.
Uplift indeed. If you look, you’ll find plenty more reviews like that.
I’m surprised to the extent which people still want to decry the Amazon reviewer, as though we’re still in 2002. If you look, Amazon reviews are not that bad. They’ve become something akin to a collective, public book group, where people who give a damn about good books—although not enough of a damn to attempt to become a published critic—give fairly honest opinions about what they’re reading. Yes, there are still the “ZOMG!!! I hate teacher 4 makin me read this!!!” but there are also plenty of intelligent remarks. Much more the latter than the former.
Incidentally, from the same panel that Ozick was on, this is asinine:
“I was once asked about the most devastating review I ever received,” [Carsten] Jensen said. “My answer was that it had never been written because the only person who could write it was me.”
You Might Also Like:
More from Conversational Reading:
- Disappointing Reads of 2010 A note before I start–in this post I’m not going to bash books that just weren’t good. Though there were plenty of those, I only...
- You, or the Invention of Memory Impressively, the LAT runs a review of the new book from experimental writer Jonathan Baumbach. "You" is the 11th novel by Jonathan Baumbach, who...
- Michiko on Pynchon Michiko lets us down. The problem is these characters are drawn in such a desultory manner that they might as well be plastic chess pieces,...
- Philip Roth on Serious Readers This Nerve.com interview of Philip Roth has some interesting stuff (does the man ever give a bad interview?). Here’s one piece: I think the core...
- Review of Zona by Geoff Dyer My review of Zona by Geoff Dyer runs today at The Barnes & Noble Review. A lot of Dyer-y goodness here, but on the whole...
Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.
The Names by Don DeLillo (1982)
The Box Man by Kobo Abe (1973, English 1974)
Head in Flames by Lance Olsen (2009)
Agaat by Marlene van Niekerk (2006, English 2010)
The Weather Fifteen Years Ago by Wolf Haas (2006, English 2009)
Scott: I hear where you’re coming from. And I’m wondering if the report here does full justice to Cynthia Ozick’s views. A few years ago, I talked with her about this, because I too was curious. What she’s referring to are not the old standards like MIDDLEMARCH, but the expectations for contemporary novelists. And I think her basic criticism now applies to Goodreads. Look at Adam Wilson’s wonderful comic novel, FLATSCREEN. It presently has a 3.22 average rating on Goodreads. Here are a small sampling of the criticisms:
“The Not So Good Stuff — Eli is a loser and I just found myself disliking him and feeling uncomfortable because he was so pathetic”
“This is one dark and sometimes humorous debut, but I couldn’t deal with Eli and I felt he was unlikeable and couldn’t care less what he was doing or where his life was going.”
“You know, the first 45 pages of this were hysterical. However, as it went along, it got more and more disarming, and just sad. It turned out to be a sad little book. I guess it’s supposed to be darkly comic, but I just found the dark.”
“I did not finish this one. Sadly, it is too crude and is filled with too much dark humor.”
And that’s just from the first page of reviews. So there is some basis. The bottom line is this. Authors who wish to present or depict dark or “unlikable” characters are being held hostage by readers who want something more of comfort or that is more entertaining. (And as a guy who champions works in translation, Scott, I’m surprised you would be in opposition to this.) It’s possible that this problem was always there. But now that Goodreads (and Amazon) has given voice to these readers, and a Goodreads rating can often matter more in 2012 than a serious book review, this is certainly a problem that needs to be discussed by anyone concerned about the diminishing of literary perspectives.
It seems to me that Ozick may be trying to protect her own interests: as a mainstream writer who gets regularly reviewed in the big outlets like NYTBR, she does not want to see the public evaluation of her work put into the hands of “amateurs,” even if those “amateurs” are often more insightful, more well-informed, and more careful readers than the professionals whose good opinions are essential to her reputation and her royalties. But she is spitting in the wind: the blogosphere and such outlets as Amazon reviews are increasingly the places where folks are going to go to see what is out there, what is new, what is “good,” what is worth their time. I’m a lit. professor and I know that’s what I do now: I check the ten or twelve literary blogs and lit. magazine websites I’ve got bookmarked (including this one) and, often, Amazon reviews, long before I check NYTBR or NYRB, etc., if I bother to check them at all any more. Whether for good or ill (and, in my view, mostly for good) there’s a democratization of the literary marketplace going on that spells a certain kind of doom for those of Ozick’s elitist sensibilities.
I told you this would all lead to canonical tyranny. This attitude of aesthete, not aesthete itself, is opposed to the very idea of subjectiveness. A relationship with a personal aesthete allows for other aesthetes or it is tyrannical.
Also, nobody jumps from a heartfelt read to a critical read without the advantage of time; much like, nobody jumps from high school to grad school.
Mainstream writer, Patrick? Ozick certainly has a literary reputation, but let us be clear. This is the same woman who was reduced to tears in 1997 when the boorish Leonard Riggio, CEO of Barnes & Nobles, read out her middling sales records before a crowd.
http://www.nytimes.com/1997/10/01/books/much-hand-wringing-with-gloves-off-at-a-publishing-debate.html
Let’s not forget that even the best literary voices are being marginalized these days.
I don’t think Ozick is saying that well-informed amateurs, who are often better equipped to respond to literature than so-called professionals, shouldn’t be offering their thoughts or contributing to the conversation. But, again, we’d have to hear it directly from her. The issue here really comes down to how divergent literary works, especially ones which depict difficult or downbeat perspectives, can thrive when the reviewing mechanisms (such as Amazon and Goodreads) are increasingly tailored around commercial or capitalistic motivations: star ratings that can be piped into databases or reviews which reinforce the more mainstream titles. Of course, as Scott has rightfully pointed out, there are some exceptions.
Good point about Ozick, and agreed that Amazon is a major player–perhaps the major player–in the commercialization of literature/art that Gaddis so relentlessly satirizes. But Amazon does provide a venue (perhaps, despite itself)–just as the blogosphere and podcasts like your Bat Segundo Show do–that allow for a semi-chaotic diversity of perspectives to emerge that give attention to work/writers that might have been totally ignored otherwise, and all of this occurs by means of the decidedly non-capitalistic labor of that democratized body of readers. All I know is that, these days, I find out much, much more about the literature I want to read or should read from these venues than I ever could from the mainstream review outlets, and if that continues to be the case for a large enough group of readers, then the way that mainstreaming, canon-formation, sales, authorship, etc., will (and is) changing. But maybe it won’t be an either/or, and I may also have talked myself out of a job in the meantime.
Bravo on both your comments here, Edward…I read through thinking I’d comment myself, only to find that you’d said all that needed consider. I offer a belated second.
In my previous comment, wherever I used ‘aesthete’ substitute instead ‘aesthetic’. Sorry.