The battle of the book reviews | Lionel Shriver | | The Guardian

The battle of the book reviews | Lionel Shriver | Comment is free | The Guardian:

Professional reviewers v. Amazon reviewers. A pro defends the craft.

"Still, when executed responsibly, reviewing requires many hours of reading that modest fees don't begin to compensate. We're not all grinding an axe or scratching a back. We try to put an author's work in context, to advance a more constructive argument than "I didn't like it", and to make a few halfway amusing observations along the way. We delight in bringing a fine book to your attention, while sparing you a trawl through dozens of conflicting comments by folks who can't spell. When we pan a work, hoping to save you time and money, we risk making an enemy of the author for life, while Amazon trolls can forever hide behind "woof25"."

This is a subset of the elitism v democracy argument in the arts. There's a sense in which it's a misunderstood, even false, argument. "High art," "serious art," has NEVER been popular. What is different is that the new consumer-capitalist focus on "the bottom line" has created a contest between long established apples and oranges. I favor elitism in the arts. I favor elitism in baseball. I favor elitism in anything that requires skill, craft, talent.

Pop lit is a popularity contest and always has been. That's fine. What has changed is that media now would have us believe that pop lit is more important than "literature." Yes, there are individual books in  pop lit genres that "rise to" the level of literature, but overall there is a world of difference between today's best seller and a novel by Joyce or Faulkner. Because all are written in English, it's tempting to believe they share more than they actually do. Their differences define the difference between pop lit and serious lit.

I guess the bottom line is this: what has changed, really, is there now is so much loud hype in the land that defenders of serious lit barely can get a word in. I always come back to the class I took at UCLA, 19th C Popular Literature, and the absolute invisibility of all those novelists today -- and this in a century now labeled for its "classic American literature"! The point is, there are many kinds of writing. We didn't used to be as short-sighted about the books we treasure. Pop lit is immediate entertainment. Serious lit looks at the long haul and asks questions about our lives that stay with us all our lives. But we have to be receptive to the question, which takes a varying degree of literacy.

This latter -- writing a serious book -- used to be considered a noble quest for writers who attempted it. Today such writers are asked -- but how many copies did you sell? With the answer, the writer is dismissed.

I'm reminded of a moment I witnessed at a writer's conference at the Univ of Colorado when I was a grad student. A serious novelist was giving a reading. In the front row, two pop lit writers -- one of a popular TV series, the other a successful sci-fi writer -- sat in the front row blowing bubbles at him. They, and some in the audience, thought this was amusing, even hilarious. I thought it was disrespectful. I was disgusted. I left. (So, it turns out, did the wonderful poet and short story writer Marilyn Krysl, and this in fact is how we met, fleeing this scene together, starting a long friendship.)

As I've said here before, one of the more important and consequential "careers" a bright young lover of literature could embrace today is to found an ejournal of literature, an online journal that would seek out, find, and promote to the heavens the "great serious writing" that surely many young (and even old) writers are producing today, which has not yet been able to find its audience. All artistic revolutions are supported by a small coterie of critics. Where are they today?