Kevin Allman

Book reviews: an endangered species?

Interesting to see that The New York Times and NPR have both done stories on the save-the-review campaign launched by the National Book Critics' Circle. From the Times story:

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, meanwhile, has recently eliminated the job of its book editor, leading many fans to worry that book coverage will soon be provided mostly by wire services and reprints from national papers.

The decision in Atlanta — in which book reviews will now be overseen by one editor responsible for virtually all arts coverage — comes after a string of changes at book reviews across the country. The Los Angeles Times recently merged its once stand-alone book review into a new section combining the review with the paper’s Sunday opinion pages, effectively cutting the number of pages devoted to books to 10 from 12. Last year The San Francisco Chronicle’s book review went from six pages to four. All across the country, newspapers are cutting book sections or running more reprints of reviews from wire services or larger papers.

To some authors and critics, these moves amount to yet one more nail in the coffin of literary culture. But some publishers and literary bloggers — not surprisingly — see it as an inevitable transition toward a new, more democratic literary landscape where anyone can comment on books.

I think the only workable solution is going to be some combination of the two — a traditional newspaper book-review section (with an intensely local focus, especially at the smaller papers) that both provides content for and draws content from online forums. And the more independent book bloggers, the better.

But if newspapers want to insist that they have an inherent value beyond the blogs — a value that's actually worth a reader dropping two quarters instead of firing up his browser — then they have to offer content that people aren't getting on the blogs...whether there are ad dollars to support a book section or not.

I'm all too well aware that stockholders are charting every burp and fart in a newspaper's quarterly profits these days, but books are news. And newspaper readers are also likely to be book readers. So the question with book sections may not be How do we save a few bucks?, but How do we continue to ensure that some of our most loyal readers don't defect to the Web?.

"of course"...?

Regret the Error notes this correction from New Zealand's Southland Times...

Six-week-old Blaze Clegg, of Queenstown, was incorrectly referred to as her in a photo caption yesterday. Blaze is, of course, a boy.

The art of the review

From a Metacritic review of the Quentin Tarantino/Robert Rodriguez movie Grindhouse:

"It's about as exciting as watching really violent paint dry."

Fiction & disasters (natural and unnatural)

Whenever there's a crisis in America, writers spring up to try to make sense out of it, to turn tragedy into art. For a few years, everyone is too close. What comes out is agitprop, or sentimental slop, or some sort of placeholder that takes up the space until another writer has the time and wisdom to turn the incomprehensible into a story that both encapsulates the crisis and, somehow, doesn't need the crisis to be a work of art. It took John Steinbeck to make The Grapes of Wrath out of the Dust Bowl and the Depression, Michael Herr to synthesize the Vietnam experience into Dispatches, Tony Kushner to forge Angels in America out of the devastation of AIDS.

It took Patty Friedmann less than two years to produce A Little Bit Ruined, which is one of the earliest in a raft of novels about Hurricane Katrina, but I think it will end up being remembered as one of the first and best. I finished it last night and am still blown away by Friedmann's storytelling and sense of humor. Not sure yet if it's her best novel (that may be Side Effects), but there are characters and passages in there that are both universal and so Katrina-specific that they're indelible. Like this one, in which the delusional narrator, Eleanor Rushing, finds herself in Houston and can think of nothing but going home:

And from all I sense, people from New Orleans now are citizens of everywhere and should have hermit crab sorts of privileges. If we burrow in somewhere, we're home, and no one should take anything away from us....

Houston is hundreds of square miles of nothing but Metairie. A warehouse for extremely comfortable people. Their homes probably don't have grease in the kitchens or dirt on the baseboards, they park in their driveways, for Chrissakes. And I've never seen so many supermarkets. One supermarket has a Barnes & Noble next door. Every franchise in the world has an outlet every ten blocks here. No one needs to worry about imagining anything because whatever they see on TV is available, and they don't have to make anything up. If they see an infomercial and want that stuff that sprays on carpets and eliminates pet odors, it's in a store nearby. If their kid sees the XBox360 at a friend's house, it's in six Houston stores when it's not anywhere else.

I heard Richard's little girls turning into Houstonians in Radio Shack that day. Too much comfort here. I haven't seen one bumper sticker. This is a terrible excuse for a city because it is just a giant suburb, and people with character shouldn't live here.

Richard can leave Tina and his children here, but he needs to go back to New Orleans. He can do reconstructive surgery. There will always be damage.