TAKING ISSUE

Terry Teachout weighs in on the Checkpoint/NYTBR firestorm and offers a valuable perspective coming at the problem as a working critic. He also admits both friendship with Tanenhaus and loathing for Wieseltier, so his objectivity can be reasonably assumed. That said, I don't think he's quite on the money but the problem lies not in his arguments but rather in the scenario that launches them:

Just for the sake of argument, let’s suppose the following:

I’m the editor of an important book-review supplement. You’re a well-known professional writer of good repute. I commission a review of a controversial book from you. You submit a piece that is extremely strident in tone (but not obscene or actionably libelous) and with whose political implications I disagree very strongly. What should I do?

I, on the other hand would have posed it this way: "You submit a piece that is extremely strident in tone (but not obscene or actionably libelous) and with whose political implications I disagree very strongly but more importantly, which fails fulfill the assignment given to you - namely, to review a book. Instead, you use a cursory mention of the work in question to launch into political screed having little or nothing to do literary matters or merit.

Then the response becomes a bit trickier. I don't think a single blogger is taking issue with Wieseltier because he evinces political ideas we might disagree with. We object because he didn't fulfill his brief as a book reviewer. (If his piece had appeared in The Week in Review, I doubt you'd have heard a peep about it.) Let me pose yet another counter-scenario - I manage to land a NYTBR freelance gig and, reviewing a controversial novel, I hand in, word-for-word, the piece in question. What do you think my future as a reviewer would look like? Or what if Stanley Crouch had been assigned to review A Terry Teachout Reader, and after a few dismissive remarks continued on into a lengthy polemic on how white people have co-opted jazz and shouldn't be allowed to write about it? Should that sort of a review be run without editorial challenge?

I do agree with Terry in one important point - a book that is so nakedly political invites a political examination and, in fact, no serious criticism of the book can occur without taking that context into question. But Wieseltier's piece was not serious criticism and that, I think, it what's giving most of us gas.

Comments

[Ed]

Right on the money, Mark. One other thing: why couldn't a newspaper with the Times' resources have given Wieseltier two extra weeks to make it more book-centric or to fit in with the tone of the NYTBR? An editor's job is to step in and tell someone else that their wares can be better. It would have been better for Wieseltier, better for Tanenhaus, and better for the NYTBR.

I submit that Tanenhaus may have failed to step in and help Wieseltier shape his piece (or there exists the more sordid possibility that this is the best he could GET out of Wieseltier, in which case Tanenhaus was screwed from the get-go). My point here: It's the New York Times, fer crying out loud, not some country bumpkin mid-sized metro. You can demand anything you want. John Leonard did. And that's why the NYTBR kicked ass back then.

Factor in the hollow promises Tanenhaus has made on these pages to cover more fiction, and you begin to see the problem in a nutshell.

[Sarah]

Well I never met a bandwagon I couldn't jump on: I read CHECKPOINT today and will have more to say about that, and Terry's post, tomorrow.

[CAAF]

Yes, I've read Terry's thoughts and, as always, value his perspective. Though I am aghast if he thinks me, for one, such a ninny that I would quash a timely piece b/c I didn't agree with its politics. That would be a vast misunderstanding of my objections, which remain -- and are ably summated here by Mark & Ed.

I was teed off for the novel's sake. I think Baker and Checkpoint merit serious treatment, even if it were to end up unfavorable -- and this review was shabby & flagrantly disrespectful.

But I will add, what Ed alludes to here, that I wouldn't have been nearly as teed off if I felt this was an isolated incident. A one off. But in context the review seems evidence that Tanenhaus' promises of taking fiction seriously are empty. And while Wieseltier may run a great ship that includes Vendler, Wood, and Ozick, among others, his use of "This scummy little novel...", etc., reminded me that he was also the editor responsible for some of Peck's most flagrant stunts — while, in this outing, evincing none of Peck's passion for books.

[Ron]

The problem with Terry's position is that it risks reducing the editor of a publication to a content procrurer, someone who simply invites people to produce material and then ships it off to the printer when it arrives, as long as it's spelled and punctuated properly. When in reality it's an editor's job to edit--and that includes killing a piece for failing to live up to whatever critical standard the editor establishes for his publication.

And a professional writer, even a bigshot like Leon Wieseltier, has an obligation to either rewrite his material upon request or accept that it's been evaluated as unsuitable for publication.

[Dan Green]

I'm late in commenting on this, but for what it's worth: I think Ron is correct in principle, but the problem is that I don't think Tanenhaus objected to what Wiseltier wrote. The review is very much like what you see in the New York Review of Books--the book as excuse for the reviewer's cogitations--and I still maintain this is the direction in which Tanenhaus wants to take NYTBR.

[Ron]

Dan is, of course, right--while I've been talking about how an editor shouldn't have to run a bad review, and others have been saying an editor just plain shouldn't run a bad review, there's no reason to assume that Tanenhaus thinks it's a bad review. And that offers pessimists more evidence as to where the NYTBR may be headed in the long run.

But I have to disagree with Dan on one point: most of the NYRB stuff I've read is better written than Wieseltier's scummy little review and genuinely uses its chosen texts as a prism through which to view the larger issues. Of course, I don't read it cover to cover, so I may be missing the bad stuff.

[Dan Green]

I'll agree that many of the reviews in NYRB are more thoughtful than this one was--but the approach is the same: discuss the issues at hand with only the occasional nod toward the book ostensibly under review.

[Ron]

I think the better pieces give their subjects more than the occasional nod, but as I say, I'm not a consistent reader of the NYRB, so I could be wrong. In principle, though, I don't think that discussing the issues through the book is a less valid approach for thoughtful criticism than discussing the book's success or failure to live up to the critic's ideal of what a book should be. Generally, of course, the former is a less USEFUL approach for considering fiction, but Checkpoint is something of a special case, not only explicitly aiming for relevance but quite possibly for didacticism.

[Dan Green]

If a publication wants to devote its book pages to "discussing the issues through the book" that's fine, but does every publication have to do this? If NYTBR goes this route, who's left to instead focus on "discussing the book's success or failure"? At least among nationally prominent publications? And the consequence of NYRB taking this route is that they don't really discuss fiction much at all. Indeed, this seems to me almost the necessary consequence of taking this route. Again, who's going to discuss books as books?