The Elegant Variation: ANOTHER BOOK REVIEW CASUALTY

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April 18, 2007

ANOTHER BOOK REVIEW CASUALTY

These have been dire times for book reviews. Philadelphia Inquirer book editor Frank Wilson has detailed his woes at his fine blog Books Inq. Jerome Weeks was yet another high profile casualty of slashed arts budgets and his farewell column was widely read at Critical Mass before he started up his own blog. Readers of this blog are all too aware of the struggles faced by the rapidly shrinking Los Angeles Times Book Review.

Today word reaches us from NBCC President John Freeman that the ever diminishing amount of book column inches has just taken another body blow. The following is cross-posted from Critical Mass:

"Last week the Atlanta Journal Consitutition did a staff reorganization, eliminating its book editor position, which is demoralizing beyond speech. The AJC's section was run by long-time NBCC member and former board member Teresa Weaver, who put together one of the best-edited literary pages in the country, giving Atlanta -- which was #15 on the list of most literate cities in the U.S. (far ahead of New York(#49) -- the cultural dialogue it deserved.

Those on the NBCC board know Teresa's commitment to literature, especially novels and narrative nonfiction which meditated on America's complicated and shameful racial legacy. She was an early champion of writers like Edward P. Jones, William T. Vollmann, and Colm Toibin, not to mention Paul Hendrickson. I had the pleasure of writing for her, and I found Teresa's edits and reviewing assignments an education in and of themselves. I will miss working with her dearly.

Teresa has the opportunity to apply for a job within the company, but it's not clear what the fate of the book page will be -- whether it'll be reassigned to an existing editor, whether it will go entirely to wire copy, or whether it will be removed altogether. If you care about books, or literary events in Atlanta, or cultural discussion, this is of vital importance, especially since the paper reaches over 2.3 million readers in Atlanta per week, with over 3 million additional page views online.

If you're reading, you *can* do something, which is write to the AJC's editor Julia Wallace and the publisher, John Mellott, and advocate for the continuance of a book page in Atlanta with a diversity of voices, not simply fed by wire copy from the AP or New York Times. There are some things, I believe, that the 'all-knowing' capital markets may not place a value on, but readers do -- so it's important that they hear from you, loudly."

We support Freeman's call and urge you to drop a line to the editors in question. We're off to write our own.

Posted at 12:10 PM in Words Fail | Permalink

Comments

This is terrible news about Teresa Weaver. What are they thinking over there? I just called my publisher after reading this post, because the novelist Sheri Joseph and I have an AJC interview with Ms. Weaver scheduled soon. It turns out that Ms. Weaver is so entirely devoted to books that she is going ahead with the interview even though she has received this undeserved blow. If I were her, I'd just say "Screw it," but she really cares about us Atlanta writers. What are we going to do without her? She ran a very smart book page.

Posted by: Jack Pendarvis | April 18, 2007 at 02:20 PM

In light of the fact that book-blogging has become rather widespread, why is it such a cause for dismay when newspaper book sections decline? I would think that the decline in column inches devoted to book coverage in newspapers, is more than offset by the rise in book coverage in blogs.

Posted by: James | April 18, 2007 at 04:52 PM

Right. What was I thinking? Hooray for "blogs"! Whoopee! Let's all clink our glasses together and dance a merry gavotte. Tra la la la la!

Posted by: Jack Pendarvis | April 18, 2007 at 05:04 PM

Now if we can just get rid of all these darn books, too, we'll have it made.

Posted by: Jack Pendarvis | April 18, 2007 at 05:08 PM

Atlanta continues to embarrass itself culturally and economically. As a writer and a nearly lifelong Atlantan, I am humiliated for my city and its "leading" newspaper. What a piece of s**t that paper has become, and no one there apparently cares. Who needs literacy, reporting, and culture when you can have contests in the paper about who has the cutest dog costume?

Posted by: Jessica Handler | April 18, 2007 at 07:01 PM

The difference, James, is that when I write an 800 word review for a newspaper, I take copious notes when reading them, meticulously organize these in a Word file, write, rewrite, and rewrite so that I sound thoughtful and reasonably clear and, if I'm lucky, get good feedback from an editor (assuming she has the time).

Whereas if I write a blog entry, it takes me twenty seconds to write, "Scarlett Thomas! Cool dudes!"

So yeah, I'd say that mourning the loss of a newspaper offering quality literary coverage, or indeed taking the time to write an email expressing why this is a foolish idea, is a pretty damn apposite thing to do right now -- until we can see some litblogging network of editors, vetters, and grammatical tweakers that can offer the same kind of quality that newspapers can. (And I say this as a litblogger and a litblog supporter.) I'm sorry I never got to write for the AJ-C and I hope that Teresa lands on her feet. She deserves it.

Posted by: ed | April 18, 2007 at 10:17 PM

Gosh, a lot of finger pointing, at everyone but the reviewers themselves. Who is really to blame if members of the general public aren't reading book review sections?
For that matter, who is to blame for the much-noted decline in readership of short stories also?
Shouldn't we point the finger at the stories and reviews themselves-- and by extension, at those who write them?
This isn't to argue for a decline in "quality."
On the contrary, it's to argue FOR quality-- for compelling writing, whether in a short story or a review, which DEMANDS to be read.
If the well-trained conformist writers who dominate literature aren't providing such work, they have no one to blame but themselves.
(Which ultimately leaves the door open for those who will provide it.)
(Or, your definition of "quality" doesn't work.)

Posted by: King Wenclas | April 19, 2007 at 02:43 PM

Your unemployment check is in the mail, King.

Posted by: ed | April 19, 2007 at 03:49 PM

Thanks, King Wenclas! I enjoy your hymn! It's one of my favorites. I'm going to take your advice and try to write some good short stories next time! Why didn't I think of it before? You're the wind beneath my wings, King Wenclas!

Posted by: Jack Pendarvis | April 19, 2007 at 05:57 PM

I just want to go ahead and apologize for being snippy with King Wenclas in my former comment. Sometimes the internet makes me all giddy with excitement and I type too rapidly and hit the "send" button with a certain vigor. We can all have our own opinions! Okay! This is my last comment ever on someone else's blog. I'm afraid I don't know how to do it right! I still like newspapers with book pages. But if there are some people who want to take up for the giant media conglomerates, good for them! Everyone needs solace. Who's going to put a tender arm around the giant news corporations? See? This is why I can't comment on blogs anymore. It comes out all wrong. Goodbye!

Posted by: Jack Pendarvis | April 19, 2007 at 06:44 PM

Mr. Pendarvis, you have the Best Blog Ever!

(My apologies to the person behind this blog for my certain breach of blog etiquette.)

Posted by: kimrenemiller | April 23, 2007 at 07:33 AM

The comments to this entry are closed.

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The Elegant Variation is "Fowler’s (1926, 1965) term for the inept writer’s overstrained efforts at freshness or vividness of expression. Prose guilty of elegant variation calls attention to itself and doesn’t permit its ideas to seem naturally clear. It typically seeks fancy new words for familiar things, and it scrambles for synonyms in order to avoid at all costs repeating a word, even though repetition might be the natural, normal thing to do: The audience had a certain bovine placidity, instead of The audience was as placid as cows. Elegant variation is often the rock, and a stereotype, a cliché, or a tired metaphor the hard place between which inexperienced or foolish writers come to grief. The familiar middle ground in treating these homely topics is almost always the safest. In untrained or unrestrained hands, a thesaurus can be dangerous."

Nobility of Spirit: A Forgotten Ideal by Rob Riemen

This slim volume by the president and founder of the Nexus Institute, a European-based humanist think-tank, stands as the most stirring redoubt against the ascendant forces of know-nothingness that we've come across in a long time. A full-throated, unapologetic defense of the virtues of Western Civ – in which "elite" is not and never should be a dirty word – this inspiring exploration of high art and high ideals is divided into three sections: The first looks at the life of Riemen's great hero Thomas Mann as a model for the examined life. The second imagines a series of conversations from turning points in European intellectual history, populated with the likes of Socrates, Nietzsche and others. The final section, "Be Brave," is nothing less than an exhortation to dig deep, especially in times of risk. The notion of nobility of the spirit might strike some modern ears as quaint but it seems more desperately necessary than ever before, and there are worse ways to read the accessible Nobility of Spirit than as a crash refresher in the Great Thinkers, free of academic jargon and cant. As a meditation on what is at stake when the pursuit of high ideals is elbowed aside by the pursuit of fleeting material gain, however, Nobility of Spirit might well be the most prescient book we've yet read on what's at stake in the current election cycle and in the developing global situation. Agree or disagree with Riemen's profound, ambitious and high-minded plea, you will be thinking about his words for a long time. It's been ages since a work of non-fiction moved us this way. Read it. Discuss it. Argue about it.
Netherland by Joseph O'Neill

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Dictation: A Quartet by Cynthia Ozick

"History," wrote Henry James in a 1910 letter to his amanuensis Theodora Bosanquet, "is strangely written." This casual aside could easily serve as the epigraph of Cynthia Ozick's superb new collection Dictation, which concerns itself with lost worlds evoked by languages -- languages which separate and obscure as readily as they bind. It can be risky to look for connective tissue between stories written years apart and published in magazines ranging from The Conradian to The New Yorker. But themes of deception, posterity, and above all, the glory of language -- at once malleable and intractable -- knit together this quartet, recasting the whole as the harmonious product of Ozick's formidable talent. Read the entire review here
Diary of a Bad Year by J. M. Coetzee

Now, on the one hand, you scarcely need us to alert you to the existence of a new J.M. Coetzee novel, or even to have us tell you it's worth reading. But we can tell you - we insist on telling you that Diary of a Bad Year is a triumph, easily Coetzee's most affecting and fully wrought work since Disgrace. Formally inventive, the book intertwines two narratives with the author's own Strong Opinions, a series of seemingly discrete philosophical and political essays. The cumulative effect of this strange trio is deeply moving and thought provoking. It's increasingly rare in this thoroughly post-post-modern age to raise the kind of questions in fiction Coetzee handles so masterfully - right down to what is it, exactly, that we expect (or need) from our novels. It's telling that, for all of his serious pronouncements on subjects ranging from censorship to pedophilia to the use of torture, it's finally a few pages from The Brothers Karamazov that brings him to tears. Moving, wise and - how's this for a surprise - funny and lightly self-mocking, Diary of a Bad Year might well be the book of the year and Coetzee is surely our essential novelist. We haven't stopped thinking about it since we set it down.
The Indian Clerk by David Leavitt

David Leavitt's magnificent new novel tells the story of the unlikely friendship between the British mathematician G.H. Hardy and Srinivasa Ramanujan, mathematical autodidact and prodigy who had been working as a clerk in Madras, and who would turn out to be one of the great mathematical minds of the century. Ramanujan reluctantly joined Hardy in England - a move that would ultimately prove to his detriment - and the men set to work on proving the Riemann Hypothesis, one of mathematics' great unsolved problems. The Indian Clerk, an epic and elegant work which spans continents and decades, encompasses a World War, and boasts a cast of characters that includes Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Lytton Strachey. Leavitt renders the complex mathematics in a manner that resonates emotionally as well as intellectually, and writes with crystalline elegance. The metaphor of the prime number – divisible only by one and itself – is beautifully apt for this tale of these two isolated geniuses. Leavitt's control of this dense, sprawling material is impressive – astonishing, at times – and yet despite its scope, he keeps us focused on his great themes of unknowability and identity. The Indian Clerk might be set in the past but it doesn't resemble most so-called "historical fiction." Rather, it's an ageless meditation on the quests for knowledge and for the self – and how frequently the two are intertwined – that is, finally, as timeless as the music of the primes. (View our full week of coverage here.)
Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris

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Scanning our Recommended selections, one might conclude we're addicted to interviews, and one would be correct. If author interviews are like crack to us, then the Paris Review author interviews must surely be the gold standard of crack (a comparison Plimpton might not have embraced). The newly issued The Paris Review Interviews, Volume I (Picador) rolls out the heavy hitters. Who can possibly turn away from the likes of Saul Bellow, T.S. Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, Jorge Luis Borges, Dorothy Parker, Robert Gottlieb and others? The interviews are formal and thoughtful but never dry and can replace any dozen "how-to" books on writing. What can be more comforting than hearing Bellow, answering a question on preparations and conception, admit "Well, I don't know exactly how it's done.” The best part of this collection? The "Volume I" in the title, with its promise of more volumes to come.
The Dead Fish Museum: Stories by Charles D'Ambrosio

The best short story collection we've read since ... well, certainly since we've started this blog. And we might even say "ever" if Dubliners didn't cast such a long shadow. The short story is not our preferred form but D'Ambrosio's eight brilliant stories are almost enough to convert us. Defy the conventional wisdom that short story collections don't sell and treat yourself to this marvel. (We're especially partial, naturally, to "Screenwriter".)
The Mystery Guest by Grégoire Bouillier
*Now in Paperback*

What would you do if the woman who’d left you high and dry ten years ago called out of the blue to invite you to a party without any further explanation? If you’re French, you’d probably spend a lot of time pondering the Deeper Significance Of It All, which is exactly what Grégoire Bouillier does for the 120 hilarious pages of The Mystery Guest. This slim, witty memoir follows Bouillier through the party from hell, and is a case study in Gallic self-abasement. Before it’s all done, you’ll set fire to any turtleneck hanging in your closet and think twice before buying an expensive Bordeaux as a gift. But fear not – just when it seems that all is, indeed, random and pointless and there is no Deeper Significance, salvation arrives in the unlikely form of Virginia Woolf, and the tale ends on a note of unforced optimism. Parfait.
Ticknor by Sheila Heti

When George Ticknor's Life of William Hickling Prescott was published in 1864, it received rapturous notices, and reviewers were quick to point out that the long-standing friendship between Prescott and Ticknor made the latter an ideal Boswell. Sheila Heti has pulled this obscure leaf from the literary archives and fashioned a mordantly funny anti-history; a pungent and hilarious study of bitterness and promise unfulfilled. As a fretful Ticknor navigates his way through the rain-soaked streets of Boston to Prescott's house ("But I am not a late man. I hate to be late."), he recalls his decidedly one-sided lifelong friendship with his great subject. Unlike the real-life Ticknor, this one is an embittered also-ran, full of plans and intentions never realized, always alive to the fashionable whispers behind his back. Heti seamlessly inhabits Ticknor's fussy 19th-century diction with a feat of virtuoso ventriloquism that puts one in mind of The Remains of the Day. Heti's Ticknor would be insufferable if he weren't so funny, and in the end, the black humor brings a leavening poignancy to this brief tale. But don't let the size fool you — this 109-page first novel is small but scarcely slight; it is as dense and textured as a truffle.
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The Sea by John Banville

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Here Is Where We Meet by John Berger

We've been fans of Booker Prize winner John Berger for ages, and we're delighted to have received an early copy of his latest work, Here is Where We Meet. In this lovely, elliptical, melancholy "fictional memoir," Berger traverses European cities from Libson to Geneva to Islington, conversing with shades from his past – He encounters his dead mother on a Lisbon tram, a beloved mentor in a Krakow market. Along the way, we're treated to marvelous and occasionally heart-rending glimpses of an extraordinary life, a lyrical elegy to the 20th century from a man who - in his eighth decade - remains committed to his political beliefs and almost childlike in his openness to people, places and experiences. There's no conventional narrative here, and those seeking plot are advised to look elsewhere. But Here is Where We Meet offers a wise, moving and poetic look at the life of an artist traversing the European century from a novelist whose talent remains undimmed in his twilight years.
Home Land by Sam Lipsyte

In his recent TEV guest review of Home Land, Jim Ruland called Sam Lipsyte the "funniest writer of his generation," and we're quite inclined to agree. We tore through Home Land in two joyful sittings and can't remember the last time we've laughed so hard. Lipsyte's constellation of oddly sympathetic losers is rendered with a sparkling, inspired prose style that's sent us off in search of all his prior work. In Lewis Miner's (a.k.a Teabag) woeful epistolary dispatches to his high school alumni newsletter ("I did not pan out."), we find an anti-hero for the age. Highly, highly recommended.

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SECOND LOOK

The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald

Penelope Fitzgerald's second novel is the tale of Florence Green, a widow who seeks, in the late 1950s, to bring a bookstore to an isolated British town, encountering all manner of obstacles, including incompetent builders, vindictive gentry, small minded bankers, an irritable poltergeist, but, above all, a town that might not, in fact, want a bookshop. Fitzgerald's prose is spare but evocative – there's no wasted effort and her work reminds one of Hemingway's dictum that every word should fight for its right to be on the page. Florence is an engaging creation, stubbornly committed to her plan even as uncertainty regarding the wisdom of the enterprise gnaws at her. But The Bookshop concerns itself, finally, with the astonishing vindictiveness of which provincials are capable, and, as so much English fiction must, it grapples with the inevitabilities of class. It's a dense marvel at 123 pages, a book you won't want to – or be able to – rush through.
The Rider by Tim Krabbe

Tim Krabbé's superb 1978 memoir-cum-novel is the single best book we've read about cycling, a book that will come closer to bringing you inside a grueling road race than anything else out there. A kilometer-by-kilometer look at just what is required to endure some of the most grueling terrain in the world, Krabbé explains the tactics, the choices and – above all – the grinding, endless, excruciating pain that every cyclist faces and makes it heart-pounding rather than expository or tedious. No writer has better captured both the agony and the determination to ride through the agony. He's an elegant stylist (ably served by Sam Garrett's fine translation) and The Rider manages to be that rarest hybrid – an authentic, accurate book about cycling that's a pleasure to read. "Non-racers," he writes. "The emptiness of those lives shocks me."

The Elegant Variation

A Literary Weblog.
A Guardian Top 10 Literary Blog * A Forbes "Best of the Web" Pick * A Los Angeles Magazine Top Los Angeles Blog
"Really brave ... or really stupid" - NPR

April 18, 2007

ANOTHER BOOK REVIEW CASUALTY

Comments

MY NOVEL

WORTHY READINGS

TEV DEFINED

RECOMMENDED

THIS GUN FOR HIRE:
Reviews & Criticism

SECOND LOOK

Categories

The Elegant Variation

A Literary Weblog. A Guardian Top 10 Literary Blog * A Forbes "Best of the Web" Pick * A Los Angeles Magazine Top Los Angeles Blog "Really brave ... or really stupid" - NPR

April 18, 2007

ANOTHER BOOK REVIEW CASUALTY

Comments

MY NOVEL

WORTHY READINGS

TEV DEFINED

RECOMMENDED

THIS GUN FOR HIRE: Reviews & Criticism

SECOND LOOK

Categories

A Literary Weblog.
A Guardian Top 10 Literary Blog * A Forbes "Best of the Web" Pick * A Los Angeles Magazine Top Los Angeles Blog
"Really brave ... or really stupid" - NPR

THIS GUN FOR HIRE:
Reviews & Criticism