Sunday, August 19, 2018

"The Graying of 'The New York Review of Books'"

From the Chronicle of Education:
By Russell Jacoby January 06, 2014
In a world of disappearing and diminishing book reviews, every two weeks The New York Review of Books slaps to the table with a satisfying thud. Printed in a large format, its 60 pages—at least!—reassure those of us obsessed with books that the world is not totally lost. Here are serious essays by serious reviewers on serious books. A recent issue contains, for instance, a lengthy review of fabliaux, 12th- and 13th-century verse ditties, and a biography of the Empress Dowager, as well as reflections on Syria ("The Road to Genocide?") and a short piece on the fate of New York's "stop and frisk" program. A mix of long reflective reviews with left-leaning political commentary has marked the NYRB from its beginning. Neither academic nor populist, its unapologetic devotion to earnest reviews and political reportage has enriched our culture.

To a point. The year 2013 marked the 50th anniversary of the NYRB, and a series of events in New York and London celebrated the magazine, and especially Robert Silvers, who has edited it since its beginning in 1963. The assessments of the 50-year run consist of wall-to-wall encomiums. "Silvers is the wise emperor of a brilliant literary empire" is the gist of the articles and interviews. Perhaps this is not surprising. More than a thousand issues of a magazine crammed with heavy-duty reviews and essays impress critics. How can one question such an enterprise?

But something else thwarts a critical assessment. Timidity. "There is often to be found in men devoted to literature," declared Samuel Johnson several centuries ago, "a kind of intellectual cowardice." Writers and professors parade their toughness, their credo of "speaking truth to power." But when it comes to talking truth to mini-power, the magazines in which they might publish and editors who might allow it, laryngitis strikes. Who criticizes the professional journals or the general book reviews? Few or no one. The reason is obvious. We all hope to be reviewed or noticed. Even the most specialized sociologist of adolescent dating patterns harbors dreams of a major book review. Some public words about the dismal quality of reviewing in this or that journal may not help that cause. Less courage is required to attack the architects of American foreign policy than the editors of Foreign Policy.

In fact the NYRB began by way of a rare critique of The New York Times Book Review. In 1959, the novelist and essayist Elizabeth Hardwick, who went on to cofound the NYRB, published an essay in Harper's, "The Decline of Book Reviewing," which lacerated the Times book review for its "torpor" and "sluggishness." Edmund Wilson, America's pre-eminent man of letters, chimed in, remarking that the printer strike of 1963, which closed down the Times book review for three months, "made us realize it had never existed."...MUCH MORE
Complacent equals replaceable:

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