Jeff Bezos did not create the world’s biggest bookstore out of a deep love of literature. I interviewed him in his Seattle office back when he was the crown prince of the dot-com crowd and recall seeing only one book in it: “Destiny’s Road,” by the science fiction writer Larry Niven, about a planet colonization attempt gone awry.
If books were not a passion for Bezos, it seems that owning a newspaper does not rank high either. Last month he fired more than a third of the journalists at The Washington Post, the paper he bought in 2013. That included the entire staff of the book review. Bezos said the purge was merely a question of numbers. “The data tells us what is valuable and where to focus,” he explained.
This is the high art of Silicon Valley: If a subject clicks with readers, they will quickly be served more of the same. But readers don’t want the same thing all over again. The pleasures of a good book review are less in being a leader than a follower — to have smarter minds tell you things you didn’t know about things you weren’t necessarily thinking about.
People read The Washington Post’s Book World for entertainment, education and serendipity. As Henry James, a pretty fair critic himself, famously said, “We work in the dark — we do what we can — we give what we have.”
Here is a tale, in the dark for 30 years, about how book reviews are an engine that helps keep the culture running. It is about what can happen when you’re not ruled by data.
Our prologue takes place in the mid-1970s. Larry McMurtry is the respected author of a half-dozen novels, including one that became the hit movie “Hud,” and a recent Oscar nominee as the co-writer of the script for “The Last Picture Show,” based on his novel. McMurtry is also a weekly book reviewer for The Post. His reviews are good: terse, wide-ranging, effective. He likes his job.
One day in 1978 a new editor at Book World named Michael Dirda calls McMurtry and, acting on orders from management, fires him. Reviewing has always been a tough trade. An annoyed McMurtry, who never liked Washington much, begins spending more time in his native Texas.
It is so boring in his small town that it proves a good place to write. One day he sees a church bus with a distinctive name, which he appropriates for a stalled manuscript about a 19th-century cattle drive. Almost no one thinks this novel sounds promising. Texas fiction is traditionally concerned with sex-crazed oil tycoons or the assassination of President Kennedy, and this tale has neither. Before McMurtry’s story is finally published in 1985, every major studio in Hollywood passes on it.
Now let’s jump forward a few years. In 1993, Annie Proulx publishes “The Shipping News,” which receives rapturous reviews, wins a Pulitzer and a National Book Award, and becomes one of the great literary best sellers of the era. Following her muse, Proulx does not go for the easy sequel.
“Accordion Crimes,” her next novel, is an account of the American immigrant experience spread over a century and a continent. Nearly all the characters have the life squeezed out of them. “America is a place of lies and bitter disappointment,” exclaims a man caught up in an anti-Italian riot in New Orleans. “It promises everything but eats you alive.” He is promptly murdered by the mob.
Somber and darkly comic, “Accordion Crimes” was contrary to the national mood, which held that history had ended and the good guys had won. President Clinton was re-elected a few months after the novel’s publication, with a substantially higher share of the vote than he got in 1992. The economy was humming and the dot-coms flowering. Right-wing agitators were cranks who could be safely ignored.
If reviewers had been data-driven in 1996, they might not have bothered with a novel they thought their readers would scorn. Instead, they slammed “Accordion Crimes.” Walter Kendrick wrote in The New York Times Book Review that it was “numbing” and “ludicrous,” a spectacle “both repellent and trivial.” He seemed offended by Proulx’s notion that America was boiling over with violence and rage.
Michael Dirda, who by this point was a regular reviewer for Book World, felt differently. He thought that in its sweeping naturalism “Accordion Crimes” was akin to the novels of Émile Zola or Frank Norris’s “McTeague.” In Proulx’s pages, he wrote, the children and grandchildren of immigrants find themselves “yearning for a vanishing culture just beyond their grasp.” The novel’s message was that the future “seldom has any good in store for us.”
Dirda reinforced his admiration by subsequently writing that the “undervalued” “Accordion Crimes” was one of eight key works since 1972 that successfully depicted “the complex and troubled soul of America.” (Among the others: “Song of Solomon,” by Toni Morrison; “Gravity’s Rainbow,” by Thomas Pynchon; “All the Pretty Horses,” by Cormac McCarthy; and “JR,” by William Gaddis.)
This was routine work for a newspaper critic. Who knows what the readers of Book World thought? Likely a few went out and bought the novel. Maybe they even liked it. But in Centennial, Wyo., where the footloose Proulx was living, Dirda’s words had a significant impact.
Proulx was working on a short story, her favorite form, but this particular tale eluded her. There were many false starts over several months. For a time she thought it would be a novel or maybe a series of stories set in different eras. She was obsessed by it but could not find the right approach. If she had been data-driven, if she had known where to focus, she would have given up and worked on “More Shipping News.”
Then she saw Dirda’s accolades. No laurels are more welcome than those for a book that has been misunderstood. “It is funny how words of praise from someone whose opinion you respect can give you a rush of courage — let you take on a piece of work that is risky,” Proulx wrote to her friend Joel Conarroe. “Such a thing seems to have happened here.”
She went back to work, writing “in a tranced condition way over my head,” she told Conarroe. Who knows exactly what changed? But the result was undeniable: The story very quickly snapped into place. She called it “Brokeback Mountain” and sent it off to her agent. When it ran in The New Yorker a few months later, it became one of the most famous short stories by an American writer since the heyday of J.D. Salinger and Shirley Jackson.
Larry McMurtry bought the rights to the story and, with his writing partner Diana Ossana, wrote a script that eventually became Ang Lee’s Oscar-winning film. “Brokeback Mountain,” a risky venture for all concerned, was one of the defining movies of the era, anticipating and perhaps speeding up the legalization of gay marriage.
For at least a few decades, McMurtry remained bitter about being fired by The Post. He never acknowledged that his dismissal got him out of Washington and thrust him toward that neglected cattle-drive novel, which won a Pulitzer and then became a much-loved mini-series. According to Amazon’s sales data, “Lonesome Dove” — 41 years after publication and five years after McMurtry’s death — is routinely one of the best-selling books on the platform. Not best-selling novels. Books.
Annie Proulx, now 90 but still keeping close watch on the troubled soul of America, told me she had forgotten about that push of praise that let her write “Brokeback Mountain” until I found her letter in her archives. McMurtry never knew — how could he have? — that the same guy who fired him paved the way for the story that became the script that revitalized his Hollywood career.
David Streitfeld writes about technology and the people who make it and how it affects the world around them. He is based in San Francisco.
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