In 1981, Donald Barthelme published “Challenge,” a funny and weirdly prescient short story, in The New Yorker. Its premise was that Japanese book-reviewing technology — bots that deliver “sleek, space-efficient” pieces — were putting American critics out to pasture. The death of the American book review was nigh.
One machine, the Nakamichi Model 500, was capable of “deconstructing a book of average length in seven seconds, with 0.5 distortion, signal-to-noise ratio of 124 db, and a damping factor of 60 — a technological feat well beyond the capacity of any U.S. review.” By comparison, Barthelme wrote, American book notices tended to be bulbous and plodding and written by John Kenneth Galbraith or Joyce Carol Oates.
Other units had different accessories and upgrades. The Sanyo Model 350 suppressed undue enthusiasm with a “special microprocessor unit.” Nikko’s Model 770 came equipped with a three-foot-long “clip-on extension probe that actually reached out and touched the reader’s heartstrings, aided by dual LED heartstring meters.” The bots were similar, but each had their quirks:
Close readers (“review nuts”) could discern a mushiness in the midrange in some Mitsubishi reviews; the upper registers of a Yamaha review were, in some models, unpleasantly shrill; Subaru’s notices were thought to be “charitable.” (Sansui’s use of industrial robots in book-review assembly was not in itself considered innovative; The New York Review of Books had been using robots, usually British, for years.)
There’s a lot going on in “Challenge,” as there always is in Barthelme’s cool and surreal fiction. For one thing, the story is an unconventional relic of the “Japan Panic” of the 1980s, when anxious Americans, especially those with stock portfolios, feared Japan’s industrial dominance might supersede our own. The Japanese were making better cars and spawning sharper technology. When Mitsubishi bought a majority stake in Rockefeller Center at the end of the decade, few missed the symbolism.
“Challenge” was also a scattershot satire of the state of American book criticism. Barthelme zinged Galbraith and Oates and the Times critic Christopher Lehmann-Haupt for being pokey, the Times Literary Supplement for paying its reviewers chump change and Publishers Weekly “for its exclusive employment of 13-year-old girls.” Forty-five years later, “Challenge” has lost little of its subversive electricity.
Barthelme’s story was prophetic. Even before the rise of A.I. there was a near-extinction-level wipeout of the American book review. It has gotten eerily quiet out there — it’s as if the bees, those kibitzing and sometimes stinging pollinators, have vanished — and few have noticed.
Only yesterday, it seems, nearly every American newspaper, dozens and dozens of them, even in midsize cities, ran book reviews by local critics. The alternative weeklies (I wrote for many of these) had feisty and clamorous and occasionally nutty book sections. “Sometimes an off-the-wall review,” Norman Mailer said, “can be as nourishing as a wild game dinner.”
Time, Newsweek and other weeklies had serious critics who mattered to the conversation and knocked their heads together like bighorn rams. So much of this is gone. The strangulation sounds of early dial-up should have served as warning.
The recent shutting of The Washington Post’s Book World, one of the nation’s last free-standing books sections, feels like the end of something larger. It marks an inflection point in America’s literature, which can’t thrive without serious, fervent and quick-witted criticism: public talk, back and forth, between competing voices, in something like real time. The thin crust of American intellectual life, long flaking, has begun to show bald patches.
It’s a grim business to linger on the numbers. In the 1960s, a good first novel might receive 90 individual newspaper reviews in America and England, the novelist Reynolds Price wrote in his memoir “Ardent Spirits.” By 2009, the year “Ardent Spirits” was issued, he reckoned the number was 20 at best. What would it be now? Two? Three?
A few magazines, of course, still run inspired book criticism; essential trees are still standing though the vast underbrush is gone. And the online discourse has its moments. But here’s another number: Not long ago, someone estimated that there were seven full-time book critics left in America. With The Post’s Book World gone, that number has dropped to five.
As a lonely and shellshocked survivor of this decimation, I find it hard not to envy the critics in London, which still has at least seven daily or Sunday papers in which a serious author might hope for a review. The literary debate over there is more like a boisterous dinner party and less like a Morse code dispatch between distant frigates passing in the night.
It hasn’t helped that so few novelists now routinely write criticism. Martin Amis, among other novelists of the recent past, felt it was a duty — a way to keep standards up and fight the general trend toward what he termed stupefaction.
Now come A.I. assistants like Claude, Gemini, ChatGPT and Perplexity, here to either a) help with our homework, or b) end the world. The anxiety around these intellectual butlers and all-knowing collaborators isn’t so unlike the Japan Panic of the ’80s (minus the racism). A foreign force has arrived, a baffled populace recognizes. What does it intend?
A freelance critic, writing for The Times Book Review, has already been busted for purportedly using A.I. to fashion part of a review. There’ll be more like him. These products are wonders — they’ve read and digested far more books than Harold Bloom, that great literary dandy in the sky who, the title of a new collection of his letters tells us, was “The Man Who Read Everything.”
But here’s a catch with A.I. It’s easy to tell when a reference, or a comparison, or a sentence, doesn’t belong to a writer. Erudition and style aren’t forgeable for long; it still must be earned. As for A.I.’s sleek, space-efficient text, we’ve already grown accustomed to what that sounds like — the flat, consistent tone, the pert little summary bits, the repetitions, the impersonal and fluorescent-lit mood. Reading it, you feel you’ve been through the desert on a horse with no name.
It will get much better. Like a Nakamichi Model 500, perhaps, A.I. models will probably someday be programmed to calculate range and trajectory and to spit out rich critical prose. But as John Berryman put it in one of his “Dream Songs,” speaking of dead-on-their-feet essayists everywhere, “When the mind dies it exudes rich critical prose.” A.I. machinations can reflect the consensus, but it’s part of a real critic’s job to not go flopping along with the times, to wage guerrilla warfare on that consensus. Je suis Claude? Nix to that.
Book reviews may survive if only because, as Elizabeth Hardwick observed, publishers need praise for their new releases “as an Easter basket needs shredded green paper under the eggs.” But the breakup of the monoculture, the rise of algorithms and the flattening of taste mean that critics will never, for better and worse, have the consecrating power they once did.
Pauline Kael, Albert Murray, Lester Bangs, Edmund Wilson and Kenneth Tynan — five of my critical heroes — knew what to notice, in ways that can’t be taught or imitated, and they knew how to make their prose and their ideas stick. I’m cheered by the young critics out there, swimming in this sea without drowning in it, trying not to be cast into gaol by their creditors, and working to make certain that the last snatch of book criticism isn’t three fire emojis, two jazz-hands, a crying face and a facepalm.
Dwight Garner has been a book critic for The Times since 2008, and before that was an editor at the Book Review for a decade.
The post Where Have All the Book Reviews Gone? appeared first on New York Times.
