In yesterday’s items about the Almost Moon “controversy,” I mentioned a possibly tendency towards inflated invective in the NYTBR, but I could only come up with a handful of examples, and asked if you could think of any others. You mentioned Daniel Mendelsohn‘s rejection of Jonathan Franzen (“[his] very admissions of weakness, of insufficiency, smack of showboating, of grandiose self-congratulation”) and just about anything William Logan has written for the Review during Sam Tanenhaus‘s reign (which I think is a bit much, really; some of those reviews, sure, but all?)
(Another reader mentioned Michiko Kakutani, citing her reviews of The Almost Moon and Michael Cunningham‘s Flesh and Blood, but while her frequent excoriation of second novels is well-known, it’s not something anybody can hold the Review accountable for.)
As I commented yesterday, beyond the question of whether or not any of the reviews in question are too “vicious,” there’s an interesting question as to whether or not it would be so awful if they were. Awful for the writers who get panned, perhaps, but then they almost always seem to get invited to write for the section soon after. And, let’s face it, it certainly keeps people talking about the Review in a way that they aren’t talking about just about any other book review section in the country. I mean, let’s face it, if you weren’t in the NBCC in the first place, or a publicist looking to get your frontlist books covered, did you really pay that much attention to, say, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution or the San Diego Union Tribune before their review sections were “gutted”? Did the nation’s readers argue over anything they printed?