Give NY Sun book critic Adam Kirsch credit for openly admitting that the National Book Critics Circle‘s responses to the so-called book review crisis are a lot like “rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.” One wishes, though, that Kirsch had followed that line of thinking through to its logical conclusion—namely, what it means when the self-assigned guardians of book review culture, whatever that means, “demonstrate a basically flawed understanding of what book reviews are for.” Instead, he sidesteps into another tired attack on the Internet, which he first has to explain to the apparently rock-underdwelling readership of the Sun: “People who write about books on the Internet, and they are surprisingly numerous, do not call themselves reviewers, but bloggers.”
After that auspicious beginning, Kirsch tosses in all the usual swipes about bloggers as resentful outsiders and how real literary criticism could never flourish in the blog format, because “literary criticism is only worth having if it at least strives to be literary in its own right, with a scope, complexity, and authority that no blogger I know even wants to achieve.” Which raises two questions: How many bloggers does Adam Kirsch actually know (meeting me at a book party doesn’t count!), and when was the last time he actually read [insert the name of your least favorite critic]?
Kirsch is a fine critic, no question—The Wounded Surgeon will change the way you look at mid-20th-century American poetry—but blaming the NBCC’s current thumb-twiddling posture on pressure from the blogs is, to borrow his own vocabulary, a dead end.