Even though the San Diego Union-Tribune has already made its choice to ditch a stand-alone book review section and incorporate literary coverage into the Sunday arts pages, literary agent Sandra Dijkstra refuses to give up her fervent letter-writing campaign over the issue. Instead, Dijkstra’s latest missive offers a condescending “one has to give it a chance” tone upfront, after which she launches right back into her fixation on losing review inches when the Union-Tribune “still [owns] San Diego,” by which standard it should, she appears to argue, run a book review, ad-free if necessary, as a public service.
“What do we lose when we lose a free-standing Book Review section?” Dijkstra writes. “We lose our own address, a section we can save to read when we can savor it; a space that is dedicated to books.”
That kind of rhetoric could make a cynic ask if what was at stake here isn’t so much the upholding of an intellectual tradition as the preservation of pride of placement, especially when Dijkstra’s self-interest bleeds through her rhetorical flourishes on behalf of “we readers,” as when she warns the U-T, “I too will be watching and hoping that this ‘expanded’ coverage indeed does materialize! The early signs, I must admit, are promising: How thrilling it was to open this morning’s U-T and to discover a review of Lisa See‘s Peony in Love.”
Yes, it surely must be comforting to know that whatever happens to the book coverage in San Diego’s biggest newspaper, they’ve still got room to write up Dijkstra’s clients (which is not, of course, to say anything bad about See or Peony). No wonder it sometimes seems, as Jeff Gomez observed when this all started, that “what Dijkstra is really mourning is a literary status quo that she seems desperate to not let slip away.” So “we readers” might have to turn to another section of the newspaper to find the book reviews. Is that really so dreadful a fate? For that matter, if we want to insist that contemporary literature has something to say about and to the world around it, shouldn’t we welcome the opportunity to merge literary discussion into mainstream discourse, if only by degree?