Grossman's essay reminds me of a lot of things I've read in science fiction fanzines and blogs over the years where people want to justify their taste and pleasures against armies of straw people marching through an alternate literary history. But I don't really feel any malice toward SF fans and amateur critics who are passionate about what they spend most of their time reading; that they don't have a nuanced understanding of Modernism is really not a big deal.
That a man who has a degree from Harvard in literature and did work toward a Ph.D. in comparative literature at Yale, has written for Lingua Franca, the Village Voice, Entertainment Weekly, Time Out New York, Salon and the New York Times, and has been Time's book critic since 2002 -- that a man of those qualifications can write something this clueless, though, is impressive. After all, plenty of fanzine and blog writers produce better-informed and more thoughtful stuff.
A few quick points before I go...
- "Modernism" can be, and often is, used as a term to describe an era rather than a set of techniques primarily associated with an era -- an era and set of techniques fiercely debated just about from the moment they first appeared -- but pretending that "Modernism" is a settled term is likely to lead you toward the same sorts of problems you encounter by assuming that, for instance, "science fiction" is a settled term.
- Books are not popular or unpopular simply because of their accessibility. Consider Faulkner. The Sound and the Fury does, indeed, sell quite well these days. Before teachers realized how much fun it can be in classrooms, it didn't do nearly as well. The bestselling novel in 1929, the year Sound and the Fury was published, was All Quiet on the Western Front (an episodic novel that is not especially suspenseful, at least not in the way we generally talk of popular fiction being suspenseful). In 1931, Faulkner's "pot-boiler" Sanctuary sold well and helped raise the sales of his backlist, but still not in the way his Nobel Prize and academic canonization did. And then a few years ago Oprah helped.
- Which is just to say that confusing what makes a book popular with how a book is written is likely to lead to distorting simplifications and confusions.
- Also, confusing the popularity of a book within an academic context with its popularity within a general context is likely to lead to distorting simplifications and confusions.
- Also, confusing a book's reputation with its popularity is likely to lead to distoriting simplifications and confusions.
- There is no link between the ideas that A.) a group of writers Lev Grossman defines as Modernists wrote books that are hard to read, and Z.) "millions of readers" "need something they're not getting elsewhere". Look at the lists of 1920s and 1930s bestsellers. Most of the names have been forgotten, but of the ones people today might possibly recognize -- Zane Grey, Sinclair Lewis, Edna Ferber, Rafael Sabatini, John Galsworthy, Booth Tarkington, Edith Wharton, Thornton Wilder, J. B. Priestley, Pearl S. Buck, Willa Cather, James Hilton, Isak Dinesen, Franz Werfel, Margaret Mitchell, George Santayana, Rebecca West, Aldous Huxley, Kenneth Roberts, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, John Steinbeck -- hardly any of them are bestsellers with books that are "difficult" because of the reasons Lev Grossman identifies. (One notable exception is Virginia Woolf's The Years in 1937, though it's a more "accessible" novel than many of her others.)
- Here's an interesting analysis of bestseller lists that is relevant to this discussion.
- Lev Grossman sez: "The revolution is under way. The novel is getting entertaining again." This is a meaningless statement outside of a personal context. Its meaning is closer to, "I've recently enjoyed more of the novels that 1.) I have encountered, 2.) have been published within the last few years, and 3.) I identify as 'literary fiction'."
- Lev Grossman sez: "This is the future of fiction." Do not trust anyone who utters such a sentence. They are likely a charlatan, a mesmerist, or a dolt.
- Lev Grossman sez: "Old hierarchies of taste are collapsing. Genres are hybridizing." This is called The History of the Novel. Those two statements could have been made at any time during the last 300 years at least.
- Lev Grossman sez: "The balance of power is swinging from the writer back to the reader, and compromises with the public taste are being struck all over the place." When did writers have power, exactly? Writers do not have power (well, at least before they establish a proven track record of bestsellers). Publishers, editors, marketing executives, reviewers, teachers, booksellers, and readers have power. And what are these "compromises with public taste" of which you speak? Are people writing on walls with their feces or something?
- Lev Grossman sez: "Lyricism is on the wane, and suspense and humor and pacing are shedding their stigmas and taking their place as the core literary technologies of the 21st century." I'll agree that within this article, lyricism is on the wane.
- Lev Grossman often sez "the novel". This is even less useful than talking in general about "the internet". It can be done. But it's seldom enlightening.
- Lev Grossman sez: "In fact the true postmodern novel is here, hiding in plain sight. We just haven't noticed it because we're looking in the wrong aisle. We were trained—by the Modernists, who else—to expect a literary revolution to be a revolution of the avant-garde: typographically altered, grammatically shattered, rhetorically obscure." Whoa, man, you are, like, soooo 1960s!
- "Lev Grossman is the book critic at Time magazine and the author of 'The Magicians,' a novel." Lev Grossman seems to have mistaken the indefinite article a after The Magicians for the definite article the.
know, my fascination with Samuel R. Delany really began when I read an interview with him in Charles Platt's book 
. I've been an avid reader of Delany interviews ever since, and so when Jeff VanderMeer asked me to do a quick interview with him for the Amazon.com blog Omnivoracious, I was particularly thrilled.
edited by Carl Freedman for the wonderful 
, I read this past weekend. (Not sure if I'm going to write much about it anywhere, because I had exactly 
, as well as brushing up on all the rest of his books, this week. Beyond that, well...
, since I've had 
from Vintage, and it's an interesting attempt to reconstruct the earliest manuscripts of 
not only because I had never heard of it or because it is billed as the first Mexican-American novel, but because it tells the story of a Mexican girl raised by Apaches who ends up in New England amidst hypocritical abolitionists.I don't usually find a plot to be the most intriguing things about a novel, but 
in the traditional way, but we thought she might be able to have more success publishing her novel herself and marketing it within the equestrian community, a world she knows well.
on Amazon.com, which ended up being good training for this blog. (It's amusing to me now that the novel, which I thought was the important project at the time, turned out to be awful, but without having done the reviews, I might never have created this blog, which has been an important part of my life for the past six years. Oh, and we seemed to have turned 6 two days ago. Happy birthday, blog!) 
, is the first of his books I've read.
(parts of which can be heard on 
, which counters some of the assumptions about certain forms that appear in "genre fiction" and are supposedly absent from "literary fiction". But I actually don't have a big problem with this paragraph on its own; it's a statement of personal taste, and there are certainly general differences that it is, generally, somewhat accurate in general about, sort of. How this paragraph moves on to the next bothers me more:
volumes 