Grade A Genre Snobbery Spotted In the Wild

It's Tournament of Books time again. I'm quite fond of this competition, which strikes me as being as sensible a way to award excellence in literature as any other. Plus, with more than a dozen judges each publicly listing the reasons for their selection, one is practically guaranteed good rant fodder. So far, the 2008 tournament hasn't offered anything on the scale of Dale Peck's magnificent refusal-to-judge-while-excoriating-the-entire-Western-literary-scene, but Elizabeth McCracken sure does her best when asked to choose between Junot Díaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao--which on top of appearing on very nearly every best-of-year list a few months ago recently won the NBCC award for best fiction--and Laura Lippman's mystery novel What the Dead Know. Unsurprisingly, the Díaz carries the day, but amid McCracken's explanation of her reasons for choosing it one finds the following gem:

Don’t get me wrong: I like murders in fiction. A lot. And I don’t mind the trappings of genre; I adore genre straddlers like Lethem, Lehane, and Kelly Link. But I want glorious language first, depth of character a close second, and everything else after. Cram all the Pinkertons, Shamuses, Cold War spies, werewolves, unicorns, and rainbows you want in a novel; I’ll read it as long as it has great language and interesting characters. (Not vampires, though. I can’t abide vampires.) But a straight crime novel? Clearly it was going to be Díaz in a walk.

Intellectually I know that, for the sake of my health at least, I should stop getting worked up over yet another iteration of the 'but this is good/well then it's not SF' attitude. And it's not as if you don't know the counterargument to McCracken's unthinking dismissal of genre already--while she's certainly not wrong that genre writing tends to prioritize plot over language and character, there are plenty of genre works that excel on both those counts, and many literary works that don't deliver on either. What really gets me about this particular instance of genre snobbery, though, is that it's really not that common to come across so sweeping a dismissal. One more often encounters reviewers who, while praising a single genre work or writer, hasten to dismiss the field lest they catch genre cooties (see this recent example regarding J.G. Ballard), but McCracken actually comes out and says that good writing and complicated characters are antithetical to genre writing, and that their absence is part of the definition of genre. It's good, every now and then, to be reminded of just what level of ignorance and snobbery those of us who love and believe in genre fiction are up against.

A Study in Contrasting Perspectives

Over at Strange Horizons, Adam Roberts reviews Doctor Who's third season. The first half of the review focuses on the season-ending three-parter, which Roberts criticizes for its myriad plotting malfunctions while ultimately concluding that

This question of puerility is, of course, the key one. As the Dobby-version of the Doctor was placed in a cage, I found myself wondering whether this was a deliberate allusion to the Sybil in Petronius's Satyricon, immortal but continually ageing, eventually so shrunken that she was kept in a bottle (this is the passage Eliot uses as the epigraph to The Waste Land: and when the boys come to ask her "what do you want?" she replies "I want to die"). But by the end of the episode it was clear that Davies was aiming at a lower age group. And that gave me pause. Had I so overwritten my experience of Who with pretentious adult expectations that any childishness in the show had become intolerable to me? Was I really criticising Who for being a kids' show?

When you put it like that of course it's obvious. Not only is Doctor Who a kids' show, its great glory inheres in that fact. In one sense the large adult fanbase it has accrued is an encumbrance to its proper functioning. My five-year old daughter watched "Last of the Time Lords" in a pleasurable agony of dramatic anticipation and excitement; only the fact that the sofa in our house is set against the wall prevented her from hiding behind it. She found the resolution thrilling and utterly satisfying. It ought to go without saying that fans—actual children or adults in touch with their childish hearts—will not be bothered by a Peter Pan ending, and are unlikely to mourn the fact that allusions to Petronius Arbiter and T. S. Eliot aren't more thoroughly worked through. Kids are not cynical jaded old hacks like me. There's a freshness to their spirits that the show captures precisely.

(While we're on the subject of Adam Roberts and Strange Horizons: if you haven't done so already, be sure to read Roberts's joint review of The Children of Húrin and Patrick Rothfuss's The Name of the Wind. It's a very fine meditation on the differences between Tolkien-ian epic fantasy and the modern kind, as well as a heartfelt ode to Tolkien's frequently and unfairly maligned prose. Also, Strange Horizons's fund drive is ongoing.)

Even as Roberts chides himself for taking Doctor Who too seriously, Edward Champion is laying into Russell T. Davies for not taking the show seriously enough:

Russell T. Davies, you fucking wanker. How could you do this? How could you destroy a sizable chunk of the human population in the present day? How could you write scenes in which characters effortlessly infiltrate major executive scenarios? How could you write something so adverse to the show’s quirkiness, wit, intelligence, and charm?

I find myself, unsurprisingly, somewhere in the middle. I've always known that Ed judges Doctor Who more harshly than I do, and in spite of my problems with the third season--which, in my opinion, had a soporific beginning, an exceptionally strong middle, and a schizophrenic, yet ultimately enjoyable ending--I certainly wouldn't go so far as to call it, as he does, 'flamboyant tripe.' On the other hand, I'm wary of the 'but it's for kids!' defense. It seems to me that Roberts is equating complexity with quality. Even at its finest, Doctor Who has never been complex, but then neither are many of the finest and best-written works of entertainment out there. Roberts is right to conclude that we need to judge the show on its own terms, which generally means not looking for T.S. Eliot references, but by the same token there are universal yardsticks that apply to all fiction. The issue isn't what Davies is trying to do--it's perfectly valid for him to aim for nothing more than entertainment--it's whether he does it well.

The scene in "Last of the Timelords," in which the Doctor is restored through the hopes and prayers of all humanity, is a perfect demonstration of this distinction. The core concept is actually quite strong. Having established the existence of a telepathic field surrounding the planet, through which the Master has manipulated humanity, it is, I think, internally consistent to argue that humanity can turn that link around. It ties into some of the show's core themes and some of the Doctor's most cherished beliefs--celebrating humanity's potential, embracing unity and rejecting violence. It's the execution that is flawed--the floating Tinker Bell Jesus Doctor, which fails on every level, denying the audience the catharsis they've been expecting, throwing us out of the story and leaving us frustrated. Rather than calling adult fans jaded, isn't it more accurate to say that with our greater experience comes greater discernment, the ability to tell good writing from bad?

That said, I don't think we should lose sight of the important point Roberts raises in his review. Davies and his staff are writing a show for kids, and as viewers and reviewers, we need to figure out what that means before we can try to enjoy or critique the show. We need to work out where to cut the writers slack and where to hold them to universal standards (just for the record: gigantic plot holes such as Jack shooting up the paradox machine when we had previously been told that to do so might destroy the universe fall in the second category). It might not be fair to watch Doctor Who as rigorously as Ed Champion seems to be, but neither is it fair to dismiss the show--its accomplishments as well as its failures--as nothing more than kids' stuff.

Beware, Politics Ahead

My review of Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policemen's Union will appear in Strange Horizons next month. It will, I believe, be the first time an Israeli has reviewed the book (this is obviously your cue, loyal AtWQ readers, to point out the fourteen instances of reviews by Israelis which I have unaccountably missed), although I can't say that my reaction to it is primarily influenced by my national identity. Nevertheless, there's no doubt in my mind that the novel, an alternate history in which Jews flee Nazi persecution and later a lost war for Israeli independence to a temporary safe haven in Alaska, will have a different resonance with Israeli readers than it has had, thus far, with non-Israelis, and I am very curious to see what the Israeli literary establishment makes of it once the inevitable translation appears. An early example of one possible reaction was provided this week by the English-language daily The Jerusalem Post. Samuel Freedman, who writes a column on issues relating to American Jews, dedicated an entry, titled "Chabon's Choice", to The Yiddish Policemen's Union.

The Jerusalem Post is unabashedly a right-wing paper, but to my mind its editorial stance is determined less by political conviction than by a parochial insistence on viewing the world through Jewish-tinted glasses. This is a paper that literally asks, of every event it reports or comments on, whether it is good for the Jews or good for Israel (the two are often used interchangeably) and quite often one gets the impression that, for its editors and writers, there is only one acceptable way to be pro-Israel. I had my doubts, therefore, about whether Freedman's piece would be worth reading, and at first glance those doubts seemed justified. The article opens not with Chabon but with his wife, the novelist Ayelet Waldman, and with an essay in which she describes the process by which she arrived at an anti-Zionist point of view. "Chabon is Waldman's husband, and he dedicated the book to her as his 'bashert,'" Freedman concludes, "so it is hardly a risky stretch to believe that his work of fiction ratifies a worldview the couple shares."

Well, of course it's a risky stretch. Unless the work in question is as nakedly political as, say, Captain Corelli's Mandolin, it is both foolish and irresponsible to ascribe its political stance to its author (as Ian McEwan recently pointed out in a well-deserved smackdown to a Guardian reviewer who did just this in her review of On Chesil Beach). To top off this presumption with a reference to the political opinions of the author's spouse and then present this flimsy supposition as ironclad proof is nothing short of absurd, especially when coming from a professor of journalism at Columbia University. I was therefore surprised to discover that "Chabon's Choice" turns out to be a great deal more intelligent than its indefensible opening suggests. At the article's core is an intelligent reading of Chabon's novel, one that is sadly blighted by its author's apparent unwillingness to treat The Yiddish Policemen's Union as anything but a purely political work.

Freedman's main argument against The Yiddish Policemen's Union is that it, or more precisely Chabon, "appears to find landlessness and eternal wandering romantic." This conclusion is both correct and driven by inaccuracies in Freedman's reading. Although it is true that the novel's main character, the washed-up detective Meyer Landsman, and his boss and ex-wife Bina Gelbfish "exude not the slightest fear or anxiety" about the homelessness that will be their lot when the Alaskan Jewish settlement in Sitka reverts to US control in a few months (this is mostly because Landsman has despaired of his future in general, and Bina has plans to be absorbed into the incoming American police force), just about every character they meet, including the third member of the novel's primary character triad, Landsman's partner Berko Shemets, is. In fact, the novel's plot is driven by the fear and anxiety of Jews who don't wish to be displaced one more time, and resort to violence in their quest to ensure that they never need be again. Freedman also rather conveniently ignores the fact that these Jewish antagonists are not the novel's primary villains, a role reserved for fanatical Christian evangelicals, who against their Jewish co-conspirators' quite palpable fear and anxiety have nothing but a smug superiority and a desire to fulfill 'prophecy' to justify them. Is it not more likely that as an American, Chabon has saved his political darts for the targets that affect him directly, rather than aiming them at a nation on the other side of the world?

Nevertheless, there is no question that Freedman is right when he diagnoses the novel's fundamental attitude towards displacement. There is no other way of describing passages like the following:

You have to look at Jews like Bina Gelbfish, Landsman thinks, to explain the side range and persistence of the race. Jews who carry their homes in an old cowhide bag, on the back of a camel, in the bubble of air at the center of their brains. Jews who land on their feet, hit the ground running, ride out the vicissitudes, and make the best of what falls to hand, from Egypt to Babylon, from Minsk Gubernya to the District of Sitka. Methodical, organized, persistent, resourceful, prepared. Berko is right: Bina would flourish in any precinct house in the world. A mere redrawing of borders, a change in governments, those things can never faze a Jewess with a good supply of hand wipes in her bag.

What Freedman doesn't acknowledge, however, is that Chabon's aggrandizement of the rootless lifestyle that, at the end of his novel, his characters have been doomed to, is not, as his column seems to suggest, an intellectually dishonest attempt to do away with the need for a Jewish state. It is a response--on Landsman's side, and perhaps also on Chabon's--to what the novel perceives as the great evil of territorialism. When Landsman angrily tells an American power-broker, who has just finished pitching Landsman their plan for establishing a new Jewish homeland, and possibly starting World War III in the process, that "[his] homeland is in his hat. It's in [his] ex-wife's tote-bag," he is not embracing a nomadic lifestyle. He is rejecting all other options in disgust. Over the course of the novel Landsman, driven by his fundamental decency and desire to see justice done, sloughs off all the layers of his self-definition--as a policeman, as a member of a religion, as a member of a nation--until all that's left are his convictions. At the end of the novel, he has narrowed that definition down to two simple predicates: he is the man who loves Bina Gelbfish, and the man who is going to do the right thing. Romantic? Yes. But not insipid or free of consequences.

I don't know Freedman's personal history--whether he has ever lived, even for a brief period, in Israel. If he hasn't, then it's possible that he can't understand just how powerfully The Yiddish Policemen's Union captures the corrosive effect of territorialism. I say this as someone who is a Zionist, who loves her country, and who hopes and plans to live here for the rest of her life: it can be exhausting to constantly define oneself as a member of a group, especially if that group's actions often challenge your most cherished beliefs. The temptation to fling off all but the most fundamental of allegiances can sometimes be overwhelming, and although I don't concur with Landsman's decision to do so at the end of The Yiddish Policemen's Union any more than I can understand Ayelet Waldman's choice to shirk off her Israeli identity because of the actions of a single prime minister, I also don't see that either choice is, as Freedman seems to believe, a refusal to engage with the issue at hand.

Refusal to engage is in fact Freedman's culminating accusation against Chabon and The Yiddish Policemen's Union:

Roth in Operation Shylock and The Counterlife and Roiphe in Lovingkindness drew powerful and often critical portraits of Israel's place (or lack thereof) in the existence of American Jews. Yet as writers of a certain generation, they did not need to eradicate Israel, or at the minimum treat it as a communal embarrassment, in order to depict something vital in the Diaspora experience. Roughly two generations younger, apparently imbued with the belief that Israel is a colonial, imperialistic oppressor, Chabon has found joy in, at least on paper, making it cease to exist.

And there we have the fundamental fallacy of Freedman's argument: the belief that every decision in The Yiddish Policemen's Union was made first and foremost for political reasons. Never mind that the novel's genesis is in an article, "Say it in Yiddish" that Chabon wrote ten years ago, in which he imagines a modern Yiddish nation (for which, as this blog entry reports, he has also been roundly criticized by Yiddish-speakers who claim that the language isn't nearly as dead as he suggests. All I know is that in my personal experience of Yiddish-speaking enclaves in Israel, they are precisely the kind of ghettos Chabon describes in The Yiddish Policemen's Union). Never mind that for the sake of that alternate history, Israel as we know it can't exist. Never mind that the noir anti-hero has to reject the security offered by his corrupt society in exchange for his silence and tacit approval of its sins. Never mind that Chabon has been an outspoken proponent of bringing genre tropes and conventions back into literary fiction. None of these possible reasons for the form the novel ultimately takes are as persuasive as the political one, perhaps because Freedman can't imagine any reason to write a novel other than to make a political point.

I was thinking about Freedman's article when I read Nader Elhefnawy's review of Brian Aldiss's latest novel, HARM, in Strange Horizons. According to Elhefnawy, the novel, in which a British cartoonist of Muslim descent is jailed and tortured for making a joke about killing the prime minister, is "unambiguously (and for a publisher, intimidatingly) about the present War on Terror, and Paul's torturers, at the titular Hostile Activities Research Ministry, are unambiguously American and British officials." I was struck, while reading Elhefnawy's review, by how little he actually discusses the novel as a work of fiction. A significant portion of his review is taken up by plot description, and more importantly, by his highlighting of the ways in which HARM mirrors what is happening in the real world today.

Paul also remains in custody even after paranoia has ceased to be an excuse for detaining him, as his interrogators freely admit among each other. The American interrogator, Abraham Ramson, figures out in just one session early in the novel that Paul is not a threat and that it is a waste of time to hold on to him. Algernon Gibbs, the British manager of the facility, simply stubs out his cigarette and remarks "I'd nuke the lot of them, given the chance"—which is all that matters to him.

It's hard to escape the conclusion that for Elhefnawy, HARM's virtue is rooted in its unadulterated mirroring of reality, which is entirely antithetical to my feelings about what makes good fiction. Elhefnawy closes the review by concluding that "HARM richly deserves a place in the canon of dystopian science fiction," but last time I checked, a dystopia was a work that imagined how the future might be, in its worst possible form, not a work that describes the present day. 1984 is powerful precisely because it can't be pinned down to a single era, or a single menace to our freedom and civil rights. It was famously written in response to Stalinism and then appropriated as a response to fascism, and it works equally well for both, as well as remaining a vibrant and terrifying warning in the face of present-day incursions into civil liberties, because its ultimate focus is the universal human tendency to give away freedom for the sake of the illusion of security (this universality is absent from Orwell's other anti-totalitarianism novel, Animal Farm, which is one of the reasons that it hasn't aged nearly as well as 1984). As Elhefnawy describes it, HARM is not so much a work of fiction as a work of fictionalized journalism, the kind of novel, like Operation Shylock, that Freedman deems justified in its criticisms of Israel because it traffics not in fancy but in slices of reality.

I've probably harped on this issue so often that it's become dull, especially in my discussions of Battlestar Galactica and Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, but I don't believe it's possible for a work of fiction to be good art and good propaganda at the same time. The Yiddish Policemen's Union is a good novel, partly because it can't be boiled down, as Samuel Freedman attempts to do in "Chabon's Choice," to a political statement. I don't mean to say that art shouldn't be political, or shouldn't have a point of view. On the contrary, I think one of the hallmarks of great art is that it can win you over to a point of view, not in the sense of changing your opinions, but by placing the reader in an emotional frame of mind in which certain opinions are inevitable, at least for as long as the pages are turning. James Tiptree Jr. did this in some of her short stories--as I once wrote, one of the marvels of "The Screwfly Solution" is that it makes you frightened of a misogynistic tendency in all males that you probably don't even believe exists. Ian McEwan manages it in Saturday, when he makes us sympathize with an affluent, privileged Englishman who really hasn't done enough to earn his good fortune or try to spread it around. Russell T. Davies manages it in The Second Coming, an atheist fantasy whose fundamental assumption--that humanity has, en masse, outgrown religious belief--is untenable. All of these works, however, have more to offer than an opinion. Disagreeing with Tiptree or McEwan or Davies doesn't make it impossible for us to enjoy their work, and neither is that enjoyment predicated on accepting their viewpoints. This is, to me, the essence of worthy fiction.

Professionalism: An Object Lesson

Over at Strange Horizons, Dan Hartland writes about Battlestar Galactica so I don't have to, and is, as usual, thoughtful and eloquent on the subject:

Moore these days seems almost exclusively interested in the endpoint rather than the journey. So "Unfinished Business" needs to be a story about Apollo and Starbuck's relationship, and thus crafts an entirely unconvincing sequence of flashbacks to justify the resuscitation of their on-again off-again love affair. We are expected to accept this ret-con of the characters without question, even as we beg to know why not a hint of this sudden backstory has been dropped before. Similarly, in "Hero," Adama reveals that just prior to the Cylon attack on the colonies he had led an illegal incursion into Cylon space, thus arguably provoking the machines' devastating onslaught. The viewer resents such massive elements of backstory being conjured from nowhere. This is not merely another permutation of the show's hopeless attempt to equate the humans with the Cylons—there is simply nothing humanity could have done to fairly invite the holocaust delivered upon them by their robotic creations. It also exhibits a simple lack of respect for anything but the moment. If Battlestar Galactica wants to tell a story about Adama feeling guilty for causing Armageddon, it will tell it however it can. There is no pleasure in watching a series happy to rewrite its own mythology for the quick shock (predictably, in subsequent episodes, Adama's revelation has not been mentioned again).

(If you haven't done so already, check out Dan's previous Galactica essays: 1, 2, 3. I'm particularly fond of the second one, in which Dan lucidly diagnoses the Cylons' core disfunction months before the show's writers got around to acknowledging it.)

I came to Dan's article in a bit of a mood, having previously been pointed towards this write-up of a visit to the set of Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip which included a Q&A with Aaron Sorkin. Reading between the lines, one gets the impression that the press gaggle in question was eager for a chance to bait the medium's resident enfant terrible, and he doesn't fail to deliver: first attacking the LA Times for what he describes as irresponsible reporting on his show, and then segueing to his favorite punching bag, online fan writers:

Next Sorkin ridiculed the whole idea that bloggers -- many of whom come from parts unknown, bearing grudges, perhaps, and not always a reliable sense of who they are and what they're really after -- be taken more seriously in the mainstream media than any random josephine walking down Main Street. "An enormous rise in amateurism," Sorkin said of the blogosphere. "And everyone's voice oughtn't be equal."

I do realize how futile it is, at this point, to get worked up over the fact that Aaron Sorkin doesn't understand the internet and takes every opportunity to parade his ignorance of it, but in the context of television writing, Sorkin's words are nothing short of baffling. When was the last time any of you looked to mainstream, professional publications for thoughtful, in-depth television reviews? Against Dan Hartland's Battlestar Galactica series, here is some of what the professional media has to offer:

• First we have Nancy Franklin in The New Yorker, whose alleged review of the show kicks off with the following paragraph:
  

  It’s easy for people who aren’t science- fiction enthusiasts to laugh at the genre—its earnestness, its lingo, its fans’ awestruck romance with the idea that God is in the details of equipment and uniforms and security code and how many moons orbit Planet X and why it’s called Planet X in the first place. Does it have something to do with the number ten, or is it meant to be a leaning cross, or is it a reference to the mark on Captain Blah’s forehead in the second episode of the third season of “Star Bores”? (Usually, a writer’s answer to such questions is “I called it Planet X because I liked the name.”) Making fun of science fiction became even easier after William Shatner, in a 1986 “Saturday Night Live” sketch set at a “Star Trek” convention, exploded at fans who asked him insanely pointless questions, “Get a life!” At first, even civilians who had never owned a “Star Trek" trading card or a toy phaser were a little stunned by this slap at the faithful; it’s amazing that Shatner ever worked again after inflicting that Vulcan nerve pinch. But his admonition was eventually incorporated into the fans’ self-image; you see self-aware, amused references to it in sci-fi blogs when someone goes on about something in a way that he knows may brand him as a geek.

  Not only is Franklin indulging in some of the most tired clichés about genre fans, she isn't even remotely close to her topic--how does she get from the new Battlestar Galactica to William Shatner? And while one can imagine bringing up fan reactions to a cultural artifact later in the article, how is it good writing to open with them?


• There are, of course, several variants on the 'I'm not a geek, I swear!' boilerplate. Attacking the fans is a popular option, but in her Salon article, Laura Miller chooses another old favorite--knocking down other works in the genre as a way of reminding the audience that the subject of her review is an abnormal specimen, and that she therefore can't be blamed for paying it any attention. "These shows have ranged from the passable ("Farscape") to the appalling ("Lexx," a sort of R-rated "H.R. Pufnstuf")," Miller wrote, and then got all excited over the fact that Galactica features a female character as innovative as Starbuck, who is a capable military officer and treats sex as recreation.


• Troy Patterson's essay at Slate needs no comment:
  

  Battlestar Galactica (Sci Fi, Fridays at 9 p.m. ET), now entering its third season, is not science fiction—or "speculative fiction" or "SF," or whatever you're supposed to call it these days. Ignore the fact that the series is a remake of a late-'70s Star Wars knockoff. Forget that its action variously unfolds on starships and on a colonized planet called New Caprica. And never mind its stunning special effects, which outclass the endearingly schlocky stuff found elsewhere on its network. Sullen, complex, and eager to obsess over grand conspiracies and intimate betrayals alike, it is TV noir.

• And finally, Dan Martin writing just last week in The Guardian.
  

  Before the sci-fi Channel's re-imagining of the series formerly known as "The Shite Star Wars", the genre was hardly on fighting form. As the Star Trek franchise declined exponentially with every splinter series, a spawn of even drearier efforts like Farscape and Babylon 5 sprung up in its wake. The only glimmer of quality, Joss Whedon's Firefly, was hauled off air after just half a season.

  The grammar in this paragraph is so tortured that I don't honestly know what Martin is trying to say, but I'm fairly certain he calls Farscape dreary. I realize that Farscape isn't everyone's cup of tea, and genre outsiders in particular might find it a bit of a trial, but the fact that Martin uses this particular adjective to describe the show can only mean that he has never watched a single episode.
  

This, then, is what passes for television writing in professional venues: unthinking, uninformed, its authors more interested in distancing themselves from their subject matter than engaging with it, and while I do realize that, by focusing on mainstream discussions of a genre show, I've skewed the results, I don't think this fact undercuts my point. Dan Hartland is equally fair-minded and thoughtful writing about Deadwood as he is about Battlestar Galactica. His professional counterparts, however, were so terrified by the genre of their subject matter that they fell over themselves trying to assure their readers that they weren't taking it seriously. And here, I believe, is where Aaron Sorkin misses the point when he talks about the virtue of professionalism (beyond, that is, the fact that in his personal dictionary, the entry for 'amateur' probably reads 'a person who doesn't like my work'). A professional is one thing, and a person who takes their work seriously is another. The two qualities are neither mutually exclusive nor inextricably tied--there are professionals who don't give a damn about creating something worthy, and amateurs whose day jobs are nothing but a way of subsidizing a hobby to which they devote the bulk of their mental energies. It's the latter quality that discerning readers should be looking for, regardless of venue.

I'm not holding my breath waiting for Aaron Sorkin to figure out how little he understands either the internet or the various facets of professionalism (frankly, if there are any epiphanies in his future, I hope they involve making Studio 60 even marginally watchable). It's probably best, when faced with the kind of outbursts that have become synonymous with his name, to sigh philosophically and try to concentrate on his still-impressive body of work. That said, I can't help but chuckle when I notice that the writer of the Oregon Live (the online version of the newspaper The Oregonian) article, who laps up Sorkin's dig at the amateurism of bloggers, ends the piece with a reference to "Matt Albie's drug problem."

Sooner or Later, Something Good Had to Come Out of The Da Vinci Code

...and now it has--Anthony Lane has reviewed the film:

Help arrives in the shape of Sophie Neveu (Audrey Tautou), a police cryptographer. She turns out to be the granddaughter of the deceased, and a dab hand at reversing down Paris streets in a car the size of a pissoir. This is useful, since she and Langdon are soon on the run, convinced that Fache is about to nail the professor on a murder charge—the blaming of Americans, on any pretext, being a much loved Gallic sport. Our hero, needing somebody to trust, does the same dumb thing that every fleeing innocent has done since Robert Donat in “The Thirty-nine Steps.” He and Sophie visit a cheery old duffer in the countryside and spill every possible bean. In this case, the duffer is Sir Leigh Teabing (Ian McKellen), who lectures them on the Emperor Constantine and the Council of Nicaea, in 325 A.D. We get a flashback to the council in question, and I must say that, though I have recited the Nicene Creed throughout my adult life, I never realized that it was originally formulated in the middle of a Beastie Boys concert.

Read and love, my friends.

Honestly, Tournament of Books Folks, What Did You Think Was Going to Happen?

Dale Peck judges (or rather, refuses to judge) the current round of The Morning News Tournament of Books:

Regardless, until writers realize the social compact is spiritual and species suicide, a pseudoethical pressure valve that allows Western society to pretend it’s examining its troubled conscience when all it’s doing is assuaging the guilt we feel for exploiting the rest of the world—and destroying it in the process—then the literary novel will remain little more than a series of embarrassing, irrelevant mea culpas. Speaking to the present context, this is my way of saying that I refuse to advance either of these books, even by the flip of a coin; as meaningless as the title “novel of the year” is, neither of these deserves it.

But speaking more generally—hell, you’re all just waiting for the pull quote anyway—books like these make me want to join al Qaeda.

Be sure to check out Kevin Guilfoile and John Warner's commentary, which is only about four times as long as Peck's entry. I have a sneaking suspicion that the entire exercise is nothing but a big, attention-grabbing stunt. To which I say, more! The ToB has been entirely uneventful this year, and rehearsed or not, performances like this are at the very least funny.

An Open Letter to Male Film Reviewers Writing About Pride and Prejudice

Dear male film reviewers writing about Pride and Prejudice (and, sad to say, at least one woman).

I want to assure you that I have no doubts with regard to your masculinity. I'm sure you're all big, burly men with thick and bushy beards as long as your arms. I'm sure you drink your weight in beer and belch hugely afterwards every single night. I have no doubt that you can pleasure a woman, and have done so consistently since you were old enough to tell women and livestock apart. Nothing you or anyone else can say will ever cause me or the rest of your readers to doubt your virility or your manhood.

So could you please stop prefacing your Pride and Prejudice reviews with some variant on 'being a man, I naturally hate Jane Austen and everything having to do with her. I've never read Pride and Prejudice and don't intend to, since it's a fluffy, girly book for fluffy girls, and is about love and feelings and all those things that men find icky and gross. Nevertheless, I'm certain I would hate this book, which only fluffy girls who like reading about icky love and gross feelings would enjoy, since I'm a manly man and therefore above such things. Now, about the movie...'?

I want to be clear that I'm not requiring you to read Pride and Prejudice before you offer an opinion about the film. I don't think everyone on the planet should love Jane Austen and I wouldn't be distraught to read a review prefaced by a declaration that the reviewer disliked the book (I hardly could, as I myself have been known to trash a well-loved author or two). Similarly, a reviewer who simply announced their disinclination to read Pride and Prejudice would probably get a pass from me--there are plenty of lauded books that I don't care to read simply because they don't appeal to me. It's the implicit assumption that you must distance yourselves from icky Jane Austen romance cooties that drives me up the wall. This is precisely the kind of attitude that causes mainstream reviewers to launch into a paragraph of 'aren't Trekkies funny and pathetic' before saying anything even remotely positive about genre. But while I can almost see the rationale in wanting to maintain a distance from Klingon-speakers, by trashing Jane Austen you're blithely distancing yourselves from half of humanity, or at the very least a large sub-group of them who read a well-received and highly appreciated classic author, and making proud grunting noises as you do so.

The fact that you feel justified in distancing yourselves from Austen's novel is either an indication that you truly are profoundly insecure in your masculinity, or, more disturbingly, that Austen's fiction is still perceived as girly stuff, romance novels that won't get you laughed at too much, but romance nonetheless. That one of the finest authors in the English language, the author of genuine gems full of wit, keen insight, cutting observations of human nature, and brilliant characterizations should still be on the receiving end of this kind of condescension, even if it's only from silly film reviewers, is deeply disheartening.

But crusading for Austen's position in the canon isn't my purpose today. I just want to make one thing clear, dear male film reviewers writing about Pride and Prejudice: the fact that you are either too insecure or too set in your ways to even make an attempt at one of the finest novels in the English language is not, I repeat not, something to be proud of.

So zip it, OK?

(For those of your wondering why I'm only going on about this now when the film has been out for six months, it was released in Israel this week, and the local review--in Achbar HaIr, for interested Israelis--is textbook male condescension.)

The More Things Change...

After reading so many slipshod diaries called "novels," what a pleasure it is to turn the pages of this consummate work of art. The common method today of writing a novel is to begin with the birth of the hero, shove in all experiences that the author can remember of his own childhood, most of which are of no interest to any one but himself, take him to school, throw in more experiences, introduce him to the heroine, more experiences, quit when the book seems long enough, and write the whole biography in colloquial jargon.

William Lyon Phelps, reviewing Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence for The New York Times Book Review in 1920. Apart from Phelps' insistence on male protagonists and his blissful ignorance of just what exactly 'long enough' would come to mean over the next 85 years, this passage could apply today, or possibly at any point in the intervening decades.

(Shamelessly stolen from Maud Newton.)

I'm Also Fairly Certain that "One-Dimensional Storyline" is a Malapropism

From Amazon.co.uk's review of Rachel Cusk's In the Fold (longlisted for this year's Booker award, to the surprise and consternation of Jessa Crispin and Chris Loxley), by Carey Green:

While Cusk will never appeal to those looking for one dimensional storylines with cardboard characters, this beautifully, sparingly written gem is sure to delight the discerning reader.

Alright, show of hands. How many of you, when selecting your next read, actually think "Hmm, I'd really like something with cardboard characters. The less believable, the better. And it would be so cool if this book had a one-dimensional storyline--I'm so tired of complex, interesting plots"?

Clearly, Green was trying to find a polite way of saying that In the Fold is light on plot, but overshot the mark and ended up with something that, at first glance, seems simply funny, and at a second rather insulting. If you like your books with a bit of plot, the review seems to say, you're clearly reading for the wrong reasons.

Matthew Cheney (and several others) have been discussing the use of the term 'self-indulgent' in literary reviews, with the consensus being that, if nothing else, it's a hallmark of lazy and uninformative reviewing. I've been going on about 'escapism', and how little it actually means. Green demonstrates with flair that avoiding certain catch-phrases is no guarantee that you won't come across as the worst sort of snob.