The Novelist’s Complicity | Hacker News Reader

The Novelist’s Complicity

nybooks.com

26 pointslxm16 comments

> The democratization of reading tastes has gone hand in hand with the demise of the critic, and with that, the idea of reading a novel because certain people with discernibly good judgment think that the book is worth reading.

This seemed wrong to me on a glance, and I wasn't sure why at first.

I think it's the phrase "discernibly good judgment." When I look to see if I should follow any recommendation, whether from someone who is formally a critic or not, one of the first things I do is try to figure out if the person is admirable, accomplished, and — yes, if they have good judgment.

To be frank, most professional critics fail that test.

The best critics are typically those who are also accomplished, interesting people with a wide variety of interests and life experiences to draw on.

Take George Orwell. Most people would agree he was an excellent writer and lived a very interesting life. He fought in the Spanish Civil War and was wounded by a fascist sniper. He turned out a number of classic works — 1984 spawned a whole set of metaphors and words that entered the English language.

He's also an excellent critic of both literature and society. "Politics and the English Language" and "What is Fascism?" are both extremely astute reads that make you smarter.

But when I look at most critics, they don't measure up at all to Orwell. They're often very privileged people, for whom political connections and politicking were of primary importance in getting their role as a professional critic — not anything like an objective standard of merit or accomplishment.

Most of them seem, frankly, unaccomplished.

So I'll listen to Orwell on literature and culture — an accomplished person with many insights — and I'll read carefully the reflections of Edward O. Thorpe when he talks about corruption in finance, or Peter Norvig when he writes on experiment design and critiques sloppy thought in the sciences.

But the average critic? The author of the piece thinks they have "discernibly good judgment"? Why would he think that? It seems to be... well, frankly, false.

Yes. In truth, I am far more likely to be swayed to read a book because some intellectual wrote a positive review, than because of crowdsourced ratings/recommendations.

But that intellectual will not be someone who is placed before me as a generic source of "discernibly good judgement". I'll do the discerning for my self. The critic I follow we usually be a blogger or columnist who I have followed for posts that they write abou their own field of expertise.

> Amazon and Goodreads ratings, and numerous online book-reviewing sites, have all contributed to and reflected the democratization of the arbitration of literary taste. But such democratization is not intrinsically a good thing.

It hadn't occurred to me before this article but after thinking about it I do depend upon Amazon/Goodreads ratings in large portion when choosing my next book.. Upon re-examination I think I'm going to factor in more book critics' opinions into my selection process.

https://www.npr.org/books/

https://www.nytimes.com/section/books

Also:

http://www.nybooks.com/ (Source of TFA)

http://www.lrb.co.uk/

https://www.kirkusreviews.com/

The problem that Harold Bloom frames in his 1994 The Western Canon is that with a finite amount of time to read, we ought to choose wisely. A good literary critic helps with that, and The Western Canon is a great example.

https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss/136-9956209-9412407?...

> democratization is not intrinsically a good thing

Isn't that heretical, and deserving of - what's the word nowadays ... oh, yeah - "consequences"?

Being told how to think by experts in literary professions has always been orthodoxy. The heresy is to contractict them.

A great example of the problem of even reading Amazon reviews: I was looking for a translation of the Analects by Confucius (more correctly, Lunyu by Kongzi).

A well-respected translation was criticized by at least one Amazon reviewer for its commentary, which veered off-topic, included the editor's own ideas, etc. I ruled out that translation.

Then I read a scholarly review of the translations (found via Google Scholar) and learned that such commentary is the proper way and that it's been done that way for centuries or more. The editor is meant to interact with the Kongzi's text.

If I didn't read the scholarly review, I would have believed the Amazon reviewer. It was a lesson to me - one I finally accepted: No matter how smart you think you are, unless you have expertise in a field then you lack the ability to discern the truth from ignorance. Persuasiveness is not a measure of truth. You're a sucker, a mark, if you think otherwise.

I no longer read Amazon reviews for such purposes and don't trust Wikipedia either. Also, note that reading the Amazon review actually hurt me; bad information is worse than no information.

I dunno. Sounds like the Amazon review was factually correct. The difference was whether what it identified was good or bad.

The answer to that surely depends on what you need.

My friend is a car expert. I might read a positive review of a car which said that its small engine made it easy to control. He would say that a small engine meant it had poor top speed and acceleration and therefore sucked.

Surely all I learned from this is that the car has a small engine. Someone who drives a lot of cars may want a fun one. Someone who reads a lot of translations of the analects may want a dialogue that contributes to the field. After all, if such a scholar wanted a litteral translation they would read it in the original language.

Same phenomenon, though, occurs with TV/Film. Brett Easton Ellis's podcast riffs (extensively, caustically and yet wonderfully) on this "democratization of art" as it occurs in TV & Film.

A large part of this is the mass culture problem generally.

Dwight MacDonald wrote of this in the 1950s:

https://is.muni.cz/el/1421/jaro2008/ESB032/um/5136660/MacDon...

The "literary critic" should be revived as a website, or as a feature of existing websites like GoodReads. I have no idea what recent fiction to read, and would love to just enter a list of authors ("Cormac McCarthy", "John Darnielle") into a search engine and find critics to follow...

Most leading book reviews are available online. Try:

* NY Times Book Review: https://www.nytimes.com/section/books/review

* New York Review of Books

* London Review of Books

* New Yorker

Here are a couple of aggregators, but I haven't tried them very much:

* iDreamBooks: https://idreambooks.com/

* Book Verdict: http://www.bookverdict.com/

> "...modern fiction, particularly English-language fiction, has moved in the direction of the televisual, anyway. Much so-called literary fiction is evidently written with an eye to an option for film or TV adaptation."

These statements (and therefore the points which follow) lack evidence and do not align with my anecdotal experience, which suggests to me some selection bias (likely from both myself and the author). I would be deeply surprised if a great enough portion of books are 'written with an eye to [a TV adaptation]' to cause a significant impact on writing quality and style.

The "portion of books" doesn't matter at all, the economic incentives do. A few sentences later: "For all but a tiny few, it’s nearly impossible to make anything even approaching a living from writing literary fiction."

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