I don’t know much about being a Managing Editor of the Washington Review of Books, but I’ll bet I’d be darling at it.
N.B.:
Save the Date: The next WRB Presents will be on November 12 at Sudhouse D.C., featuring Ralph Hubbell, Johannes Lichtman, Mikra Namani, and Danuta Hinc.
Next month’s salon will meet on the evening of November 30 to discuss the topic, “Is order more important than justice?” If you would like to attend, please please email Chris for the details.
Links:
In The Walrus, Greta Rainbow on the novel of the internet age:
The proper noun seduces with exclusivity, but the language of exclusivity can be readily manufactured. In the current state of cultural production on the internet, realistically small subcultural phenomena balloon so that references specific to, say, a New York City neighborhood hold meaning far away. Viewers of lifestyle blogs, listeners of podcasts, and subscribers of Substacks can quickly learn the lingo of a creator without ever “belonging” to the place where the content originated. They sustain the wheel of the operation by paying for a peek inside.
What journalist W. David Marx calls “savvy consumers,” those desiring cool and convention-breaking pop culture, are still consumers. When the names of products or celebrities appear in a book, they prick us like a targeted ad, jumping from the page as digestible morsels. Reference novels work because of globalized digitization; the danger in them is the possibility of further narrowing our taste to revolve only around what we encounter online, often as things to buy. The books themselves operate within the market, as Christian Lorentzen identified in his screed against literature’s sociological turn, as “commodities and demographic specimens.”
In our sister publication Down Under,
reviews two essay collections of the internet age (All Things Are Too Small: Essays in Praise of Excess, by , April; and No Judgment: Essays, by Lauren Oyler, March):Both Oyler and Rothfeld are present to their readers as admirable and complicated personas. “A snob, highbrow, and an elitist, I find the concept of plot oppressive, value style over voice, and enjoy an unfamiliar vocabulary word,” writes Oyler. They stage a bold refusal of politics in favor of art, a form of self-dramatization that is the literary equivalent of the carefully curated Instagram page. Both books feature vignettes of stalking their nemeses online, foraging for clues, and we can read the vigilant textual self-awareness of Oyler and Rothfeld as that of the “always online”; no disclosure, whatever the postures of candor, is inadvertent.
Most of the essays in these collections are hybridized critical and personal essays, a form that has been a staple of the viral essay epoch, although of course its lineage reaches back to Montaigne. It’s fair to say that there’s more criticism, and more philosophy, in Rothfeld’s book, and a lot more vibes in Oyler’s. Writers like Leslie Jamison and Tolentino familiarized a generation of readers with writing that moves between texts and locales by means of personal experience. The Empathy Exams (2014) and Trick Mirror (2019) invited readers to recognise themselves in the experiences of Jamison and Tolentino; Rothfeld and Oyler are, by contrast, flagbearers for a new micro-generation of essayists who are more invested in prompting their readers to agree with them than to relate to them.
[All Things Are Too Small was an Upcoming book in WRB—Mar. 30, 2024; we linked to an excerpt in WRB—Feb. 21, 2024. No Judgment was the Upcoming book in WRB—Mar. 13, 2024; we linked to a review in WRB—Apr. 10, 2024.
The WRB social media girl has told me several times that I am not Online and have no idea what is going on there. —Steve] [He still doesn’t understand what “let’s work it out on the remix <3” means and I think at this point he’s too afraid to ask. —Hannah]
[That’s right. I am. But if all of this makes me scared and confused about what the kids are up to I also think it supplies a necessary critical distance that the immediacy of the internet denies to its aficionados. I don’t want to reiterate my notes from last month about creating personas as art here, but the failure to acknowledge any predecessor there is similar to what’s happening with Rainbow’s novels of references. It’s not really any different from the age-old tradition of referencing the Bible or Homer or Shakespeare or something else assumed to be universally familiar—but now you can’t really assume everyone has read anything. (If you would like to dispute this, please explain to me how a few years ago the New Yorker ran a piece making it apparent that neither the writer nor the editor(s) were familiar with Jesus’ injunction to pluck out your eye and cut off your hand if they offend you.) But you can assume, if your novel’s main marketing is word of mouth on the internet (and, if all goes well, viral reviews also on the internet), that your readers, who came to a knowledge of your book through the literary corner of the internet, are familiar with the people, places, and things that get talked about there. And so referring to them, in addition to the motivation Rainbow discusses, is a useful shorthand in the same way that writing “balm of Gilead” used to be. —Steve]
In The New Yorker, an excerpt from Sloane Crosley’s foreword to a new Dorothy Parker collection (Constant Reader: The New Yorker Columns 1927-28, November 5):
It’s important to note that these reviews are not contemptuous, a common pitfall for her imitators. They are simply unbridled in their dislike. Of the novelist James Branch Cabell, she concludes that, though “his books are of the golden great,” she “couldn’t read all the way through one of them, to save my mother from the electric chair.” You want bridled, you can look elsewhere. At, say, our contemporary idea of a “pan” or a “takedown.” Please. Are we a consortium of kindness? A society of good will? No. But it takes us four times as long to kill our prey, and, too often, our motivations are so convoluted that future generations will wonder what brought forth this screed of violence. Part of this is because the line between the personal and the critical has grown thin. And self-serious. Our literary criticism features a great deal of “I,” the pronoun most likely to overstay its welcome. In the right hands, this conflation of narrative and critique can have dazzling results. But on the whole? Imagine waiting twenty minutes for a medical diagnosis while your doctor walks you through her commute. Whereas Parker’s use of “I” is practically a “we.” She approached “Constant Reader” assuming a shorthand with her audience, as if they shared her assessments, and, hooray, now we can bitch and moan about the thing together.
[Behind the paywall: Trollope, Auden, Pynchon, notebooks, ancient Roman grain, the Mahabharata, and more links, reviews, news items, and commentary carefully selected for you, just like on Saturdays. If you like what you see, why not sign up for a paid subscription? The WRB is for you, and your support helps keep us going.]
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