Stephen King, the much derided and occasionally respected writer, opined on the problems in short story land for The New York Times. He’s the editor of this year’s Best American Short Stories edition and consequently had the pleasure, duty, or job of going through hundreds of them. I’m wondering if my general dislike for short stories is more a problem with the way they are currently produced:

Instead, let us consider what the bottom shelf [of the bookstore magazine rack] does to writers who still care, sometimes passionately, about the short story. What happens when he or she realizes that his or her audience is shrinking almost daily? Well, if the writer is worth his or her salt, he or she continues on nevertheless, because it’s what God or genetics (possibly they are the same) has decreed, or out of sheer stubbornness, or maybe because it’s such a kick to spin tales. Possibly a combination. And all that’s good.

What’s not so good is that writers write for whatever audience is left. In too many cases, that audience happens to consist of other writers and would-be writers who are reading the various literary magazines (and The New Yorker, of course, the holy grail of the young fiction writer) not to be entertained but to get an idea of what sells there. And this kind of reading isn’t real reading, the kind where you just can’t wait to find out what happens next (think “Youth,” by Joseph Conrad, or “Big Blonde,” by Dorothy Parker). It’s more like copping-a-feel reading. There’s something yucky about it.

Last year, I read scores of stories that felt … not quite dead on the page, I won’t go that far, but airless, somehow, and self-referring. These stories felt show-offy rather than entertaining, self-important rather than interesting, guarded and self-conscious rather than gloriously open, and worst of all, written for editors and teachers rather than for readers. The chief reason for all this, I think, is that bottom shelf. It’s tough for writers to write (and editors to edit) when faced with a shrinking audience. Once, in the days of the old Saturday Evening Post, short fiction was a stadium act; now it can barely fill a coffeehouse and often performs in the company of nothing more than an acoustic guitar and a mouth organ. If the stories felt airless, why not? When circulation falters, the air in the room gets stale.

I’m a bit late in posting the link, but the sentiments about the problems with the short story are ones I appreciate and I doubt the general trends will go away anytime soon. Still, King’s essay might not apply to me: I’ve always disliked short stories because I’m only getting into them when they end. There are some exceptions—Woody Allen, James Thurber, and T.C. Boyle come to mind—but even someone as intellectually wonderful as Flannery O’Connor doesn’t make me really want to read to read, as opposed to reading to admire her technique. As a side note, I’ll be applying to graduate schools soon, and one reason I’m trying for USC is because Boyle teaches there. My Dad took me to hear him speak in Seattle when I was 14 or 15, sparking the initial interest in author appearances that continues today through this site.

Slate has an essay on The Savage Detectives, and this one already assumes the novel’s worth. The essay mentions “momentum” three times on its first page and “energy” twice on its second, leading me to coin a new law of novels: “Energy without structure sputters without going going anywhere.”

A Farewell to Alms continued to fascinate, though I am not convinced of its central thesis concerning the role culture and perhaps genetics played in making the Industrial Revolution happen in England rather than elsewhere. The theory still suffers too much from causation issues, especially because so many different things were happening within society that it is nearly impossible to disentangle cause from effect. Its most interesting prescriptions are the end, when Clark argues that Africa still hasn’t escaped the Malthusian Trap, in which a growing population consumes any efficiency gains in subsistence agriculture, leaving society as a whole no wealthier than it was prior to efficiency gains. As a result, he argues, aid from and contact with the West has actually made much of Africa worse off. Again, I am not convinced that problems with institutional governance are not the real problem with Africa, but the idea is worth considering because anything that would allow the West to better target aid is much welcomed.

Tyler Cowen does a better job with the book’s highlights and flaws than I care to and can. See this post too. He will continue discussing it on Marginal Revolution for the next several weeks, so those who want further discussion should check there.

Is A Farewell to Alms worth reading? Probably not, unless one has a keen desire to know more about a very specific part of or about developmental economics. I have no expertise in those fields and so am unable to ascertain the book’s importance aside from what others have written. A Farewell to Alms is dense with technical graphs that require some care to understand and don’t always seem relevant to Clark’s thesis, and its narrow subject matter indicates that a broad audience is unlikely. But expect it to influence debates about aid, colonialism, and development for many years to come.

Gail Pool’s Faint Praise: The Plight of Book Reviewing in America discusses the problems inherent in book reviewing, the perceived solutions to them, the problems with her perceived solutions, and why none of this might matter if newspapers book reviews continue to diminish. Although the subtitle of her book defines it as “in America,” I suspect many of the issues about evaluating worthiness are universal. Some of her comments are specific to the American market for book reviews, and the use of the word “plight” probably comes from her implicit realization that only a small number of paid critics will work in the future. A much larger number of people like me will occupy the rest of the universe with our fractured, para- and unprofessional opinions that may or may not be worth much. Newspapers are likely to continue cutting independent reviews, which in turn reduces the number of opinions one is exposed to and the philosophies underlying why the reviewer judges a book the way he or she does.

Pool links the market pressure to the big problem with book reviewing, which remains and is perhaps exacerbated by current trends. The big problem is that “[…] assessing critical judgments inevitably comes down to taste.” You can make your argument more forcefully or less forcefully, but you can’t eliminate taste or come to a perfect solution about what makes art. I’ve been wrestling with that issue in posts concerning Elmore Leonard and B.R. Myers’ response to Leonard, and many others see it too. Taste is worth having even if it can’t be defined, and you at least need some sense of it to say anything useful about art. You also need space in which to say it, and that brings Pool’s book back to the problem of having fewer quality outlets and too few words to express a big idea.

Books about books give writers nearly infinite space to write, so Faint Praise isn’t hampered by that problem with reviews or reviews about reviews. Instead, she’s facing the problem of too many people having already dealt with the things Faint Praise discusses. You don’t need the book—Book Daddy’s discussion is adequate to understand its main points, especially since some of the comments also contribute useful ideas (oh, and read this for some juicy quotes about critics). Other writers, like Tyler Cowen, also made me think about the problem in this post. In addition to Book|Daddy, Marginal Revolution, and Critical Mass, The Elegant Variation also sometimes covers arts. I probably would’ve been much more interested in Faint Praise if its subjects hadn’t already been hashed and rehashed in so many forums. I feel déjà vu: the arguments are going in circles, the problems about what should be criticized and when and how are unsolvable, although one can be cognizant of them and thus try to write more successful. Steve Wasserman addressed current problems in the Columbia Journalism Review, and a recent symposium on book pricing dealt with similar issues. Orwell on reviewing is an older and condensed version of what Pool says. Writers keep asking about what the Internet is doing to publishing and literature, and although I won’t try to predict to the future, I do know one consequence: it has made Faint Praise superfluous because if you read all the links I posted above you’ve already learned as much if not more than you would from the book. The questions about how should one judge a work and how does one find the merit of the work remain. There is no standard and cannot be, efforts at standardization often being worse than the problem they seek to solve. So we are left with the struggle and the frequent failure of book reviews, which, like the novels they comment on, fail more often than not. Let us try to, as Zadie Smith said, fail better. I wish Pool had more and more insight on how fail better and fewer dour if correct predictions about the future of book reviewing.

Why does everyone love The Savage Detectives, Roberto Bolaño’s new old novel? I say new because the English translation just arrived—to ecstatic reviews—and old because it was originally published in 1998 in Spanish. James Wood loves Bolaño:

Over the last few years, Roberto Bolaño’s reputation, in English at least, has been spreading in a quiet contagion; the loud arrival of a long novel, ”The Savage Detectives,” will ensure that few are now untouched. Until recently there was even something a little Masonic about the way Bolaño’s name was passed along between readers in this country; I owe my awareness of him to a friend who excitedly lent me a now never-to-be-returned copy of Bolaño’s extraordinary novella ”By Night in Chile.”

He goes on to cement, rather than knock down, that reputation. Francine Prose does too: “The novel seamlessly blends surrealism, lyricism, wit, invention and political and psychological analysis — and the same brilliance illuminates “Last Evenings on Earth.”” As if that weren’t enough, she concludes:

Like Bolaño’s work, this definition of fiction is at once transparent and opaque, lucid and elusive. And yet we intuit what he means. Reading Roberto Bolaño is like hearing the secret story, being shown the fabric of the particular, watching the tracks of art and life merge at the horizon and linger there like a dream from which we awake inspired to look more attentively at the world.

Accolades on the back of The Savage Detectives include one from John Banville. The Millions thinks Bolaño’s great too, although any post that includes a sentence like “[t]o borrow from Sir Mix-A-Lot: I like big books, and I cannot lie” is suspect.

More love from the New Yorker here.

Amid the hype I picked up a long, pointlessly digressive, and irritating novel, like Faulkner at his worse. Bolaño most reminds me of Faulkner, but he can’t pull off the multiple narrative voices, who consume the latter 400 pages in a frenzy of confusion and uncertainty. I’m also reminded of Richard Farina’s English-language novel, Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me, another, equally irritating novel with the principle attribute of narrative uncertainty leading to reader boredom. In this respect Bolaño and Farina resemble the Beats, an overrated group of nominal poets whose work should be forgotten like the days their adherents spent getting high. The Millions noticed the connection: “For Bolaño, as for the Beats, the poem is a way of finding beauty even (or especially) in insalubrious circumstances.” The context implies this is a good thing, but I take it as a bad—very bad—thing, as the Beats are incoherent, not visionary. Since Bolaño is Chilean, he may not have read any of them, but he still reminds me of them.

To be fair, some sentences in Bolaño are great, as when a chapter ends, “[i]t was Lupe and she was smiling like a spider,” which loses its resonance taken out of place, but is unexpected and wonderful. Occasional thoughts like this are okay: “And then I realized that something had gone wrong in the last few days, something had gone wrong in my relationship with the new Mexican poets or with the new women in my life, but no matter how much I thought about it I couldn’t figure out what the problem was, the abyss that opened up behind me if I looked over my shoulder.” The Savage Detectives has them too frequently. Comment one: Bolaño is not Proust. Comment two: Enough self-indulgent speculation. These seemingly random comments, deracinated from the action, fill the novel. One character, Quim Font, says ironically, “At a certain point you need to steep yourself in reality, no?” You don’t need reality to tell a good story, but you at least need a novel that hangs together. The Savage Detectives doesn’t, and it has no sense of place, too many characters, and too little narrative cohesion to make it worth reading. Novels with different speakers and different points of view can work, as The Bridge of San Luis Ray and Dan Simmons’ Hyperion demonstrate. Sadly, I just read 160 pages I’ll never get back that don’t.

Terry Teachout, critic, blogger, and probably much else besides, has collected his pieces in A Terry Teachout Reader, a compendium of critical wisdom that is a pleasure, though only about 20% seriously interested me. He also observes the larger culture in a way narrower critics can or do not and doesn’t assume the merit of what he writes about. Best of all, he has sensibility. This includes respect and acknowledgment of high culture while still paying attention to low culture and a voracious appetite for everything significant between without losing sight the cultural top rising above the detritus, even interesting or worthy detritus.

He’s not an elitist, but he also isn’t going to take silly music or TV or, yes, books, seriously, and culture is ultimately about people more than ideas. One of his best essays discussed the Book of the Month club and showed how important it was the cultural conversation of its time—a kind of Oprah’s book club for an era without good bookstores in every down. In this case, something many writers would consider mundane, like book distribution, affected how people responded to books and how books got sold. It’s fashionable to bemoan the loss of independent bookstores, but one time there simply weren’t many good bookstores within a reasonable radius of a large percentage of the population, and now, thanks for Barnes & Noble, there are. The company serves a purpose, as Teachout reminds us, and he also respected the Book of the Month Club for the way it exposed ordinary people to unusual books. Sure, it picked plenty of duds and was the object of much condescension from the literati of the time. But it was better than nothing. Jonathan Franzen’s tizzy with Oprah has the same sentiment underlying it, as does the lit blogosphere’s distaste for the New York Times Book Review. Mass culture and group experience matters, if for no other reason than authors need to eat and people who are readers are often much more interesting than people who watch reality TV. It would be a boring world without someone to share your latest find with, and a duller world for many of those who wouldn’t otherwise read.

I perceive all this because Teachout’s writing reflects his underlying beliefs, and he has mastered the plain style of Robertson Davies or George Orwell, thus offering knowledge in the clearest and most precise language possible. I’d like to think I eschew needless complexity to the extent teacher does, but then I find myself writing words like “eschew” inappropriately, and sometimes those words slip into the blog.

Despite my general admiration for Teachout, I skipped some pieces, just as I might not like everything at a buffet. While I share many of his convictions, the pieces on books and larger American culture captivated me, but I skimmed most of the music pieces and anything relating to dance. I like music and listen to everything except country, but I have no technical knowledge about music or ability to criticize it beyond very basic likes and dislikes.

Some passages make me rethink much of what I’ve thought. In my own unpublished fiction—perhaps, as I fear, unpublished for a reason—I commit some of the sins Teachout observes in others: I don’t care for or about religion and have trouble making my way out of what Teachout, quoting a literary scholar named Joan Acocella, calls “the boundaries of the sex plot.” I’d never considered sex plots in those terms, save from a few essays pointing out that the marriage plot engine has been exhausted, or how they drive so much great literature, just as murders drive so many contemporary pop novels. The sex/murder dynamic is so intertwined that decoupling a plot from either is hard, at least with realism. Tolkien does it, as do many fantasy and science fiction writers, but among realist writers I’ve read Robertson Davies and Graham Greene (in some novels) do it best. Is that because writers are obsessed with sex, or readers are, or humans are? I’m not sure the answer, but it is striking how few novels in the Random House 100 Best Novels have sex as their driving plot. Again, this artifact may come from the selection committee, the literary tastemakers, something genuine, or something else. I can only ask because Teachout helped me pose the questions I couldn’t have formulated before.