Salon has an interview with Salon-book-critics Laura Miller and Louis Bayard which examines, for the umpteenth time, Who killed the literary critic? (sub. only) What I like about this take is that the reviewers turn it back on literature. As in: Well, if the books were better, the criticism would be better. An interesting angle I'm not entirely sure I buy...but I have read some awful dreck lately (Frey comes to mind) and, well, I'm game. Here are a few of the interesting nuggets:
"If we want to bring the critic back to life, we first have to resuscitate the novelist."
"So the only critics left to evaluate most contemporary fiction are journalists, ranging in seriousness from someone like Wood to your average newspaper freelancer who mostly delivers plot summary. There are no critical movements evident today. James Wood has a well-formed, if rather austere aesthetic but he seems to be the only one who actually adheres in it. Of all the people I've met who admire Wood's criticism I've yet to encounter anyone who actually subscribes to his fairly restrictive standards or taste. They like his writing and seem to feel braced by his rigor, but at the end of the day, they go home with Jonathan Franzen or Zadie Smith instead."
And a somewhat refreshing take on those "amateur" critics:
"The problem with arguing for cultural gatekeepers is that, if you're a professional critic, you inevitably look self-serving -- 'Hey, that's my job!' -- and yes, elitist -- 'Don't try this at home, guys.' I myself don't have any particular training or qualifications to be a reviewer, other than my own experience as a reader and writer, so I feel silly arguing that someone else isn't qualified to deliver an opinion. And believe it or not, I've learned things from Amazon reviews, from letters pages, from literary blogs, from all sorts of non-traditional outlets. The quality of writing is certainly variable, but then so is the quality of traditional journalism."
Overall, it's worth a read, but I wish they'd delve a little deeper into the meat of some of the issues, rather than simply touching upon them as that is the very yardstick by which they measure the value of reviewers, critics, and writers.
