The Believer
With apologies to Raymond Carver, what do we write about when we write about books? Are book reviews supposed to be critical essays? When a freelancer writes 500 words on the new James Patterson in-flight thriller for the Yazoo Herald, is that literary criticism? How about if it runs in the New York Times? What if she writes instead about José Saramago's latest, and takes it to 1,000 words? Is she still just a reviewer, or has she taken her place in the ranks of Critics alongside Louis Menand, Harold Bloom and the ghost of Lionel Trilling?
What are these pieces for, anyway? Helping a reader decide whether to buy a book by describing its contents and evaluating its quality? Going a step further and locating the title in a broader literary, sociological or ideological context? Exploring its moral and artistic themes to deepen the reader's appreciation and sharpen his own critical skills? Making value judgments about which books are "Good" and which are "Bad"?
Do these questions matter? They do to Heidi Julavits, novelist and co-editor of The Believer. She opens the inaugural issue of The Believer, a monthly "literary cultural review" from the McSweeney's crew, with roughly 9,000 words on the sorry state of whatever it is these people are doing. While the thread of the essay can be a little difficult to follow, Julavits's premise is that those who write about books should adopt a more service-oriented attitude toward their work and strive to enter into a more edifying dialogue with the larger community of readers and writers.
Julavits spares no spleen in calling out those who fall short of this noble ideal. On the subject of the Yazoo Herald school of criticism: "This is review as consumer reports-style squib, meant to alert the reader to a book's simple existence as a purchasable ornament, a seasonal literary accessory that presumably everyone will be talking about, assigning to their book clubs, reading on airplanes and subways." Zing! Hang your heads, you bourgeois lip-movers.
But she's not done, accusing the book editors of daily papers of running "reviews that are of varying meatiness, certainly, and often composed of rearranged copy cribbed from a press release." Take that, Michiko Kakutani! Of course, "A lot of books are reviewed by those people whose main qualification is that they are least likely to 'get' the book in question." I always wondered how they made those assignments.
Amid fantasies of quaffing cocktails with Edmund "Bunny" Wilson, Mary McCarthy and Norman Podhoretz, Julavits bemoans our Era of Snarkiness. This era, Julavits argues, is characterized by critics being assigned books by authors they have reviewed unfavorably in the past, "wit for wit's sake or hostility for hostility's sake," MFA-hating and petty ankle-biting of those who dare to write ambitiously. Furthermore, while follow-ups to successful first novels that have been delayed by a "sophomore slump" are invariably reviewed kindly, "I need only to look at those successful debut writers who are not crippled by their fame, who continue to work uninterrupted to produce a second book in due time, and the very different treatment they receive, to sense there is something more complicated and perverse at work than mere graciousness."
Given the shrillness of this opening salvo, it comes as a relief that the rest of the Believer is so inviting and pleasurable to spend time with. Declaring that "We will focus on writers and books we like," it is indeed what the interview shows call "talent-friendly." But it's also reader-friendly; aptly named, the publication engages a broad range of literary topics with an enthusiasm and perspicacity that reminds us what a wonderful thing it is to read, and it renews our faith in this all too solitary pursuit.
Although printed in Canada rather than Iceland (like a number of earlier McSweeney's products), The Believer shares the high production value, luxurious paper stock and curiosity shop fussiness of its parent publication. In addition to a title and subtitle, each article is headed by a seemingly random selection of terms used that actually do give you a sense of its contents. Interspersed among its 128 pages are ample pomo curios for those who go for such things. The table of contents and other editorial interstitia are presented in the oddly stilted, translated-and-retranslated prose so familiar to legions of McSweeney's bookmarkers.
The Believer is at its best, though, when it eschews willful eccentricity in favor of real substance — which, thankfully, is most of the time. In this spirit, an essay by Jonathan Lethem that begins with the conceit of imagining the characters in Dickens's "Dombey and Sons" as anthropomorphic animals shifts not a moment too soon to a more conventional — and insightful — piece of criticism.
A piece by Paul LaFarge begins as an appreciation of Nicholson Baker, then poses an intriguing if speculative link between Baker's "A Box of Matches" and "Pale Fire" to bring Nabokov into the discussion. Fans of either book will gain new insights while being inspired to seek out the other, while the article is conversational enough to interest those with no prior familiarity at all.
An article on "True Grit" author Charles Portis entitled "Like Cormac McCarthy, But Funny" brings a neglected writer to light, and the reader's to-do list grows longer still. A profile of Susan Straight (author of "I Been in Sorrow's Kitchen and Licked Out All the Pots," "Highwire Moon") strikes a nice balance of fan club intimacy, personal history and writerly inside baseball. The clubhouse atmosphere is furthered by a column that asks writers including Harry Matthews, Zadie Smith, Aimee Bender and Daniel Handler what's on their desks — a question some answer more literally than others.
As a "literary cultural review," the Believer is about more than just books. A timely, balanced article on anti-Iraq war protests in San Francisco could have run in any number of other publications, but it is welcome here. An essay on Terrence Malick's film Badlands, likewise. An interview with Kumar Pallana, "The Royal Tenenbaums handstand man," on the other hand, could only have appeared here, and we are fortunate for it. The Believer nods to its hipster constituency with an article on Interpol (the band, not the cops) and an interview with Beth Orton. An interview with philosopher Galen Strawson on the fallacy of free will is both interesting and good for you.
Typography and design aside, one of the greatest strengths of the McSweeney's brand has been its ability to attract top-rank talents and put them to work. Here, we listen in on a dream conversation between Salman Rushdie and Terry Gilliam, while eyeing nervously the dwindling pages to the right.
Whether the Believer mounts an effective charge against the many windmills that plague Heidi Julavits is a question to be answered by those who share her dismal view of contemporary criticism. For those who already feel well enough served by the reviews and essays that appear in the New Yorker, the New York Review of Books, Harpers, the Atlantic, and Tin House, the Believer is nonetheless a welcome addition to the lineup. Long after the echoes of her diatribe have faded, the magazine's eclectic content, high-quality writing, and generosity of spirit will stand as an exemplar of what good criticism is all about.
— J. Daniel Janzen (dan at clownyard dot com)
