Making Content About the Content About the Content

The New York Times Book Review is a zombie brand

I don’t know if you heard, but the New York Times released a list of the best books of the 21^st century so far. If you haven’t read the list, maybe you’ve read the personal essays about voting for the list, writers’ social media apologies for voting for their own books for the list, lists of how many books people have read from the lists, alternative lists for this list, “why isn’t there more of X on this list” lists, angry debates about whether books on the list are classified in the correct way, or multiple newsletters reacting to the list as each section of the list was slowly unveiled.

I mean, thank god someone tried to commit an atrocity, to put an end to the content about the content. But here I am, making content about the content about the content.

It’s a lot of fuss about something that seems incredibly arbitrary. Like all lists, round-ups, digests, and polls, it’s a way of generating attention and engagement with extremely little effort. And it always works, because people like the easy content creation prompt and they love to feel like they are a part of a conversation.

But putting aside the totally random timing of the list – why are we doing something like this twenty-three and a half years into the century? Well, maybe twenty-four and a half, if you want to re-arbitrate the “does the millennium changeover start at 2000 or 2001 after all the Romans or whoever weren’t running around saying ‘this is year zero’” debate – and the predictability of people called in to vote in the process, this is the kind of project that a publication pulls together when they’ve got no other ideas about how to make themselves useful or interesting.

Which is kind of where the New York Times Book Review stands, as a zombie brand. All its prestige comes from the past and the audience it has managed to retain in spite of itself. The Book Review is an institution, and like all institutions, loyalty to it is more about the fantasy of what it could do for you if it suddenly granted you association, rather than the services it currently provides.

every current New York Times critic thinks they are Mary McCarthy :(

When was the last time the New York Times had a book review that went viral, and I mean something that got outside of the very small lit-centered social media circle? When was the last time one of the critics managed to make an original observation about a book or a writer? When was the last time they made a daring choice in the pairing of critic and book? Can you call to mind a witty line from a review, a clever little barb, a daring attempt to lead the conversation? Or is everything you call to mind from the Book Review just a sad little trombone sound?

It's not really that hard to come up with examples from its peers for any of the above. Instead of a star critic like Lauren Oyler or Andrea Long Chu or Becca Rothfeld or Merve Emre (whatever you might think about what they do, you can’t deny their ability to drive the literary conversation with their work), the New York Times has Dwight Garner, a man who thinks he’s the book world’s Robert Christgau but is more like a manager at a suburban Barnes and Noble. They overly rely on a small handful of loyal reviewers because they always stick to the template and never have an unexpected opinion that might cause controversy. And rather than leading the way forward, they are slow to adapt to any trends and only chime in on conversations in the literary world three months after everyone else has moved on.

The New York Times has not really had a critic of note since Michiko Kakutani retired in 2017. And if the books that she’s published since leaving the Times spark any kind of reconsideration of Kakutani as a thinker, it’s possible her work won’t hold up to much scrutiny. The Great Wave and The Death of Truth are rife with cliches, outdated references, and obvious observations tarted up like revelations. Criticism and books of ideas are two different modes, being bad at one doesn’t mean you’d be bad at the other, but reading them is a bit like, this is the woman everyone was scared of for decades? The writer who can’t even make it up to an airport bookstore’s standards? The role of the critic has changed, the cultural arbiter is not a respected force anymore, but the New York Times seems to have responded to the changing market by switching from a small selection of distinctive voices to a beige mass, each idea and opinion and choice indistinguishable from the next.

They must be thinking that they are the largest so they have to be the blandest. If you’re the dominant product on the marketplace, you can only really go downward, so maintenance becomes the highest priority. Each week’s review greets you like the “3 for 2” paperback table that used to be near the front door at Borders, there’s a sense of inevitability to the selection, the strings pulled, the payoffs made, to get exactly what you would expect on that table, with no one title more desirable than any of the others. Books like piles of melons at the chain supermarket – you know that all of them are underripe and genetically modified and will taste of nothing really at all, but you spend your time sniffing and squeezing in the hopes of selecting the one that will let you experience something.

When the position for editor of the Book Review opened up after Pamela Paul inexplicably decided to remind everyone of her intellectual deficiencies by moving to the opinion pages (Pamela! What are you doing? Everyone had forgotten your truly terrible book about how pornography is bad, you were free!), people from the Times were making the rounds on social media, encouraging people to apply. They were looking for unconventional voices! They were going to shake things up! They were bugging people who had spent time at Bookforum and art magazines to apply because, it was heavily suggested, they wanted a fresh start.

Instead, they did what they always do, which is hire from within. They selected someone who had not been involved in books or publishing, but who had long been loyal to the Times in their TV and Culture sections. Because this is what institutions like the Times do, they elevate people who they know are already in alignment with their values and will serve them faithfully, rather than risk bringing in someone who understands what they are talking about.

The list ultimately crowns Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend as the best book of the 21^st century, and it’s a very telling selection. If only because when it was originally published in 2011, the New York Times was still years from noticing the way the literary world was going. It was still dragging its feet when it came to acknowledging, let alone embracing, the books written by anyone other than white men despite it being very clear at that point that the culture was shifting toward plurality. The industry was becoming dominated by women in both publishing and writing, and international work was more interesting and impressive than American writing. Crowning Ferrante means the Times has caught up to…… well, about 2011. And here we are in 2024.

The New York Times is still pretending not to know who the pseudonymous author is, despite a high profile unveiling. This is from two weeks ago: “Her Identity Remains a Mystery.” It’s literally not. They choose to ignore who Ferrante is because it’s an inconvenient truth -- they got trolled by someone who saw the tales of ambitious women, bootstrapping yourself out of hardship and despair through an allegiance to creative personal expression, and vague Europeanness that is less gritty realism and more picturesque background for a vacation selfie was not only an unmet niche in the market but about to become the dominant literary mode. And creating a writerly persona that tracks onto the fervent wishes of young women to become totally independent, successful Art Monsters ™ to help sell the product because the product is also now Authenticity, I mean, well played, sir.

But the Times’s ploy worked. Even if you’re admonishing the Times for its list, you’re still acknowledging the legitimacy of the list and the Times’s ability to make broad declarations about what is good and bad. That legitimacy is granted only by the readers, writers, and hangers-on who give the Times their attention. I’m just wondering when they’ll notice how little they are getting back.

Recommendations:

• Not great developments on the front of press freedom and that whole “democracy dies in darkness” the media promised us.

• Wild story about the drug kingpin who wanted to be a professional footballer.

• My own list of the best books of the 21st century would annoy the shit out of everybody, but beyond the obligatory Bolaño and Carson and so on, there would be some Kathryn Davis, some Laurent Binet, some Pankaj Mishra, maybe some Marie NDiaye and Deirdre Madden? “Best” is a pretty boring designation.

• When Sight and Sound released its latest list of the 100 Best Films, a lot of people got upset about the “diversity picks.” And I agree, I emitted an annoying sound when I saw Portrait of a Lady on Fire (a film I hate down to my bones for all its girlbossery “feminine gaze” nonsense) on that list, but then I remembered. This list is not for the history books, it is for 16 year olds who are trying to figure out where to start when they decide they want to take film seriously. And maybe they live in Montana, so they don’t have Alain Delon retrospectives destroying them with beauty on a regular basis. And lists like this are extremely helpful, even when it leads them to watch nonsense like Portrait. But honestly, I think the New York Times list doesn’t even accomplish this, it just lets people who have Paris Review tote bags feel smug that they have read 30+ of the books on the list. I don’t think any kid falling in love with writing gets anywhere with that selection, except maybe into a middling MFA program.