In an earlier time a single critic could sell a novel. Not necessarily a novel they wrote, alas, but by tossing a thousand words onto a page they could alter the finances of another writer and of bookstores around the country. Although there’s a loose, unarticulated perception that a similar dynamic still exists today—with book influencers, celebrity endorsements, and viral hits substituting for stuffy magazine criticism—this earlier time, where an individual from the literary class slammed a gavel and offered a judgement, has certainly passed.
Even if the typical reader wasn’t aware or didn’t read the major critics, publishers, booksellers, and library buyers attended to the most important reviews. So when that typical reader strolled through a store looking for a new book, the choices were often constrained, or shaped, by critics; they didn’t have to read Edmund Wilson or H. L. Mencken or Lionel Trilling or Susan Sontag to have the shelves around them reflect, in many cases, the tastes of those writers. The book on the shelf in your local bookstore is what’s leftover after a long, relentless process of sorting, a sorting that, today, includes fewer gilded commentators.
Of course you can still find remnants of this earlier age that reverberate today. Such as how Edmund Wilson is partly responsible for the revival of an almost-forgotten novel, The Great Gatsby, simply because he wrote essays in support of the work two decades after its publication with an authoritative voice. A smaller but notable example comes in Gore Vidal’s writing about Dawn Powell in The New York Review of Books. Vidal wrote an elaborate, laudatory essay about Powell, analyzing her plots and her characters with his incisive pen, complaining that her work was so difficult to find, but that readers should look for used copies. Now The New York Review of Books has never worried about running out of paper for its subscribers, but this single essay in a small publication found the right readers and triggered enough demand so that your local library probably has Dawn Powell books on the shelves today.
Some people might claim that the analogous trend in today’s world comes from celebrities. A few figures can influence, with a social media post, what books happen to sell. And these posts, whether by film stars or former presidents, do affect publishing, although it is more haphazard, with preference the primary value, rather than literary criticism. If you’re thinking about literature, and a literary culture, this distinction is crucial. Regardless of whether you believe that the old model was based on literary standards, the presumption, the conceit, was that critics attempted or even pretended to attempt to provide context for a novel, to place each novel into a broader literary project, so that reviews weren’t explicitly based on preference. James Wood at The New Yorker wrote plenty of critical pieces that I found misguided, as did Michiko Kakutani at The New York Times, though I always read their work, understanding, easily, their literary sensibilities. A critic with this methodology could state that a novel wasn’t enjoyable but that it was important and well-written and fit into a broader context without any fear of contradiction—which is a sentence that doesn’t resonate with our contemporary book celebrities, as individual preference, pleasure, is what’s decisive.
What’s even more common but even less predictable in today’s world is the rollicking, disorderly forums where novels are rated in snippets on video platforms. BookTok and Amazon reviews and X outrage and Goodreads ratings do contribute to book sales. And there’s certainly a democratic undertone to this dynamic: rather than reviews in weekly magazines by top critics, the reviews come from individuals without major platforms. I wouldn’t dismiss the benefits of these changes, but I also wouldn’t dismiss the timeworn complaint about democracies, the complaint that goes back thousands of years—that it is really just an artful name for the whims of the mob.
It seems that we have two bad choices when it comes to cultural criticism: in the former, taste is determined by a single elite, an individual who has power to influence publishing and influence what writers are read; in the latter, taste is determined by the masses, with success a matter of popular opinion and majority rule. The downside of the former is that you end up with an institutional, sclerotic elite, while the downside of the latter is anarchy. I don’t particularly like either of these options, though I realize that life comes with trade-offs and that having more of one will mean that you have less of the other, regardless of what option you prefer. I also realize that nothing in these paragraphs is restricted to the book world, though that just happens to be my subject. If I change a few words in these sentences, the same story could be written about health, education, politics, or whatever else you happen to focus on this week, as this is a timeless dynamic: your choice is between the rigidity of an elite class and the anarchy of the mob.
To call it a choice is, of course, more than a bit misleading. Not only because it is an emergent, organic property of our time, rather than anything that can be controlled, but also because the choices aren’t decisive. This pendulum doesn’t stop—the culture will always oscillate between the extremes. Sometimes the tastemakers grow a bit too rigid. Sometimes there’s no way to comprehend the chaos. With literary criticism, today, I think my opinion is fairly straightforward: the old way was bad, what we have today is worse.
Oh, damn, that last sentence. So true.
Much of the superficial, often banal content ravenously consumed on social media confirms to me the low bar set by the masses. It’s why poorly written chick lit romantasy novels, for example, sell well, in addition to tell all books by celebrities. Alternatively, relying on “informed” critics and literary experts means accepting their political persuasions and artistic biases. And of course, the celebrity book club purveyors (like Oprah) and other influencers (not sure what their literary qualifications are) reflect the power of yesteryear’s literary critics in influencing book sales. What is a reader to do? I try to find reviewers whose recommendations prove useful (Sam Sacks at the Wall Street Journal comes to mind). In the end, I mostly tune out the noise. I browse bookstores and libraries, pick up books, examine them, read the first chapter, and frequently that’s enough to guide my selections. And I realize, everyone’s tastes vary. Read what pleases you.