"But without reliably insightful book reviews, literature risks becoming 'an unweeded garden that grows to seed.'"

"We’re left depending only on the whisper network of our own clique, exchanging the same tuna casserole back and forth. I realize this wobbly jeremiad reeks of self-interest: After 30 years of summarizing the plots of literary novels, I can do literally nothing else. But if journalism is still, at least partially, a public service, then book reviews are one of its most eloquent contributions — one we should defend until the very last page."

Writes Ron Charles, in "The future of book reviews looks grim/The Associated Press will no longer produce book reviews, though it will pursue stories about the publishing industry" (WaPo).

Let's talk about the tuna salad and the unweeded garden. The unweeded garden is in quotes, but there is no attribution. We're talking about literature, and if you're one of the last remaining Americans who care about actual literature, you're presumably supposed to know "an unweeded garden that grows to seed." But we can all google and find the attribution. I know I did.

I've sat through "Hamlet" a few times in my life — and read it too — and the first soliloquy is familiar to me: "O, that this too too solid flesh would melt, Thaw and resolve itself into a dew!" I know some other lines: "How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable, Seem to me all the uses of this world!" But I didn't recognize "Fie on't! ah fie! 'tis an unweeded garden, That grows to seed...."

And what of the tuna casserole? How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable seem to me all the tuna casseroles of this world! The tuna casseroles are those books your friends and internet contacts talk about. The comfort food, the genre novels. Bleeh. Makes Hamlet the Book Reviewer want to kill himself. "O... that the Everlasting had not fix'd His canon 'gainst self-slaughter! O God! God!"

That it should come to this! No book reviewers! If there are no book reviewers, there will be no literary fiction. Ron Charles spent 30 years "summarizing the plots of literary novels." Well, AI can summarize the plot of any novel. That can't be the function of a book review, at least not anymore. It must be that the reviewer is supplying some special discernment, choosing what to elevate to the high plane of literature and convincing us that we should aspire to be the kind of people who read things like that.

By the way, I find it hard to trust a writer who dresses up the word "nothing" with the dreadful intensifier "literally" and plunks the phrase a few words away from "literary": "After 30 years of summarizing the plots of literary novels, I can do literally nothing else." He's defending his own livelihood. That counts against his opinion. What am I to think of Ron Charles anyway? Here he is, 14 years ago, displaying himself as "totally hip," opining on an author who is, if nothing else, truly striving to produce literary fiction:

"Finally, a novel about the travails of a successful White guy! What could pull the heartstrings of our afflicted nation tighter than a story of brief, emotional setback suffered by a handsome movie star?"

The first 2 sentences of "Ethan Hawke turns his acting experience — and past infidelities — into brilliant fiction" (WaPo). 

The reviewer, Ron Charles, also seems to be a white male, so his sarcasm may reflect his own anguish at elite America's languishing interest in how white men think and feel. 

... Hawke is... known as the man who cheated on Uma Thurman and offered loutish excuses about the sexual needs of great men like Martin Luther King Jr., John F. Kennedy and him. 

Now, some 15 years after all that cosmic embarrassment, Hawke has published a novel called “A Bright Ray of Darkness.” It’s about a young movie star who got caught cheating on his stunningly gorgeous wife. This recycled gossip is tiresome, but what’s most irritating about “A Bright Ray of Darkness” is that it’s really good. If you can ignore the author’s motive for creating such a sensitive and endearing cad, you’ll find here a novel that explores the demands of acting and the delusions of manhood with tremendous verve and insight.

That title!  "A Bright Ray of Darkness" — seems like a teenager's idea of profundity, and yet this guy gets his novel published by Knopf and praised like mad in The Washington Post. Clicking to Amazon, I see he got a blurb from Patti Smith. She called it "riveting." Riveting! This towering achievement comes in spite of the burden of being a handsome, rich, white man in America today. 

Amazon does not allow us to look inside the book, so I have no opportunity to see what kind of writing is drawing this attention. I search the review for an example of the author's prose. Here: "My life as a performer is at the absolute core of my sense of self-worth. Inside the play it felt possible that I was not a person defined by his adultery, or his unloving parents, or his lies, his failure as a father." You tell me: Is this man held back or pushed ahead by his status as a handsome white male?

"A Bright Ray of Darkness" makes me think of that old song. We were listening to this yesterday: "Darkness, Darkness"...

 

You know me. If there's one topic I've been avoiding in crazy present-day America, it's the "My Pillow Guy." But jokes were made on hearing that first line: "Darkness, Darkness/Be my pillow...."

ADDED: Speaking of Ron Charles and highly praised white male novelists...

AND: In the comments, John Henry reminds me that Amazon lets you download the first 20 pages, so I did that and came up with this extract. I'll let you judge the possible brilliance for yourself. Is this Knopf-level fiction-writing?

But you've been using violence against women (and children and men) to entertain people for half a century.

Trump thinks hitting a woman with a golf ball and knocking her down is funny. Myself, I think it indicates a severely fucked-up mind.

— Stephen King (@StephenKing) September 17, 2017

Maybe this is a takes-one-to-know-one situation, but I can barely think of a person who is more implicated in the popularization of the use of images of violence for the casual amusement of the American people.

And if you want to talk about men making entertainment out of terrible things done to  women, look at Stephen King's new book (co-written with his son), "Sleeping Beauties," reviewed here (in The Washington Post):

“Sleeping Beauties” takes place in the little Appalachian town of Dooling, W.Va., which for no apparent reason becomes ground zero of a worldwide gyno-epidemic, known as the Aurora Flu: The moment any woman falls asleep, she’s immediately covered in a sticky white cocoon, like a full-body cotton-candy wrap. What’s worse, terrified family members who break open these cocoons find that their mothers, sisters and daughters have transformed into bloodthirsty killers. “It’s, like, the ultimate P-M-S,” one yahoo says....

But I'm sure King would argue that he's not sexist. He's showing you bad guys who are sexist.

What’s... surprising is the novel’s grim gender politics. The Kings tell us that “hard right conservatives on talk radio were proclaiming the Aurora virus as proof that God was angry with feminism.” 

The right wing, over there, they are bad, like bad old President Trump, laughing about the golf ball.

We’re made to understand that that’s ridiculous, but the story doesn’t do much to supply an alternative interpretation. Despite having a female police chief, Dooling is a town under a dome, a place with little sense that we live in an era of rapidly changing attitudes about sexuality and gender roles. The novel’s theme feels just as essentialist as the spooky virus that always gets its gal. And the Lord-of-the-Flies battle that consumes the final half of the story reinscribes every worn-out trope about peaceful, constructive women and violent, destructive men.

I think that means King wants to be considered pro-woman. Fine. I assume he means well. But President Trump also claims to be pro-woman. He just also enjoys some laughing at a woman knocked down by a golf ball, and King enjoys 700 pages of women knocked out of consciousness and bound up by a sticky white substance. How could only one of these things be indicative of a severely fucked-up mind?

Hey, the WaPo reviewer, Ron Charles, made a pretty funny video about struggling to stay awake to read the 700 page tome: