Autumn of the Patriarchs: Great American critic Edmund WilsonEach Sunday, I commit a crime in the name of personal literacy: I steal the New York Times Sunday Book Review from Starbucks. I’m not even discreet about it. I order my drink and whatever mound of trans-fat appeals to me from the pastry section and then I wander over to the newspaper stand and yank apart the New York Times until I find the Book Review. I then read the first couple of reviews in full view of the asexual – yet provocatively pierced – barista while I wait for the he/she to make my drink. No one says a word to me – not the employees of Starbucks, who’ve seen me do this every Sunday for the last six years nor my fellow patrons, many of whom I see so frequently in service of this crime that we now nod to each other like co-workers – because, clearly, no one cares about the book reviews. Now, if I filched the Sunday sports page, I can only imagine an Ox-Bow Incident ending.

If the workers and patrons of a typical suburban Starbucks don’t sound like a scientifically sound focus group, they do at least comprise a metaphorical one as it relates to the dwindling space and attention given to book reviews nationwide. Their tacit approval of my crime is emblematic of just how little readers in general care about what was once a staple of the Sunday paper and, for authors, the best way for them to get news of their latest work before the most likely buying audience.

With news coming that the New York Post is cleaving their book coverage, what was once a trend is now becoming the new world order, at least in terms of newspapers and their desire to print reviews of literature. Consider the evidence: the Los Angeles Times (where I occasionally review) recently combined their Sunday Book Review section into a tabloid with their Opinion section, whilst shifting substantial genre content to their website where they’ve also instituted a daily blog; the San Diego Union-Tribune cut their standalone section entirely; the Chicago Tribune moved their reviews from Sunday to the less-circulated Saturday edition; the Atlanta Journal-Constitution eliminated its book editor position, as did the Raleigh News-Observer and on and on and on.

It’s no secret that readership of newspapers is a plummeting concern, which makes the least profitable sections the most susceptible to reduction, and thus the situation before us, when viewed through the prism of business, makes perfect sense. But through the prism of my own mortgage payments in particular and the future of printed literary criticism in general, it’s agonizing, though, honestly, wholly predictable.

When my last book was released in late 2005 the focus of the marketing efforts were to target the litblogs first, the traditional press second, the theory being that those most interested in the debut book from an indie press – albeit one from an author who’d published two previous books to some success – would be the literary minded folks who read Bookslut or The Elegant Variation every morning vs. the Washington Post’s Book World once a month. (Plus, my last book had received very little review attention whatsoever until it ended up on a few “best of” lists six months after its release and in contention for a prominent award a year later.)

Our hope was that the litblogs and websites and my own online presence would then kick start the traditional media…and, to my surprise, since I have no reason to believe in anything regarding my business acumen, that’s exactly what happened. Notices in prominent blogs led to a long tail of print reviews in nearly every single major paper not called the New York Times, some arriving nearly six months after the book’s publication. By that time, my book was old news online, which, I suspect is precisely why this slow death of traditional book review sections, while tragic, contains a bit of living radiance: Public trusts are becoming unreliable and thus we’re forced to trust the public instead.

That’s not to say a review in Bookslut is now just as valuable to an author as a review in the New York Times is, only that a review in Bookslut may well reach a book’s target audience in a more direct manner. What print provided was the chance that people not specifically looking for your book might find it simply through force of habit and familiarity – the paper is on the kitchen table, you might as well read and if the paper approves, and you approve of the paper, why, a trip to B. Dalton might be in the offering. The online reviews, even those done without much in the way of critical skill, do offer handselling by virtue of a simple link to Amazon or Powell’s, which is the one thing authors have long wanted – a way to turn their book reviews into humans in bookstores.

The problem is that I’ve long believed book reviews aren’t, in fact, a sales tool. A sales tool is a yellow cover. A sales tool is a book tour with Michael Connelly. A sales tool is if you happen to sleep with or murder someone interesting (if possible, at the same time). When I steal the New York Times Book Review, it’s not to figure out what books to buy, it’s to be entertained by the prose. Reading a great book review – like one by Daniel Mendelsohn, for instance – is like listening to a fantastic argument on a topic you might not know much about but which, upon the conclusion of the argument, you feel passionately enough about to, perhaps, investigate further. When I write reviews, that’s my aim as well – to both entertain and inform. (The truth, of course, is that I’ve never read a single review of my own work and found it in the least bit entertaining, even the good ones, because all I can think about is how many people will or will not buy my book based on those words. That’s the jaundiced eye of the author speaking, but what I can also tell you is that the book I wrote with the yellow cover far outsold the other two and received terrible reviews.)

The internet is blooming with book criticism, not all of it of professional quality, certainly, but I suspect that will change as more and more professional reviewers find themselves pinched for markets and turn to the internet in hopes of finding space and an audience. It’s already the case with genre fiction like romance, crime and sci-fi, which rarely see time in traditional print, but which the Los Angeles Times, for instance, now regularly devotes space to online in their various columns (at least in the case of crime and sci-fi...no one reviews romance regularly anywhere in the major media). Still, the end of book review sections saddens me in the most mundane way: I still prefer to read things printed on paper. I still like to spread out on a Sunday morning with the Los Angeles Times Book Review and the New York Times Book Review, the opportunity to be entertained by someone’s opinion worthy of the newsprint stains I’m sure to leave on the couch.