Actually, I’d missed it, but just caught it now. Interesting stuff.

Regarding professional reviewers, if they’re good enough they needn’t fear the competition from amateurs. That said, many professional reviewers in my experience are far from professional, rather many seem to be just people a particular paper often uses and I tend to find a good blogger is often much more informative – plus I am more likely to know their interests and can ask follow up questions. I note with interest that you read a Roth you didn’t like, given I know your taste for Roth, that carries more weight with me than most newspaper reviews would.

On 2666, I’m suspicious that a book for which a sixth part has just been found was being hailed as a masterpiece when we may not have had the final work. Is it more of a masterpiece now we have more of it? Is the bit we did have now retrospectively less of a masterpiece? Excellent as it may be, it smells of hype and overexcitement, a literary bubble, and one other advantage of the blogosphere is it seems curiously less prone to reputational bubbles than the professional reviewing world.

I think the judge felt the same way I did.

(Strange that I’m having this conversation about 2666 with myself. Is anyone else reading it?)

. . . a virtuoso accomplishment that ranks with Moby-Dick and Blood Meridian as one of the trenchant and kaleidoscopic examinations of evil in fiction.

I agree that it is a great examination of evil and violence. It works in units, as I know I’ve said before. But as a whole it is like I put some parts of Moby-Dick with some parts of Blood Meridian, shuffled them in various orders, let parts fall out of the final product, and presented it as a whole. I’m just not convinced that this is a masterpiece when it is incomplete (even if the found sixth part is not real), and I have yet to read a review or article that shows me that I’m missing something in the text, though they suggest I am missing something. More, I get the idea that what I’m missing is a conception of what Bolaño intended had he been able to finish. In other words, I didn’t have the same reader-response or I expected the author to do a little more; therefore, I missed the genius of the book’s structure.

On a related note, I’m very willing to accept that I am missing something. Also, I accept that Bolaño is a genius, and I look forward to reading his other works.

I find the complaints by professional reviewers (or writers) who say that book bloggers are a silly batch of unprofessional hacks who have decreased the value of book reviewing. I’m incredibly unprofessional, often reading a book quickly and writing a review quickly. Sometimes my thoughts are formed while writing the review. And most of the time if I do any research, it’s sloppy and unverified by anyone. Hopefully no professional is as careless. However, I find value in others like me. I think we form a good community, and when you find a blogger with similar tastes, it’s a good friendship that leads to many many good books. It’s all about that, really. And I love that book blogs don’t concern themselves solely with the recently published. I don’t know how many people have thanked me for pointing the way to Richard Yates this past year, but I also found out about him from a book blog. And Sherman Alexander, same thing, thanks to you. I don’t think the NY Times will be reviewing Winesburg, Ohio any time soon.

And I don’t think professional reviewers (at least the best) should fear a drop in work. I love their reviews precisely because they tend to get into other things than I would. They often explore context and, for the most part, are very articulate, sometimes poetic. Which can also be found in the book blogging world.

1. The payment is at best an honorarium (the Globe and Mail, Canada’s national newspaper, currently pays $250 a review, which works out to a dreadful hourly rate for a book like 2666). In my time at the Calgary Herald as managing editor (admittedly a couple of decades ago) that would have been $25 — the book cover price then would have been $20 — and the “book” that you get to keep is pretty much your payment.
2. So money is obviously not the issue. When a book like 2666 came in, your choices as the assigning editor are:
– people who really want the book, will review it whatever you pay them and will love it. Problem: the review might not be good advice for a lot of readers, since you know before you hand it out what you are going to get, even if the fee is cheap.
– “friends” of the page who review a number of books and are willing to put in the extra time at the usual fee on a book that they might or might not otherwise read. Problem: the book editor only assigns books to his old favorites.
– finding someone who will review the book dispassionately, from a reader point of view. Problem: since they are unlikely to be buying the book, getting it for “free” is not much of an incentive. Hence, the higher fee.
– why not commission a hatchet job? A quick look indicates what the book is like so let’s give it to someone who would love to destroy it, at the normal price.

The above is a short example of the book editor’s dilemma, at least at a regional newspaper (alas, most of these now no longer even get to hand out the books — there choice is now down to whether or not to publish some syndicated review, which has been assigned by much the same process, to someone who probably lives on the other side of the country).

All of which explains why I give more credibility to your opinion (and William’s and other bloggers who I respect) of difficult works like this than I do to critics who are being paid. The awards certainly interest me and I do think the long and short lists have value — but for true booklovers, I think the blogging world has overtaken the commercial world in pointing readers at books that should be read.

My own cynicism is that as this book has been built up to be the greatest masterpiece we’ve seen in a long time, certain to transform literature, that many critics don’t want to be out of step. Plus, if you spend a long time reading a masterpiece, one has to find ways to validate that time, even if it means bending over backwards to find meaning in nonmeaning (nonmeaning being a theme in this book, many critics have suggested).

I agree that the writing at a sentence level is excellent, and many of the discrete, lengthier units that are wonderful (I enjoyed most of the parts until they were almost done), but as a whole the book doesn’t add up. I enjoy all of the attempts to say why that is (because life doesn’t add up; he’s putting into the form what is in the substance; the nonmeaningfulness, etc.). I think these interpretations are valid, but obvious and a bit too easily defended. I have a hard time thinking that all of those things are really in the book, especially when he obviously states his themes in blatant ways, such as the geometry book hanging up on the clothes line, getting destroyed by the elements. That’s clear as day, and it seems to encapsulate what many readers find in the book as a whole. I don’t see what the book as a whole has to offer beyond that, though in its parts it offers much.

I (playfully) hope that this recently found sixth part is truly the sixth part. Hard to say it is a masterpiece when it is incomplete, especially when what the critics have said he was doing turned out to be nothing of the sort. I’m sure the book will stick around in the academy, especially if this sixth part is true. I don’t see it being read by most others. Then again, Finnegans Wake and Gravity’s Rainbow are both still on the bookshelves even in the most mainstream of bookstores; but at least those two books were complete, if convoluted.

We should have an interesting choice in the Pulitzer, though. I don’t think Shadow Country will win (though, who knows?), and 2666 is not eligible. Netherland is a viable candidate, especially with its recent PEN/Faulkner. We’ll see next month. The big names of Robinson and espeically Roth and Morrison, however, haven’t seemed to pull through with the awards so far.