Under it's new, post-Sam Tanenhaus administration The New York Times Book Review has tried out a few new things, one of which is a weekly 'Bookends'-column -- where, apparently: "two writers take on pressing and provocative questions about the world of books".
The topic for this coming weekend's Bookend is How Do We Judge Books Written Under Pseudonyms ? (as the headline writer puts it, anyway), where we can read: "Francine Prose and Daniel Mendelsohn on what readers' and critics' reactions say about pseudonymous works".
Prose seems more interested in the whole thing from the author's perspective and doesn't really have anything useful to say about "readers' and critics' reactions" -- and both she and Mendelsohn cite J.K.Rowling-writing-as-Robert Galbraith as an example (which, honestly, just seems sad to me -- yes, as far as sales-volume goes, Rowling and any alter egos she choses may be of interest, but literarily speaking ...).
Still, Mendelsohn, unlike Prose, is actually on point:
I can see the validity and usefulness of (some) literary criticism that focuses on context, author, and body of work -- but I'm not a big fan. As for book reviews, I want those to focus essentially entirely on the book at hand (indeed, as longtime readers know, I want books that focus on the book at hand (i.e. solely on the text) -- plain covers, little-to-no-information about the author (forget the name, even, if you can)), etc. (Yes, some context is often unavoidable -- but I wish more reviewers would work harder to avoid it.)
And so I can only roll my eyes when, for example, Mendelsohn writes:
Yes, I understand (and occasionally fall in) the trap of considering, say, Bleeding Edge as 'the new Pynchon' rather than anything else (fatally, it seems, in that case) and my ideal world of all-anonymous works might leave us all a bit too much at sea, but for the most part discussion of authors and even of their previous work seems too often to take the place of actual book-discussion.
What's interesting (at least theoretically) about pseudnoymous work is that that author-image falls by the wayside: The Casual Vacancy wasn't exactly judged -- pre-reveal -- on its own merits (pretty much no one bothered to judge it, after all), but at least it could have been. Now, it's just another book-by-that-Harry Potter-author and can never be read on its own terms. Surely, that's the interesting question this Bookends-column posed: how much does that author-name that's appended to the work (or placed front-and-center) play a role in what we make of the work ? (My wish, of course: not at all -- but even I can't manage that.)
Making his case, Mendelsohn offers names that aren't impressive pseudonyms -- John Banville's 'Benjamin Black' (where everyone knows it's Banville-writing-as-Black) is about as good as it gets (he also mentions the entirely unpseudonymous Euripides and film-maker Alfonso Cuarón). And, indeed, most pseudonyms are simply the names we know authors by -- from Stendhal to Mo Yan.
What about real alter egos and attempts-to-distance-from-the-self ? Pessoa would seem to be an interesting example -- though of course we read him only as: Pessoa. Julian Barnes' Dan Kavanagh-outings are widely ignored in any Barnes'-readings, but hardly very secret. Other dual-identities -- Ruth Rendell/Barbara Vine -- are also so well-known as to hardly count as pseudonyms, and serve simply as handy indicators for her readers. Our most pseudonymous authors remain the likes of Pynchon and Salinger, who use their actual names but seem/try/pretend to hide much of their identity; Tartt too affects an out-of-the-limelight image (though it hardly seems credible any longer after her current publicity-rampage) -- but this has become as much of their story/identity as any more traditional biography would (and to me, as with most publicity-matter, it amounts to little more than distracting noise).
Sure, authors' personal lives can shed interesting light on their work -- but especially in this day and age there's a lot of artificial marketing-steered image-making that compromises that, rendering it essentially pointless.
Stick to the individual works themselves, I say, and don't worry who wrote them, and/or what else they wrote.
The topic for this coming weekend's Bookend is How Do We Judge Books Written Under Pseudonyms ? (as the headline writer puts it, anyway), where we can read: "Francine Prose and Daniel Mendelsohn on what readers' and critics' reactions say about pseudonymous works".
Prose seems more interested in the whole thing from the author's perspective and doesn't really have anything useful to say about "readers' and critics' reactions" -- and both she and Mendelsohn cite J.K.Rowling-writing-as-Robert Galbraith as an example (which, honestly, just seems sad to me -- yes, as far as sales-volume goes, Rowling and any alter egos she choses may be of interest, but literarily speaking ...).
Still, Mendelsohn, unlike Prose, is actually on point:
As a critic, the question I want to ask is whether criticism untainted by knowledge of who the author is and what she has already done is desirable in the first place -- or, indeed, valid.He goes on to suggest (well, claim):
The most important role of the critic, after all, whether the scholar of literatures past or the reviewer of contemporary literature, is to mediate usefully between a work and its public, to present the novel or play or movie in the fullest possible way so the reader of the review can make sense of it: understand its ambitions, analyze the technical means by which it achieves them. (Or doesn't.)My response, of course, is: really ? I'm not sure what the role of critic/reviewer (two different things in my mind, too, by the way) is -- but I'm especially chary of opining on novels' ambitions. Yes, I'm more than happy to tell you whether or not a novel 'works for me' -- but I'm not sure I wan't to be claiming that has anything to do with the novel's (or its author's) ambitions. Indeed, often enough the author's ambitions are clear enough -- sometimes even made explicit -- yet have little to do with the book's success (or failure) in my eyes. And while I realize I can't discuss the work completely in a vacuum, my preference is to avoid as much context as is possible.
I can see the validity and usefulness of (some) literary criticism that focuses on context, author, and body of work -- but I'm not a big fan. As for book reviews, I want those to focus essentially entirely on the book at hand (indeed, as longtime readers know, I want books that focus on the book at hand (i.e. solely on the text) -- plain covers, little-to-no-information about the author (forget the name, even, if you can)), etc. (Yes, some context is often unavoidable -- but I wish more reviewers would work harder to avoid it.)
And so I can only roll my eyes when, for example, Mendelsohn writes:
When I read a review of the new Donna Tartt novel, I want to know not only what it's about and whether it's successful, but -- even more so, in the case of this subtle and versatile author -- how a fat Dickensian tome weaving together 17th-century Dutch painting and terrorist plots is related to its two siblings: the academic thriller The Secret History, which made Tartt's reputation 20 years ago, and The Little Friend, an atmospheric treatment of small-town Southern culture that came out a decade later.He couldn't come up with a better (i.e. for me worse) example: Tartt is (currently) omnipresent beyond the reviews of her new book anyway -- I can't open my internet browser without stumbling across yet another profile, interview, or report about her -- , so what need have we of hearing any more about her in reviews of The Goldfinch ? And given how many readers her earlier books had, what need for the reviewer/critic to dredge up that old stuff -- unless for comparative consumer purposes (if you like this about The Secret History you'll like that about The Goldfinch). Yes, some future Tartt-study might have interesting things to say about her evolution as a novelist but at this point that seems entirely premature and not particularly helpful. (Admittedly, I find Tartt and her writing -- two different things which seem to often get conflated -- more uninteresting than most seem to; she shows obvious talent and I've enjoyed reading two of her three books (the other one, not so much) but considered them all flawed; in any case, she still seems at that early stage of her career -- just like similarly-few-books-under-his-belt-Jeffrey-Eugenides -- where she is someone to better (or, preferably: only) consider book by book rather than in any overarching sort of way.)
Yes, I understand (and occasionally fall in) the trap of considering, say, Bleeding Edge as 'the new Pynchon' rather than anything else (fatally, it seems, in that case) and my ideal world of all-anonymous works might leave us all a bit too much at sea, but for the most part discussion of authors and even of their previous work seems too often to take the place of actual book-discussion.
What's interesting (at least theoretically) about pseudnoymous work is that that author-image falls by the wayside: The Casual Vacancy wasn't exactly judged -- pre-reveal -- on its own merits (pretty much no one bothered to judge it, after all), but at least it could have been. Now, it's just another book-by-that-Harry Potter-author and can never be read on its own terms. Surely, that's the interesting question this Bookends-column posed: how much does that author-name that's appended to the work (or placed front-and-center) play a role in what we make of the work ? (My wish, of course: not at all -- but even I can't manage that.)
Making his case, Mendelsohn offers names that aren't impressive pseudonyms -- John Banville's 'Benjamin Black' (where everyone knows it's Banville-writing-as-Black) is about as good as it gets (he also mentions the entirely unpseudonymous Euripides and film-maker Alfonso Cuarón). And, indeed, most pseudonyms are simply the names we know authors by -- from Stendhal to Mo Yan.
What about real alter egos and attempts-to-distance-from-the-self ? Pessoa would seem to be an interesting example -- though of course we read him only as: Pessoa. Julian Barnes' Dan Kavanagh-outings are widely ignored in any Barnes'-readings, but hardly very secret. Other dual-identities -- Ruth Rendell/Barbara Vine -- are also so well-known as to hardly count as pseudonyms, and serve simply as handy indicators for her readers. Our most pseudonymous authors remain the likes of Pynchon and Salinger, who use their actual names but seem/try/pretend to hide much of their identity; Tartt too affects an out-of-the-limelight image (though it hardly seems credible any longer after her current publicity-rampage) -- but this has become as much of their story/identity as any more traditional biography would (and to me, as with most publicity-matter, it amounts to little more than distracting noise).
Sure, authors' personal lives can shed interesting light on their work -- but especially in this day and age there's a lot of artificial marketing-steered image-making that compromises that, rendering it essentially pointless.
Stick to the individual works themselves, I say, and don't worry who wrote them, and/or what else they wrote.