Category / Tanenhaus, Sam

by Edward Champion

An Urgent Plea to Sam Tanenhaus

Mr. Tanenhaus, while we profoundly disagree on a number of points, I must echo the sentiments of my colleague. Your concerns, interests, and curiosity are clearly within politics, and the time has come for you to resign from the New York Times and take a chance. It is abundantly clear from the thoughtful and striking qualities of your New Republic piece that politics, not literature, is your beat. Your heart is in finishing the Buckley bio, not in books. Your literary hero, John Updike, is dead. And you clearly aren’t interested in any the emerging literary talents. So why continue to pretend?

But here’s the good news. There are plenty of people who can do what you cannot on the literary front. And with Democrats now controlling a sizable stretch within the Beltway, there are plenty of conservatives who cannot do what you can do on the politics front. If you wish to flail the sheets of conservatism and get a movement going, would such linen-shaking be best served in your current sinecure at the New York Times? Or would it better served through work carried out at The New Republic and other publications? I may be a liberal, but frankly a number of my progressive friends and colleagues could use a few swift kicks in the ass. Right now, there is no better candidate than you to puncture the complacency that has settled in among certain sectors of the Obama camp, who still genuinely believe that questioning even a few notions of Obama’s decisions do not involve the gestures of a natural skeptic, but a liberal drifting right. Like Jefferson, I like a little rebellion now and then. Natural storms must inhabit any partisan atmospheres if the American system is to remain honest. And while we both rest on different wings, I sense that you feel the same way.

Would not the sparring that you once unsuccessfully attempted by assigning Leon Wieseltier to write an ad hominem attack on Nicholson Baker be better served through politics? I’m sure you know by now that what works for politics does not always work for books. Humorless and austere writing — that Burkean tone you so admire and attempt to employ, often stubbornly, within the Review — does not blend particularly well with the fun and bipartisan possibilities of literary journalism. But it does work for politics.

I know what you’re thinking, Mr. Tanenhaus. Did the Democrats fire six shots or only five? Well, to tell you the truth, in all this excitement I kind of lost track myself. But being as this current political climate represents a .44 Magnum pointed in your direction, the most powerful handgun in the world, and would blow your head clean off, you’ve got to ask yourself a few questions. Do I cower away from the principles with which I’ve lived my life? Or do I accept who I am and write and work with my strengths in mind?

Do I feel lucky? Well, do ya, punk?

by Edward Champion

In Which I Talk with Tanenhaus

On Wednesday night, Sam Tanenhaus and I talked. I was in the middle of arguing with my colleague Levi Asher about the future of literary coverage, saying something to him about a priori arguments in relation to rumors about The Washington Post Book World. A soft voice behind us asked, “Book World?” It was Tanenhaus.

I must give Tanenhaus credit. It was a particularly freezing evening and Tanenhaus clearly wanted to go home. But he did take the time out to chit-chat.

Our discussion was fiery but civil. I had blunt words to say to him about the New York Times Book Review‘s paucity of translated fiction coverage and its poor attention to genre — particularly science fiction. (I suggested a replacement name for Dave Itzkoff when he asked.) He had blunt words to say to me about the harsh language directed his way on this blog — and there has been, much to my present shock, quite a lot of posts devoted to Tanenhaus. But any man who can tell me to my face that he doesn’t care for my work, without a cowardly online pseudonym or an entirely batshit perspective, can’t be all bad. And I certainly took no offense to anything he said.

I had approached Tanenhaus earlier in the evening, just after he had concluded a talk at Barnes & Noble. I came to him pointing out that I merely had one question, that there would be no ambush journalism on my part, and that I simply hoped he could clarify the record. Why had seven of the top ten books of 2008 been granted to Knopf? He did not know who I was initially. It could have been the beard. And while he grew visibly agitated when I told him I was Ed Champion, he did stick around a bit to answer my question.

He indicated to me that the books selection process was publisher-blind and suggested that “the readers don’t really care.” (He seemed to be insinuating that the NYTBR only cared about the “common reader.”) In a scenario in which one conglomerate dominated the top ten monopoly (in 2008, nine of the ten titles had gone to Random House), Tanenhaus was strongly against the idea of offering a level playing field in which a few titles from another publisher might fill in some of the slots. “We can’t really say to ourselves which one doesn’t fit,” said Tanenhaus. Although he did insinuate that “seven Graywolfs” would also be great, if the selection process had veered down that direction.

But what of a hypothetical alternative list that involved splitting up the top ten books among multiple publishers? Or one that considered genre? This was, in Tanenhaus’s perspective, reflective of “commerce at the center.”

I then pointed out to Tanenhaus that commerce was perhaps more “at the center” when the NYTBR placed 90% of its top ten list with one conglomerate, and noted that other newspapers had different criteria in place to present such a scenario from happening. Tanenhaus tsk-tsked this, before another guy, who looked to be either a friend or a colleague, came to rescue Tanenhaus and extract him from my inquiries.

I returned to my amigos, and we began shooting the shit about all this. I believe Eric was the first to point the predictability of Tanenhaus’s answers. But one had to try. Tanenhaus then came rushing by, looking for his coat. I then introduced Tanenhaus to Levi, notably responsible for the excellent “Reviewing the Review” weekly series. I asked Tanenhaus if he had found any of Levi’s observations helpful. He said no.

And so we left to grab drinks. I had joked that Tanenhaus’s inflexibility to other perspectives made him the “George W. Bush of the literary world” and suggested that perhaps the NYTBR “needed an Obama” to restore coverage back to the heights of John Leonard. The group then suggested that I was that Obama, and I responded that they couldn’t possibly be serious.

As it turned out, my Bush comparison was also wrong. For Tanenhaus did talk with us about twenty minutes later. He did express some regret that he hadn’t given enough space to translated titles, but he had no answers as to how or when he would do this in the future. The sense I got was that Tanenhaus was completely reliant on his editors’ respective judgments and that this judgment permitted him to do what he needed to do in an executive capacity, but prevented him from plunging first-hand into some of today’s realities. Levi brought up the rather unfunny offerings to be found in The Back Page. And Tanenhaus suggested to us that we should send him ideas on how to improve it. The Back Page was largely freelance.

Ideas? Freelance? I know damn well that there’s no way in hell that I will ever write for The New York Times Book Review, but I decided to present a mock hypothetical. What if I were to pitch him ideas? He suggested that my journalism was “irresponsible” and “defamatory.” I asked him when he had last read my blog, and he indicated it had been many years. Well, how could he be certain that everything I was writing was “irresponsible” and “defamatory?” Another editor had told him. I mentioned the 1,600 word response to Adam Sternbergh’s review of David Denby’s Snark.

Tanenhaus was stunned to learn that I had been published in other newspapers. There was a tinge of fury flushing through his face upon hearing this news, but Tanenhaus did keep things civilized. He insisted that my “defamations” were not up to the New York Times‘s “standards.” I had the feeling he had been wanting to say much of this for some time and, given that I had zinged him here multiple times, it seemed only fair to shut up and let him deliver his apparent vitriol. I pointed out that I went after all targets, and Levi and I both observed that these posts were largely satirical. Levi defended me and compared my work to Paul Krassner. A kind and humbling comparison, but I doubted that Tanenhaus had much appreciation for a yippy.

“Ad hominem” was the key term on Tanenhaus’s mind. And I pointed out that Leon Wieseltier’s review of Nicholson Baker’s Checkpoint was just as ad hominem as anything I had ever written in calling Baker’s novel “a scummy little book.” Ah, Tanenhaus responded, but Wieseltier was attacking the book, not the person. (I probably should have said to Tanenhaus that the definition of ad hominem involves attacking the object of the argument instead of making an effort to discredit it. Wieseltier calling Baker’s novel “a scummy little book” is just as low and pointless, a missed opportunity to explain to the reader why it doesn’t hold up as a novel.) This was where Tanenhaus remained stubborn. I had pointed out that Wieseltier’s aside about liberals vs. conservatives had very little to do with the quality of the book. Tanenhaus flatly declared that it was a tight argument.

“You don’t have to like what I do. I don’t have to like what you do,” said Tanenhaus. Fair enough. But this seemed absurd. Couldn’t we agree on a few common points?

He was particularly fixated on my “The Knopf Times Book Review” post, in which I had proposed that The New York Times Book Review had been bought and paid for by Knopf. But the words I wrote, while quite blistering, were satirical in the end. And beneath the vituperation was the telltale entreaty to Tanenhaus that he should exercise more judgment in his selection process if anyone wanted to take the New York Times Book Review seriously, with Dwight Garner’s recent work as daily book reviewer held up as a more virtuous model. (Not unlike Tanenhaus’s entreaty to me that I should stop tossing around ad hominem bombs. But Tanenhaus has admired Tom Wolfe and Joe Queenan, both writers who specialize in ad hominem. There were, of course, double standards on this question.)

In the end, I’m glad that Tanenhaus and I finally got to chat a bit. No, we’re not going to be BFF anytime soon. And I will continue to criticize the NYTBR‘s inadequacies, particularly when Tanenhaus and his team continue to perform grave injustices to covering translated fiction, debut fiction, graphic novels, and genre. But we were able to come together and have a civil disagreement and an exchange of views, and clear up a few points. That, in the end, is a healthy and constructive form of communication.

[UPDATE: Levi Asher has posted his report of the events.]

by Edward Champion

A Decent Issue of the NYTBR for Once?

I am especially surprised to see that this week’s edition of the New York Times Book Review has a lot of good material. I don’t know if some crafty editor over there who still cares about books had the bright idea of tying up Sam Tanenhaus and throwing him into a closet for a week in review. I cannot possibly envision Tanenhaus coming up with the brilliant idea of having Tom McCarthy review Jean-Philippe Toussaint (a literary translation, Orthofer, can you believe it?), getting Douglas Wolk weigh in on Spiegelman, Ames, and Heatley, and securing Sophie Gee to politely dismiss the Hensher novel, among other things.

This issue seems to have arrived from a parallel universe in which Tanenhaus declined the Times gig and finished his Buckley bio. There is a whiff of revolution in the air. The deputy editors seem eager to seize the means of production and make the NYTBR matter again. Yes, the NYTBR could certainly improve its terrible male-to-female ratio. But this week’s articles don’t bear the sleazy telltale assignment pairups that regularly spawn from Tanenhaus’s grubby little mind. This is an issue written by informed people who wants to assess literature and who are chomping at the bit to go all the way. Which is all that many of us have been asking over the years. None of Tanenhaus’s stuffy and out-of-touch regulars — Joe Queenan, the hopelessly unfunny Henry Alford, Lee Siegel, the pair of thirtysomething dopes Troy Patterson and Dave Itzkoff, et al. — are in here this week. (But sadly, neither is the one good regular mainstay: Liesl Schillinger.)

If the issue still carries the stigma of sleazily tendentious decision making, at least it has managed to restore itself with pretty decent coverage.

Of course, I fully expect next week’s issue to go to pot. It has become abundantly clear that Sam Tanenhaus is the primary reason why the NYTBR is mostly a joke. Keep Tanenhaus away from the cookie jar, and the NYTBR has some chance of recapturing a modicum of its former glory. And we’ll all have some tasty gingerbread to munch on.

by Edward Champion

The Knopf Times Book Review

[UPDATE: On the evening of January 21, 2009, I asked Tanenhaus in person about the concerns satirized below, and I was able to get a few answers. I point readers of this post to the direction of my later post, “In Which I Talk with Tanenhaus,” where some questions are answered and Tanenhaus’s perspective is reported.]

It started with Sam Tanenhaus’s ridiculously uncritical review (and fawning video interview) with John Updike. It continued with Tanenhaus’s lips nearly licking Toni Morrison to a needlessly sensual premature death. But this afternoon, Sam Tanenhaus proved that The New York Times Book Review isn’t an independent organ, but rather a throbbing and dependent organ shoving itself restlessly into Knopf’s moist vagina. The New York Times Book Review selected its top ten books of 2008. Seven of the books were from Knopf. Of the remaining three selections, two were from other Random House imprints under Knopf’s watch. The only other publisher served was Farrar, Straus & Giruoux.

I think it goes without saying that someone is getting a cock sucked here.

My beef here is not with Random House, who has been consistently receptive and helpful to journalists of all stripes, but with Sam Tanenhaus’s embarrassingly tendentious selection process. These are malodorous results that reek as shamefully as the Hollywood Foreign Press Association’s “decision-making process” during the Golden Globe Awards. It bears the skunkish whiff of junkets and favoritism. And it certainly doesn’t behoove any “paper of record” that expects us to take it seriously.

If this is a desperate ploy on Tanenhaus’s part to coax Random House to buy more advertising space in the New York Times Book Review, well, the joke here’s on Tanenhaus. Because why should Random House buy an advertisement in the NYTBR when they’re getting all this free publicity?

Look, I love Updike as much as the next guy. But let’s face the facts. By and large, the critics seemed to agree that The Widows of Eastwick didn’t quite cut the mustard. For Tanenhaus to write, in all seriousness, “At 76, he still wrings more from a sentence than almost anyone else. His sorcery is startlingly fresh, page upon page,” suggests very strongly that Tanenhaus assigned the wrong guy to review the book. It is one thing to marvel at Updike’s prose. But it’s quite another to fawn over it like an uncritical and sycophantic lapdog. For all the love and fanboyish accolades that have been granted to Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland and Roberto Bolano’s 2666, I’ve never seen any of these plaudits spill over into Tanenhaus’s unmitigated hero worship.

How can any man live with himself knowing that he is such an unrepentant whore? Thank goodness Dwight Garner got out of this sausage factory when he did for the daily book reviewing gig. Compare Garner’s more adept review of Alison Bechdel’s The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For in today’s edition. It’s just as effusive as Tanenhaus’s Updike review, but at least Garner still has some respect: both for himself and the readership.

by Edward Champion

Virginia Heffernan: The Sarah Palin of Journalism

The review came over the long Thanksgiving weekend, but the 757 words that Virginia Heffernan devoted to savaging Sarah Vowell’s The Wordy Shipmates on Sunday have little to do with Vowell’s book. Heffernan is the kind of reviewer that Coleridge accurately identified as failed talent. The embittered dunce who gave up her punch and passion eons ago, and who now approaches the craft of reviewing like a helper monkey trained to take a coat at a snap, only to deposit this winter wear into a pile of her own excrement. It is a predictable exercise that just about any marsupial with a cluster of barely functioning brain cells can accomplish. You could employ a human resources manger of average intelligence (and with some experience in professionally humiliating people for pedantic reasons) to write a review like this. Even Dale Peck understood this years ago when he gave up his hatchet to write unapologetically commercial fiction. But since the act requires little in the way of cognitive ability, one wonders why Heffernan isn’t employed in a position that better suits her skill set. Perhaps pumping gas in the New Jersey cold or putting together bankers boxes for minimum wage in a damp basement.

Heffernan’s review fails on just about every level. It isn’t particularly informative for a reader hoping to get a sense of who Vowell is or what this new book is about. It represents a predictable scenario in which the New York Times Book Review has opted to wear its ugly internal politics on its sleeve, with Heffernan unable to stretch past her own prejudices against the quirky and the interesting.

And isn’t it rather intriguing that one-liners and “blogger tics” serve as “weak liquors” for this digital culture columnist when Heffernan’s review (and her work as a whole) has employed the same? Is Heffernan even remotely curious about her beat? Or is she waiting for the joys to kick in upon the onset of menopause? One delves into the Heffernan oeuvre finding bitter and flavorless canapes instead of tasty tapas prepared with care and excitement. Heffernan cannot get her location details right. She is more interested in the girls who cling to Virgil Griffith’s arms than Griffith’s geeky achievements. Most egregiously, she talks down to her readers as if they are numbskulls. (“Search ‘Unforgivable’ on YouTube or go to isthatunforgivable.com. Definitely not safe for work,” reads one of her smug asides.) Here is the village idiot who, like Sarah Palin, believes herself to be an indispensable gatekeeper. She has foolishly equated the YouTube success of Obama’s “A More Perfect Union” speech with length and political tech savvy rather than the substance of Obama’s convictions — writing yet again with disdain against those who use the Internet. Because in the Heffernan worldview, people who use the Internet can’t possibly be interested in long-form exercises. Indeed, Heffernan is so out-of-touch that she could not even account for the rise and ubiquity of wi-fi networks in an article on cybercafes. And all of these disgracefully written and uninformed articles were written for the Times in just the past month.

Heffernan is an aging debutante who will never quite understand why others are drinking the last pre-Wet Planet cans of Jolt Cola, why geeks code or create open source software for others, or why other techheads plunder through buckets of abandoned components to build new machines. But she’ll still be insistently tapping your shoulder to ask you what HKEY_CURRENT_USER is all about, even when you’ve explained the REGEDIT niceties to her a thousand times. This is a stubborn dunderhead who cannot stick to her own hoary and boring cliques, and who does not realize just how much of a laughing stock she is in New York. She believes that the regular newspaper reader is an idiot. And anybody, like Sarah Vowell, who does get through to the public in a semi-geeky or slightly idiosyncratic way must be nuked from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure. (At least that’s the vernacular the geeks are using. But what Jim Cameron film did that come from again? Oh noes! My people skills and Google prowess aren’t quite up to snuff!)

Now Heffernan has besmirched a book review section that should matter, but that continues to remain mostly a disgrace — in large part because the editors continue to assign creative typists like Heffernan to write drivel to fill up its pages. Heffernan lacks the decency and the acumen to inform us about what the book is trying to say. Here is a reviewer who cannot be professional enough to pay attention. Heffernan fundamentally misunderstands that Vowell’s dips into the past aren’t really about “enlighten[ing] slacker Gen-Xers with a remedial history of our nation,” but about how one particular voice approaches this subject. Nobody expects to be entirely enlightened when reading Sarah Vowell. But a reader is often entertained. And is that not one of the basic functions of books? To transmit one person’s ideas to a reader.

Of course, for Heffernan, it isn’t about the book. It’s about Vowell’s vocal appearance in The Incredibles. It’s about Vowell’s work with This American Life. It’s about how other people like and enjoy Vowell, goddammit. Why don’t they like and enjoy Heffernan? It’s about prohibiting how another person’s perspective is committed to print. We can’t have references to Happy Days. We can’t have material that is written to be performed. (Never mind that, more often than not, the best prose is often that which can be spoken aloud.)

Should it really matter that Vowell is discovering John Winthrop and Roger Williams for the first time? (Or pretending to with her schtick?) Is Heffernan so sheltered a human being that she does not recognize that, because of American educational inadequacies, many people in America do not know who Winthrop and Williams are? Is she so stupid that she cannot recognize that Vowell is writing for a popular audience?

Evidently she is. If Heffernan so loathed and misunderstood Vowell, she should not have been assigned this review. The biggest clue that Heffernan, in all likelihood, lacks even the rudimentary joy to enjoy so much as a carousel or a roller coaster is this sentence: “She sounds as if she’s enjoying herself.” Well, I sure as hell hope that Vowell is enjoying herself. Or any author for that matter. Could Heffernan be seriously suggesting that a dip into history should not be enjoyable? To pillory Vowell for not being an academic is to miss the point of what Vowell and similar commentators are all about. To attack Vowell for the people she cites in the acknowledgments section rather than specific examples from the text is the act of an amateurish cunctator.

When one is dealing with an eccentric writer, even an apparent middlebrow one, it is sometimes necessary to consider the writer’s eccentricities. What we do know is this: Vowell has not contributed to the New York Times Book Review since February 2005. It remains unknown if Vowell has ever declined an assignment under the Sam Tanenhaus regime. But if she has declined, she has chosen wisely. We can indeed afford to lose this sinking ship so long as the fools who write for it continue to misunderstand the most rudimentary elements of reading and reviewing, while alienating the fun and adept people who remain quite capable.