Like many in the literary world, I read, with great interest, Naomi Kanakia’s recent exegesis on the “little” magazines like the Partisan Review and their various descendants, including n+1, The Drift, and The Point. These journals of literature and ideas have, in many instances, punched above their weight in the culture. Kanakia’s piece was a tremendous feat of research and analysis. The piece, by its nature, was controversial, and generated a great deal of discourse among various writers and academics. It was proof, to me at least, that debates around literary matters, on Substack at least, remain fruitful. All of it—even the furious dissents—was fun to absorb.
One part, in particular, stuck out to me, as someone with a stake in this debate. I am the editor-in-chief and co-founder of The Metropolitan Review, a new books and culture review magazine, and we operate in a similar milieu as the aforementioned publications. Unlike the others, we don’t have a particular party line—we do not have a defined politics, which still confuses some—but we are focused, very much, on literary and cultural analysis. We also care—primarily care, in my view—about the review function of the magazine.
We want to write, as much as we can, about the new books that are appearing in the world.
Kanakia found something very interesting about the Partisan Review successors operating in the United States.
Moreover, when Partisan Review style magazines came back into fashion, they tended to be much more political than literary. What was most striking to me about the current crop of PR-style journals was that, despite their protests about the power and meaning of art, they spend remarkably little time on traditional literary criticism.
The careful work of evaluating contemporary writers or contemporary literary trends, describing them and assessing their relative merits—most of this work is absent from these journals. Instead, this traditional criticism tends to take place in a separate category of book-review journals—BookForum, The Times Literary Supplement, The New York Review of Books, The London Review of Books, The Cleveland Review of Books, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and the like.
When books are reviewed in a little magazine, the focus is usually not on their literary value, but on the window they provide into the psyche of literary intellectuals.
This is something I’ve noticed as well. The Baffler, The Point, The Drift, and n+1 do not regularly review new books. It would be inaccurate to say they never do, or don’t publish, from time to time, excellent literary criticism. But if there is a new novel appearing in the fall, it’s unlikely any of these magazines will dedicate space to reviewing it, unless it is shoehorned into some greater argument about the culture. This is understandable because discourse essays tend to draw more readers. Some would argue they’re more worthy. The Metropolitan Review, for the record, has published many of them, and will publish many more.
Another writer, Rosemarie Ho, responded to Kanakia, arguing “the reason you don’t get big review-essays constantly in little magazines is that they are exceedingly time-consuming (and therefore expensive) to write well.” For a Zadie Smith piece, she said she “went back to read and reread all of her novels and essays; some Dickens and Ainsworth novels; histories of the novel and of 19th c. British colonialism; some theoretical lodestones for me (Raymond Williams, Fredric Jameson, Georg Lukacs).” I do think this is a valid concern. A larger review essay takes a great deal of work and if you want to reach the standard Ho sets forth for her piece about Smith, you will be spending many hours deep in reading and research. That is the ideal way to approach a review. But is it the only way? Here is where I part company from Ho and some of the little magazines. Jon Baskin, the founding editor of The Point, wrote to me last week that when “we started our magazines that there were lots of Book Reviews and places to publish book reviews so this was the one thing that there wasn’t a need for more of.” He then added, referring to The Metropolitan Review, that by “the time you started MR this was probably less true. So many newspaper review sections and literary reviews died or contracted in the past decade or so, and that seems like one area where Substack has been an important part of the solution.” I do think that’s mostly true and that Substack can be part of the solution. It’s true, too, there are hardly any book review sections left now.
What I would like to do is repeat an old plea—these magazines, and literary-minded publications broadly, should review more new books. I won’t bother asking newspapers to do it, since so many are struggling to survive and long ago eviscerated their arts sections. I wish they would, but it does feel futile to hope a failing newspaper in a midsized city suddenly starts paying a critic to regularly review books. Those with the cash and inclination should do it, though. The New York Times Book Review, for example, is a shell of its old self, and this makes little sense since the Times is a profitable business with a college-educated readership that would appreciate a lush, high-quality book review. The writer and book critic Jan Harayda has chronicled, at length, the various failures of the current Times Book Review, and if I could sum up my own frustrations, it would be that the section is too short—there was once a time when it reviewed many more novels and nonfiction works in a week—and there’s far too much focus on sophomoric, recommendation-style coverage versus actual criticism. It’s veered too close to the philistine. The Times also was once a newspaper that could review a new book every day in addition to the Sunday section. Those days are gone.
But one can only beseech the Times so much to get better. It’s more helpful to look to the magazines that engage in cultural and literary matters, and ask them to do more. I don’t believe spending months researching a single author is necessary to perform good literary criticism. For more than a century, novels were regularly reviewed in newspapers and magazines, and the critics did not all marinate for a long period of time in a particular author’s entire oeuvre. In many cases, with hard print deadlines looming, this was impractical. There are different styles of criticism: the lengthy, discursive, analytical sort you can find in quarterly magazines, and the shorter assessments of new work that tell a reader what value a book may have. One might be more substantive than the other, but both matter. And a good magazines, I do think, can do both. That’s been my mission with The Metropolitan Review. We publish shorter, traditional reviews and longer critical essays. They sit side by side. What Kanakia says is true: the Partisan Review writers were quite interested in engaging, very directly, with the new novels appearing in their midst. My worry is that the little magazines don’t do enough of this work, that far too many books appearing today are barely accounted for at all. That’s why I’ve come to like the Whitney Review of New Writing, a print publication that publishes capsule reviews of new fiction and nonfiction. The capsule isn’t my favorite form, but it works—in a few hundred words, a critic says something about a new book. Criticism, above all else, confirms a books existence. One critic has deigned to engage with another writer’s work. This practical function, on its own, is meaningful, and is how we progress as a culture. We have to know what the living artists among us are doing.
To praise a little magazine for a moment, I was gratified that n+1 recently published an editorial criticizing the literary world’s penchant for obsessing over the reissues of old books. It seems, every few months or so, there’s a renewed celebration of an aging or long dead writer. There is nothing, on its own, wrong with this, and it’s wonderful to bring old books back into print and acknowledge them. May the work continue. But as I read, for example, the legendary Vivian Gornick grapple with, in the new issue of The Nation, a 1960 work of book-length literary criticism from Leslie Fielder, I couldn’t help but wonder if it wouldn’t have been better for someone like Gornick to bring her formidable powers to bear on a writer who hasn’t been dead since 2003. Or for The Nation to allot its limited space, in its Fall Books issue, to a writer who wasn’t dead, no matter if they were as fascinating as Fiedler. What about, instead, more room for new books from living writers? n+1 put it best: “Without a critical edifice built to assimilate contemporary fiction, a reader must put in more work to stay current. Perhaps we should all adopt a new rule: For every rediscovered treasure you pick up on the recommendation of a connoisseur of late 20th-century bohemian Australian fiction, read a book published in the past five years. Don’t let the seductions of the past blind you to the fascinations of the present. Be your own canon editor! And ensure that your canon is continually replenishing itself.”
The past is, indeed, seductive. One reality rarely remarked upon because it’s so obvious is that, each day, there’s more of the past to sift through. Fiedler, writing in 1960, didn’t have to worry about the literature of the rest of the 60s, the 70s, and so on. Each generation must confront a growing corpus; the 1980s writer could not have been bogged down by works from the 1990s, as the 1990s writer had no twenty-first century to consider. The 2020s writer faces the whole twentieth century, plus the nineteenth, when the novel really came into its own. It’s easy, then, to disappear into these decades and never go back. Or dig through the past for an obscurity, and spend a life trying to celebrate it more. I know I am guilty of this. And, again, there is nothing wrong with appreciating the literature of the deep past, of studying the dead. One must know their antecedents. Yet, as n+1 argues, there are limits. A retrograde culture lacks vibrancy. It’s important to appreciate the canon and “be your own canon editor.” A worthy project is the building of a present day canon, or at least deciding, through enough reading and reviewing, that works have appeared that can make, someday, the building blocks of one.
The internet has not been good for the straight book review because these reviews don’t always perform well by internal metrics like pageviews. This is why, if new fiction is reviewed, it is often lumped into a larger discourse essay, held up as one piece of evidence in a broad argument; the book itself, as a standalone work of art, isn’t enough to carry a piece on its own because it may not receive enormous amounts of web traffic. A straight review can do very well, but is handicapped by the fact that not every reader will be familiar with a certain author, especially if they’re newer. This shouldn’t be a reason to jettison it though, in the same way a good news organization doesn’t pursue clickbait alone or decides only sports coverage is worthwhile because more people care about sports. A strong magazine can offer discourse essays and straight reviews, together. There’s enough room. If space (or money) is a challenge, the capsule approach that Whitney takes is helpful in its own way. It’s an idea I’ve toyed with at The Metropolitan Review, if we’ve yet to implement it.
The little magazines can start to fill the review void. Each can, at the minimum, review five new novels in an issue. These reviews needn’t be overly long, or challenge the critic to consume every word the writer has ever written. Is there a critic alive who’s reviewed Joyce Carol Oates who has also read everything she has ever published? Younger writers, too, can be a salve for what Rosemarie Ho fretted about when it came to the review essay. A writer who is under fifty might only have a few books in print. Easier to handle! It’s also fine, sometimes, to take a book for what it is, to not drown in so much context. Not every one of a writer’s books might be interlinked. As a novelist, I’ve found myself writing books in conversation with each other, but also those that attempt new directions entirely. Does my murder cult novel have that much in common with my time-traveling soft science fiction novel? Maybe. Maybe not. Certainly, when my next novel appears, I don’t expect every critic to have read the novel I published in 2018. All I hope for, really, is for a critic to sit with that one new book I published and treat it fairly. Or treat it in the first place—nothing is worse than silence, total indifference. The writer suffers, and so does a culture where newness is ignored. The little magazines are equipped to rectify this and they should. It doesn’t take Herculean efforts or enormous amounts of money. It’s just about setting priorities and deciding what you care about most.
