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Friday, May 05, 2006

Signed, Disgusted


Stuart Klawans writes in The Nation:

[Ms. V.’s] is a story about clichés and stereotypes passing from one subliterary commercial product to another. …The real scandal, to my mind, is that trade book publishers in the aggregate now commit themselves almost wholeheartedly to the Second Helpings and their equivalent, and that American newspapers don't mind encouraging them.

…So great is the will to evade these tawdry facts that even when the press exposes them -- as the Times did, to its credit, in an article on the role of book-packaging firms -- the story must end with avowals all around of the blamelessness of publishing companies. The full weight of culpability must fall instead on the author, who has failed to provide sufficient originality for an industry that wants none. By serving as the latest unwilling, moralized distraction from this round of same-old, Ms. Viswanathan has not damaged today's trade publishers but actually done them a service.



Problem here is that essays like this one -- indignant exposes of packaged, formulaic, commercial fiction -- are also a species of cliché. Grubb Street we will always have with us.

Klawans gets close in this piece to saying one of the things about ordinary Americans that gets liberals into trouble -- for after all, it isn’t just the “industry” that wants no originality. It’s readers. The full weight of culpability must fall on them, no?




The only new angle I see in the Ms. V. vignette is some idiot’s decision at the outset to spin her as a serious writer -- Harvard, etc. -- when she’s a hack.