THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS STORY
The trick is finding a way into the body of this publication amid blocks of small print text without invitations or hooks, unwelcoming, insular, clearly written not for the ordinary reader but instead an intellectual elite of proper status, breeding, and income, at least a group of people who like to think of themselves as intellectuals and so any publication they read has to have markers of the intellectual while constructed in such a way to keep out everyone else. . . .
AN ANALYSIS
I WAS GIFTED around Christmas from one of my wife’s relatives the most recent copy of The New York Review of Books (December 21, 2023), the person knowing I have pretenses toward being a writer. The thinking being, I guess, that I’d jump right on it. Instead it sat on my admittedly enormous “To Read” stack for innumerable days, turning into weeks. (Am I sounding literary enough?)
The problem was finding an entrance into this house of prestigious writing. I have to read enough for the New Pop Lit website, as well as necessary reading (the minimum required) for my day job. Stretching myself or at least my eyes for the new arrival was no easy task.
The problem was the Review’s reader-unfriendly layout:
Clearly designed for the leisure class. A quick glance at reader demographics bears this out: those with lavish amounts of time on their hands, not involved in the ongoing fast-paced struggle to survive which afflicts most of us, but who can instead scatter through the wordy pieces at whim, then plunge, here and there, when ready, into them. Or are the issues even read?
The literary establishment dismisses all popular/genre writing as formulaic, which it is. But these intellectual essays are also formulaic. They follow a well-developed pattern in place for decades. If they didn’t, they’d never be published in The New York Review of Books.
When all-new kinds of essays and stories arise, they too will set a pattern and become formulaic. Just as Impressionist art created a formula, and Cubism, Abstract Expressionism, rock music in its various iterations: rockabilly, Motown, prog rock, punk. On to hip hop, metal, techno, EDM: you name it.
IN TRUTH I eventually read several of the articles, and found them mildly interesting, if not striking. Among them, a long dry essay by Colin B. Bailey about 19th-century Impressionist painters titled, “A New Language of Modern Art.” Can we then ask: When will we see a new language of modern literature?
HAS The New York Review of Books changed much if at all during the sixty-one years of its existence– other than offering perhaps a more diverse array of names on its masthead? No. Nor will it change. Nor will any part of the New York-based literary establishment change. Change will come from outside the moldering institutional flagships of the literary art, whether it travels from far away, or explodes directly outside the complacently-staffed high-priced gray-windowed offices. Far below them, in the alleys or streets. And it will come.
-Karl Wenclas
