{"id":84086,"date":"2026-04-28T00:01:00","date_gmt":"2026-04-28T06:01:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.opinionpublica.tv\/portada\/?p=84086"},"modified":"2026-04-27T17:40:50","modified_gmt":"2026-04-27T23:40:50","slug":"where-have-all-the-book-reviews-gone","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.opinionpublica.tv\/portada\/where-have-all-the-book-reviews-gone\/","title":{"rendered":"Where have all the book reviews gone?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"Where<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

In 1981, Donald Barthelme published \u201cChallenge,\u201d a funny and weirdly prescient short story, in The New Yorker. Its premise was that Japanese book-reviewing technology \u2014 bots that deliver \u201csleek, space-efficient\u201d pieces \u2014 were putting American critics out to pasture. The death of the American book review was nigh.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One machine, the Nakamichi Model 500, was capable of \u201cdeconstructing a book of average length in seven seconds, with 0.5 distortion, signal-to-noise ratio of 124 db, and a damping factor of 60 \u2014 a technological feat well beyond the capacity of any U.S. review.\u201d By comparison, Barthelme wrote, American book notices tended to be bulbous and plodding and written by John Kenneth Galbraith or Joyce Carol Oates.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Other units had different accessories and upgrades. The Sanyo Model 350 suppressed undue enthusiasm with a \u201cspecial microprocessor unit.\u201d Nikko\u2019s Model 770 came equipped with a three-foot-long \u201cclip-on extension probe that actually reached out and touched the reader\u2019s heartstrings, aided by dual LED heartstring meters.\u201d The bots were similar, but each had their quirks:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Close readers (\u201creview nuts\u201d) could discern a mushiness in the midrange in some Mitsubishi reviews; the upper registers of a Yamaha review were, in some models, unpleasantly shrill; Subaru\u2019s notices were thought to be \u201ccharitable.\u201d (Sansui\u2019s use of industrial robots in book-review assembly was not in itself considered innovative; The New York Review of Books had been using robots, usually British, for years.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There\u2019s a lot going on in \u201cChallenge,\u201d as there always is in Barthelme\u2019s cool and surreal fiction. For one thing, the story is an unconventional relic of the \u201cJapan Panic\u201d of the 1980s, when anxious Americans, especially those with stock portfolios, feared Japan\u2019s industrial dominance might supersede our own. The Japanese were making better cars and spawning sharper technology. When Mitsubishi bought a majority stake in Rockefeller Center at the end of the decade, few missed the symbolism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cChallenge\u201d was also a scattershot satire of the state of American book criticism. Barthelme zinged Galbraith and Oates and the Times critic Christopher Lehmann-Haupt for being pokey, the Times Literary Supplement for paying its reviewers chump change and Publishers Weekly \u201cfor its exclusive employment of 13-year-old girls.\u201d Forty-five years later, \u201cChallenge\u201d has lost little of its subversive electricity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Barthelme\u2019s story was prophetic. Even before the rise of A.I. there was a near-extinction-level wipeout of the American book review. It has gotten eerily quiet out there \u2014 it\u2019s as if the bees, those kibitzing and sometimes stinging pollinators, have vanished \u2014 and few have noticed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Only yesterday, it seems, nearly every American newspaper, dozens and dozens of them, even in midsize cities, ran book reviews by local critics. The alternative weeklies (I wrote for many of these) had feisty and clamorous and occasionally nutty book sections. \u201cSometimes an off-the-wall review,\u201d Norman Mailer said, \u201ccan be as nourishing as a wild game dinner.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Time, Newsweek and other weeklies had serious critics who mattered to the conversation and knocked their heads together like bighorn rams. So much of this is gone. The strangulation sounds of early dial-up should have served as warning.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The recent shutting of The Washington Post\u2019s Book World, one of the nation\u2019s last free-standing books sections, feels like the end of something larger. It marks an inflection point in America\u2019s literature, which can\u2019t thrive without serious, fervent and quick-witted criticism: public talk, back and forth, between competing voices, in something like real time. The thin crust of American intellectual life, long flaking, has begun to show bald patches.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s a grim business to linger on the numbers. In the 1960s, a good first novel might receive 90 individual newspaper reviews in America and England, the novelist Reynolds Price wrote in his memoir \u201cArdent Spirits.\u201d By 2009, the year \u201cArdent Spirits\u201d was issued, he reckoned the number was 20 at best. What would it be now? Two? Three?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A few magazines, of course, still run inspired book criticism; essential trees are still standing though the vast underbrush is gone. And the online discourse has its moments. But here\u2019s another number: Not long ago, someone estimated that there were seven full-time book critics left in America. With The Post\u2019s Book World gone, that number has dropped to five.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As a lonely and shellshocked survivor of this decimation, I find it hard not to envy the critics in London, which still has at least seven daily or Sunday papers in which a serious author might hope for a review. The literary debate over there is more like a boisterous dinner party and less like a Morse code dispatch between distant frigates passing in the night.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It hasn\u2019t helped that so few novelists now routinely write criticism. Martin Amis, among other novelists of the recent past, felt it was a duty \u2014 a way to keep standards up and fight the general trend toward what he termed stupefaction.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Now come A.I. assistants like Claude, Gemini, ChatGPT and Perplexity, here to either a) help with our homework, or b) end the world. The anxiety around these intellectual butlers and all-knowing collaborators isn\u2019t so unlike the Japan Panic of the \u201980s (minus the racism). A foreign force has arrived, a baffled populace recognizes. What does it intend?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A freelance critic, writing for The Times Book Review, has already been busted for purportedly using A.I. to fashion part of a review. There\u2019ll be more like him. These products are wonders \u2014 they\u2019ve read and digested far more books than Harold Bloom, that great literary dandy in the sky who, the title of a new collection of his letters tells us, was \u201cThe Man Who Read Everything.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But here\u2019s a catch with A.I. It\u2019s easy to tell when a reference, or a comparison, or a sentence, doesn\u2019t belong to a writer. Erudition and style aren\u2019t forgeable for long; it still must be earned. As for A.I.\u2019s sleek, space-efficient text, we\u2019ve already grown accustomed to what that sounds like \u2014 the flat, consistent tone, the pert little summary bits, the repetitions, the impersonal and fluorescent-lit mood. Reading it, you feel you\u2019ve been through the desert on a horse with no name.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It will get much better. Like a Nakamichi Model 500, perhaps, A.I. models will probably someday be programmed to calculate range and trajectory and to spit out rich critical prose. But as John Berryman put it in one of his \u201cDream Songs,\u201d speaking of dead-on-their-feet essayists everywhere, \u201cWhen the mind dies it exudes rich critical prose.\u201d A.I. machinations can reflect the consensus, but it\u2019s part of a real critic\u2019s job to not go flopping along with the times, to wage guerrilla warfare on that consensus. Je suis Claude? Nix to that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Book reviews may survive if only because, as Elizabeth Hardwick observed, publishers need praise for their new releases \u201cas an Easter basket needs shredded green paper under the eggs.\u201d But the breakup of the monoculture, the rise of algorithms and the flattening of taste mean that critics will never, for better and worse, have the consecrating power they once did.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Pauline Kael, Albert Murray, Lester Bangs, Edmund Wilson and Kenneth Tynan \u2014 five of my critical heroes \u2014 knew what to notice, in ways that can\u2019t be taught or imitated, and they knew how to make their prose and their ideas stick. I\u2019m cheered by the young critics out there, swimming in this sea without drowning in it, trying not to be cast into gaol by their creditors, and working to make certain that the last snatch of book criticism isn\u2019t three fire emojis, two jazz-hands, a crying face and a facepalm.<\/p>\n\n\n\n