It doesn’t take a lot for Jonathan Franzen to fly into a
rage, or is it a fit of pique. By his own testimony he was “an extremely angry
person.”
Now that he is a rich and famous author, he has taken it
upon himself to emit a long wail of complaint about the modern world. He is
especially lathered up over techno-consumerism. He has even identified the new antichrist—Jeff Bezos,
of Amazon.
You see, according to Franzen, Amazon is ruining the book
publishing industry. It is causing book publishers to trim their staff. It is
putting book stores and book agents out of business.
Nothing says that the publishing business will not reconfigure
itself and thrive again, but, as of today, things look bleak.
On this score, Franzen is correct.
Yet, his apocalyptic rhetoric is excessive. Apparently,
he is worried that in the new techno-world people might be less inclined to read a Jonathan Franzen.
It seems a bit rich for someone who became a millionaire on
Oprah’s say-so to complain about the influence of the popular media. Keep in
mind, Franzen responded to Oprah’s largesse by attacking her book club for its
low-brow taste.
If there’s a circle of Hell for people who manifest the appalling
ingratitude, Jonathan Franzen’s place is already reserved.
Franzen yearns for the good old days when the world of ideas
had gatekeepers. He preferred the time when editors selected the best
manuscripts, when book reviewers told us what to read and when book stores induced
us to buy the best literature.
There may have been a time when merit reigned in the publishing
world, but that time has long since gone. One hates to say it, but most of the
profits in publishing come from precious few books. Those are the books that
are promoted and hyped. This being the reality of publishing, midlist authors
have been exiled to a bookworld Siberia.
If anything, Amazon has provided more access to more books
for more people than ever before. Explain to me why that’s a bad thing.
In the bad old days a book’s success or failure depended
largely on the New York Times Book Review.
A good review made your book, a bad one turned any remaining copies to pulp.
If Franzen believes that the influence of the army ofprofessional
book reviewers matched that of the NY
Times Book Review, he’s dreaming.
In the small world of New York publishing, comprising
agents, editors and publishers, book reviewers and media outlets there was
every possibility for selecting the wrong books. Why does Franzen imagine that
the gatekeepers of publishing were always selecting the right books?
This world made Franzen himself as one of its darlings. Even
before Oprah made him rich and famous, Franzen was touted in publishing circles
as the next great thing.
Nothing guarantees that the grandees of the New York
publishing world will choose rightly. Today, when their decisions are based as
much on marketability as on literary quality, they have fewer
opportunities to take a chance on a book that they like but that they will have
difficulty selling.
Dare we mention that in an era of political correctness and
identity politics the notion of merit has become something of a joke.
Despite the whining of Franzen and other overrated authors print
media is not going away. After all, Franzen’s antichrist, Jeff Bezos, just
bought the Washington Post.
In truth, Amazon has brought the free market to book
publishing. It has diminished the power and the influence of the elite gatekeepers.
It may be the case that in a free market books by Franzen might fall through
the cracks, but perhaps they do not deserve better.
When you arrive at Franzen’s level of dyspepsia—it used to
be called angst-- you tend not to see clearly. Franzen believes that Amazon
shoppers rely merely on reader reviews, but that is surely untrue. He imagines
that the open reviewing on Amazon is an invitation to corruption—as though the
old system where one book review publication could make or break a book did not
hold out the risk of being corrupted.
Allow Franzen to lay out his dystopian fantasy:
In my
own little corner of the world, which is to say American fiction,
Jeff Bezos of Amazon may not be the antichrist, but he surely looks like
one of the four horsemen. Amazon wants a world in which books are either
self-published or published by Amazon itself, with readers dependent on Amazon
reviews in choosing books, and with authors responsible for their own
promotion. The work of yakkers and tweeters and braggers, and of people with
the money to pay somebody to churn out hundreds of five-star reviews for them,
will flourish in that world. But what happens to the people who became writers because yakking and tweeting and
bragging felt to them like intolerably shallow forms of social engagement? What
happens to the people who want to communicate in depth, individual to
individual, in the quiet and permanence of the printed word, and who were shaped
by their love of writers who wrote when publication still assured some kind of
quality control and literary reputations were more than a matter of
self-promotional decibel levels? As fewer and fewer readers are able to find
their way, amid all the noise and disappointing books and phony reviews, to the
work produced by the new generation of this kind of writer, Amazon is well on
its way to making writers into the kind of prospectless workers whom its
contractors employ in its warehouses, labouring harder for less and less,
with no job security, because the warehouses are situated in places where
they're the only business hiring. And the more of the population that lives
like those workers, the greater the downward pressure on book prices and the
greater the squeeze on conventional booksellers, because when you're not making
much money you want your entertainment for free, and when your life is hard you
want instant gratification ("Overnight free shipping!").
Franzen is offended by the fact that everyday citizens can
write Amazon reviews. He is horrified that the same citizens can
exchange their views with their friends and acquaintances on social media
sites.
Why does Franzen believe that the free market does not
eventually allow for quality control? Perhaps people are fed up with an elite
few making their decisions for them. Professional book reviewers might do a
good job on some novels and certain forms of general non-fiction, but what
happens when they run into specialized non-fiction.
Why is Franzen so offended that people might actually make
up their own minds? Why is he so horrified that they might not allow the New
York media elite to think for them?
Because that, after all, is the point. Members of the media
elite—Franzen among them—do not trust
individuals to make up their own minds. For the same reason they have no use
for the free market. They cannot imagine that individuals making up their own
minds can allocate resources as well as a group of great thinkers sitting in
the bowels of a bureaucracy.
If some reviews on Amazon come from dubious sources, why not
think that most people can tell the difference. If they cannot tell the
difference, they will eventually learn the lesson.
Franzen believes that, eventually, people will “clamour” for
more professional reviewers.
But so
the physical book goes on the endangered-species list, so responsible book
reviewers go extinct, so independent bookstores disappear, so literary
novelists are conscripted into Jennifer-Weinerish self-promotion, so the Big
Six publishers get killed and devoured by Amazon: this looks like an apocalypse
only if most of your friends are writers, editors or booksellers. Plus it's
possible that the story isn't over. Maybe the internet experiment in consumer
reviewing will result in such flagrant corruption (already one-third of all
online product reviews are said to be bogus) that people will clamour for the
return of professional reviewers. Maybe an economically significant number of
readers will come to recognise the human and cultural costs of Amazonian
hegemony and go back to local bookstores or at least to barnesandnoble.com, which
offers the same books and a superior e-reader, and whose owners have
progressive politics. Maybe people will get as sick of Twitter as they once got
sick of cigarettes. Twitter's and Facebook's latest models for making money
still seem to me like one part pyramid scheme, one part wishful thinking,
and one part repugnant panoptical surveillance.
In truth, the internet provides people access to more professional
reviewers. It provides access to newspapers and magazines the world over. It
provides search engines that can call up as many reviews as you want, both
professional and amateur.
In truth, people like it. Before labeling Jeff Bezos as the
antichrist Franzen should have reflected on the fact that consumers have made Amazon what it is. People shop there because they like to shop there. Is that a crime?
Franzen is yearning for the old days when people did not
have Amazon. Some of his less enlightened brethren would probably like to shut
the whole operation down.
9 comments:
I noticed Franzen lists one reason for shopping at Barnes and Noble is that its owners have "progressive politics."
I'm sure glad I haven't spent a penny there in years (and don't intend to ever again). The faster they go belly up, the better.
However, if Jeff Bezos isn't a progressive, I am badly mistaken. It would be too much to hope that now the Washington Post would stop cheerleading and abetting the collapse of our Republic.
Franzen and his ilk can starve for all I care. When I want literature, I read Austen and her contemporaries (and occasionally Anatole France). For entertainment, I read SciFi on my Kindle.
See: http://accordingtohoyt.com/
Hoyt is an author who is much happier with publishing today, as I read her.
All I know about Amazon is that when I signed up for an accounting class at the local community college, the text from the school bookstore was listed at $230. The same text from Amazon was $88 (new). Guess where I bought my book?
Jonathan Franzen, Jonathan Franzen...seems like I've written something about him not too long ago. OH, YEAH:
http://chicagoboyz.net/archives/16259.html
"barnesandnoble.com, which offers the same books and a superior e-reader, and whose owners have progressive politics"
Barnes & Noble is a public corporation: its owners are the shareholders. Is Franzen so ignorant he doesn't understand this?
DF, maybe Anon was talking about the CEO and upper management. I do seem to recall comments from times past about B&N not displaying books by conservatives, and the leftie books were up front and stacked high.
The statement about the owners came from Franzen, who Anon was just quoting.
I have often found that "progressives" don't have a very clear understanding of the difference between the executive of a corporation and the owners.
Never heard of Jonathan Franzen before this column. However have discovered and enjoyed reading many new and sometimes indie authors via my Amazon and especially Kindle that allows me to borrow for free via my instant gratification Prime account. Such a whiner, likely a feature in his writing so I'll just read something else.
David Foster,
Progressives have selective knowledge. Any knowledge that counters their dogma is by definition not knowledge.
One would think that it would be a good thing for this country that people have access to all kinds of books, many free, at a very reasonable price. The value of "the theater of the mind" cannot be overestimated for its causing people to think.
Is this man so insecure that he fears the reading public if his friends are not the arbiters of the literary bailiwick?
Support your local library by giving the books you have already read including ebooks to them. A library is like having the combined knowledge of humanity at one's beckon call through interlibrary loans et al and in most cases the library provides internet access to those who do not have the means themselves.
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