A notice appeared the other day at Critical Mass, the blog of the National Book Critics Circle Board of Directors, about another closing of a book review section in a newspapers. (See here.) The Washington Post plans to close Book World, its 16-page weekly. From now on, book content in the print version will disperse into other sections: Outlook and Style & Arts. This will retain 12 pages of reviews, including Michael Dirda’s and Jonathan Yardley’s pieces, and the online edition will retain the section, at least for now.
The New York Times reported on the change with the summary, “In another sign that literary criticism is losing its profile in newspapers . . .” (see here), and several voices in the article testified to the trend. Indeed, the Times is the only remaining major paper to have a stand-alone Sunday section.
Others in the article maintained that book coverage remains strong, just that it is interspersed with other media and arts and “living” items. But Steve Wasserman, former editor of the highly-regarded Los Angeles Times stand-alone section (which ended two years ago), asserted that, however much the word count remains steady, the loss of a separate entity is itself a troubling trend. “Maybe it’s just foolish and sentimental nostalgia on my part,” he said, “but somehow one likes to think that the republic of letters actually deserves the recognition of a separate country.”
He’s right. To integrate book coverage into culture coverage in general is, in effect, to submerge it. It disallows for the larger statement and fuller context that book reviews (occasionally) provide. Taking away the stand-alone section makes book reviewing adopt the conventions of movie and performance reviews, conventions that allow for a relatively fast evaluation of the work (which is, to be sure, an important part of cultural vitality), but disallow the kind of broader reflections one gets in book reviews in The New Republic, The Atlantic, The New Criterion, and, now and then, in weekly sections of the City Paper.
