Is “the literary establishment is corrupt” as a framing for a review a house requirement or recommendation for The Metropolitan Review, or is it just a coincidence that quite a few of the offerings so far use this? As a reader who is rooting for the success of a new venture in books and literary criticism, I can say it is has already become incredibly tiresome, even when I might agree with the structural critique.
Speaking from the perspective of the Review, it's more of a coincidence - or zeitgeist - than anything. We certainly didn't ask our reviewers to write with this idea, or even select reviewers thinking that this is what they would say. But you're right that a lot of people who've turned in pieces to us have wanted to make this point. I would interpret that as meaning that this is something a lot of people want to get off their chests. I'd also make the point that this isn't something writers would feel comfortable saying in other publications, in case they come across as whiners or whatever. Sorry if it's tiresome! We do hope we'll have more positive reviews and a variety of content, but frankly I think this is something that has to happen. The literary world IS very conformist, and self-reinforcing, and the result is a lot of mediocre work that doesn't called get out as such. If reviewers are allowed to call spades spades, as they are here, there will tend to be a lot of pieces that are more negative and more inflammatory.
Just to be clear, I don't mind negative reviews - I enjoy a good one - but I want my negative reviews to deal with the book itself rather than some boogeyman of the "conformist establishment" which is, as a reader of books, entirely mindless and irrelevant to me, a reader who is looking for interesting insights into books. I can't even find something to agree or disagree with here because I have to wade through performative anti-elite bullshit to get to something that address the book itself, and then when I get to that, there's such a hangover from the other stuff, I can't grapple with the commentary on the book.
You've become what you've beheld, a counter-clique to the clique. I don't know what "the literary world" even means. We've got books and we've got readers. The stuff you call "mediocre" someone else genuinely loves, not because they're conformist or engaged in a circle-jerk but because that work speaks to them. You have reviews calling books "misfires" where the review doesn't even attempt to grapple with the target that the author was aiming at, instead arguing that the writer should've been aiming somewhere else entirely. The implication that people who read and praised and liked "Rejection" are dupes or lying for cred inside the establishment is absurd. I mean, yes, I'm sure some of those people exist, but why even give those people any consideration? They're irrelevant. They aren't doing the work, but neither is this kind of piece, IMO.
A couple of things. 1.We don't just have "books" and "readers." Those books are the result of a long production line within the publishing industry, and if there are kinks within the industry ("kinks" being here, I would say, a very polite word) then it's the responsibility of independent-minded reviewers to point those out. "Literary world" means something pretty straightforward - the publishing industry and then the MFA programs, trade reviewers, and general hangers-on who are all ultimately part of that production line. People who are in that world and maybe somewhat disingenuously praise a work that they secretly have misgivings about are, on the contrary, very "relevant." They're responsible for what gets selected, published, praised, and sent out to the public as a whole. 2.We really don't have a line here, so it's a bit hard for us to be a "clique" or "counter-clique"! All we've been doing - at least so far - is identifying reviewers we like and whom we would like to promote to a wider audience and then commissioning pieces from them. The emphasis is on a genuine heterogeneity. The reviews belong to the reviewer, not to us.
That being said, we also have opinions about what we like and don't like. Personally, I really like ARX-Han's piece. Maybe it's a little more "performative" than standard reviews, but what you're calling performative I would treat as an honest, emotional response to a text. And, by the way, there's plenty of writing in the review that engages directly with the novel. It's lower in the piece but that's pretty standard for reviews.
Anyway! Thanks for the honest critique! This is exactly what we're hoping for, actually, and we really would like to be part of a rolling conversation about what is of value in reviews and criticism.
I don't know man, I think you've really created a phantom here with this "kinks in the publishing industry" (by which I think you mean the Big 5) thing as though the publishing industry has any genuine connection to the pursuit of literary quality or art or culture. I don't think you're naive enough to believe that's true.
The publishing industry is not "Rejection, it's Rebecca Yarros. It's capitalism as practiced by giant conglomerates. The books we would agree fall under the umbrella of "literary" (perceived quality aside) are a vanishingly small part of this machinery. The idea that these companies spend any time truly worrying about "quality" independent of what they think they can effectively sell for more than they invested in it is absurd.
Now, despite this disconnect sometimes, even often, really interesting stuff gets put into the world by these Big 5 publishers, but the notion that they're sorting for literary quality first is just not in touch with the reality of the business.
"Rejection" and "Headshot" for all of the review and award attention mean nothing to the publishing industry as an industry. If either of these books sold over 20,000 copies in hardcover, I would be surprised, and my guess, especially for Headshot would be closer to 5-10k. Now, that number is fantastic if you're publishing literary fiction, but this is not an industry. It's a rounding error.
This "literary world" you cite is what? A few thousand people? Maybe smaller, a few hundred? MFA programs outside of a very very elite few aren't part of any production line. They're remora that significantly increased in numbers so creative writers who could not hope to live off their books had a secure job. The vast majority of what happens in the vast majority of MFA programs is entirely irrelevant to the literary world. I'm on record in print (or screen, or whatever) on how silly it is that MFA programs have proliferated and that far too many of them have a whiff of pyramid schemes meant to separate the hopeful from their money, but the notion that most of these have any impact on a larger "literary world" is purely fantastical.
I'm actually well-primed to agree with your critique. I wrote at my own newsletter this weekend about how the structure of the creative writing workshop is largely antithetical to individual writers developing their unique selves. I was chewed up and spat out (in terms of my work as a fiction writer) by the New York publishing industry and could not sell a second novel to save my life, despite writing a couple more that were (in my view, and some others) pretty fucking good! But my first novel sold less than a thousand copies. Some sour dickhead at Kirkus called it "smug," despite it being the opposite, I didn't get any major review attention, and that's all she wrote. I'll be honest, that shit stung for a long time, but this rejection had nothing to do with the kinks of an industry. It was simply how these things go the vast majority of the time when we're talking about a fundamentally capitalist, commercial equation.
I agree that reviews belong to the reviewer, but are you not editing your writers? Why gather as a publication if there isn't at least some attempt at a sensibility not of thought, but of care and attention. Less than half of this review deals with the book itself. After the panopticon business it segues into a "diagnosis" of what ails Tulathimutte's writing before sharing a single word about the book under discussion. At the very least this is upside down in terms of presenting an argument to the reader. Being told this is shit because this guy is too enmeshed in the creative writing industry before I know what I'm dealing with doesn't even make sense unless the purpose of the review is to grind an axe against the groups you think need straightening out.
When I say there's only "books" and "readers" I'm talking about the experience of what happens when you crack open the product of someone else's mind and spirit. When I'm reading a book I don't know shit about no publishing industry or literary world. I've got a text and I've got my unique intelligence, and we're going to see what's doing when those things intersect. If me and the book don't connect, so be it. Could be me, could be the book, could be the nefarious literary world poisoning the well, but the only remedy to that is go pick up another book and over time, try to articulate to other readers what it is about the books that crack open something meaningful in me, and test if others may feel similarly.
Here's my wish from a reader who is still rooting for your success. Ignore the literary world - whatever that is - and tell me about the actual world, and the books that come from it.
Why would we ignore the "literary" world? Rebecca Yarros is very rich and successful. I also do not give a shit. I care about literary fiction (a vague category, but one that isn't Yarros or Maas or EmHen - such is life!) I care about a novel that won the NBA and got nominated for the Booker. (I care about many smaller books, too.) We are literally anti-clique because we do not have a single sensibility. We aim to publish a range of talented writers, and we are doing just that. Anyone can pitch us - literally anyone. We read the emails. Some pitches get accepted, some get rejected. ARX-Han is one of the most interesting voices working today and is probably better positioned to write on "Rejection" than anyone else I can think of. I am sorry this didn't resonate with you. But, gosh, you are being condescending right now.
"Are you not editing writers?" John, did it occur to you a person can be edited and their voice can, you know, still exist? That individuals have sensibilities? If I wanted to be mean here, I could ask something like "do you have taste" for thinking certain celebrated recent books are actually good. But you've got taste, and we've got it, and sometimes they vary. Sam and I do not tell reviewers what to do or how to feel about a book. I literally had no idea what Kanakia or Han were going to say about their novels until they turned them in. But if a writer WANTS to make a structural critique of contemporary publishing, they may - especially if it's interesting. Not all of our reviews carry this critique. Crispin's didn't, Waldman's didn't, Burton's didn't. That's the beauty of the individual voice. Kanakia's didn't, either.
Not to chest-thump here, but in the span of a single week, between this review and several others, we've got more people talking about *actual book reviews* than anything published in most outlets. And I follow this stuff very closely.
Of course I have taste. We all have taste, the important thing about taste is that our taste is our own and that it's rooted in our genuine selves, rather than governed by algorithms or outside expectations, or what have you. The irony is that you're not allowing for the possibility that people other than you have taste. You accuse them of saying they like something because they're supposed to, or they're kissing up to the establishment, or whatever. I'm not denying anyone's taste.
Editing writers doesn't mean getting rid of a voice, it means helping a writer come across to the audience in the way that best reflects that writer's argument. But you know this, you've been edited.
John, Headshot sold at auction to Viking. The publisher invested significant amounts into marketing it. The book sold at least 50k copies. Rejection was acquired for 350k by William Morrow.
Rebecca Yarros, on the other hand, is published by Entangled, a small indie press. You've got this completely backwards. Romantasy is the organic trend. Lit fic is the manufactured corporate product.
It’s interesting. We have pretty different framings of what the “publishing industry” is. I’ve been offline for a bit and the conversation has moved on, but happy to chat this out further!
John stop and think what you're mad about. This is a review that commissions reviewers to write reviews of books. Do you think that if we turn in a negative review, Ross and Sam shouldn't print it? Or that people who sometimes write negative reviews shouldn't be commissioned to write for this journal? That the journal should have some sycophants on hand who can reliably turn in positive reviews?
I mean...I didn't like James. Is that opinion not allowed? Should that not be printed?
Please...this is frustration, rooted in genuine disappointment, not anger. I've read with pleasure both the masthead and several of the reviewers (including you) and had significant hopes for what was being proposed here and so far, I'm getting The Free Press for literature, tilting against imagined windmills of elites who are keeping the good and righteous artists down.
It's not even that I disagree. As I said above, I think the structural critique of what happens in creative writing workshops is valid. I published a chapter in some academic book no one read on these problems 20 years ago. But diagnosing an ailing literary consensus that only the righteous can see past while the rest of us are simply sheep enslaved to the establishment is dull. It's beneath the people who have put this together.
I don't want positive reviews, I want reviews that deal with the book in a way that helps illuminate the book so I can be more thoughtful about the book (if I read it) or have a deeper appreciate of what it and the conversation might be about (if I didn't).
But what you're asking for is what Arx-Han did. He likes the book, despite its flaws, because he thinks it's the best book about incels that could've actually been published. That's not just his reaction, that's the reaction of many men in the literary world who read it. He's happy that it exists at all, even though he feels like it's a bit of a caricature. It's the same reaction Ralph Ellison had to Huckleberry Finn--he hated the portrayal of Jim, but thought it was courageous of Twain to actually write about race.
If you aren't allowed to discuss the literary context in which you experience the book, then it's very hard to give an honest account of your reaction.
You keep flogging Pistelli and his review was much of the same tedium. And I like and have read Wagner! His review did not enhance my engagement with Wagner, it just wasted time with rehashed asides and more substack anti-wokeness.
What John was saying was that the view that you and ARX and Perez and others seem to think is so urgent and new that it must always be a topic of discussion (on your own stacks) just isn’t. Sam K had a thoughtful response; Naomi had a thoughtful response. You got defensive and started whining.
TMR is of course free to run anything it wants, and if its house style is what it has shown so far then I will remain free to critique it and not read further. The anti-woke and anti-mfa thing is both very dull and very over, and complaining about wokeness is very dumb and very dull and you should stop doing it. TMR should not (in my opinion) stake its identity on reviews that are obsessed with those things if it wants to be a review of books and not of culture war distractions you took the bait on.
To put this as simply as I can, and not really for your benefit because I know you are not listening, reading the first issue, and seeing who was in it and how they reviewed, made it clear to me (and I have to assume to others) that I should not bother pitching a review or article to TMR because I would not include the in house obligatory viewpoint and am not part of the Ross Barkan club here. TMR is not a welcoming review, it is an exclusionary one. I think that was not what the stated goal was, but it certainly is the effect. Maybe that will improve with new features and writers; I understand that initially going to friends is logical to get sufficient content. But as soon as i saw the contributors I knew to brace myself for the same old same old. I hope it changes and grows, but I think that requires conscious effort to exit the comfort zone.
It's baked in because of who is behind the publication. All reviewers will have to bow to this restriction, even as they claim they are writing for the freest, most unwokiest, super cancellation-free place. ARX-Han is also one of the most exhaustingly tedious practitioners of this framing, so it's overdetermined. Agree with you that it's tiresome, cripples reviews, and makes the Metropolitan Review a major disappointment as merely another online echo chamber of complaint.
It seems that most TMR pieces can be summarized as "a negative review of a book that the NYT Book Review liked." That's fine, for what it is, but there isn't much discovery of new literature here. And for their insistence that "at The Metropolitan Review, we read books," there's a whole lot of ancillary material in their reviews of books which have already been widely reviewed. Which again, fine. That's what basically all book blogs are doing, let's just not pretend it's something else.
I was going to keep this complaint to myself on the grounds that it was nitpicky and only incidentally related to Han's review, but it's certainly more on-topic than the current meta-debate in the comments, so sure, let 'er rip: if you're going to title your piece "Escaping the Panopticon," it would behoove you to accurately describe a panopticon!
> "We could imagine the minimalist version of the panopticon, one that does not require any technology: a small group of prisoners seated in a circle, with one guard seated in the middle."
Um... not really? A panopticon isn't just a generic system in which people watch people; the key feature of Bentham's panopticon is that the people in it DON'T know whether they're being surveilled at any given moment, and thus learn to surveil their own behavior even in the absence of an audience, developing something resembling a conscience. A relevant metaphor in smartphone world, I guess, but... does it really apply to the MFA milieu? That's just old-fashioned peer pressure, imo.
Outstanding review. The review of the specific book and author, and the critique of the larger milieu, are well-integrated. The review is a case study of a writer of talent falling short, pulling his punches, degrading his potential, because he faces a Soviet-like system of rewards and punishments for adherence to ideology.
The message is that the existing literary regime is worse than corrupt, it is destroying talent and choking off the voices, the verve, the freedom, the energy, that could bring light and clarity to this historic moment.
That is not a tragedy, it is a crime.
And the panopticon that perpetuates that crime needs to called out. But it won't reform. The answer is to create new institutions and a new regime.
We now all "live" in an enormously huge tower of left brained babble (babel) comprising trillions of words which is growing at an exponential rate every day. Almost every word ever written down about every possible subject in all times and places is now freely available on the internet.
None of which can or will make the slightest bit of difference to anything.
I thought it was somewhat thin. I hate to use hackneyed phrases but here you go: it was too clever by half. It ties to be a literary version of Delicious Tacos' "The Pussy". I feel like he read Tacos and said "well I can beat that..." But he can't, and didn't. Tacos rings in my head all the time and this flatly doesn't.
Well, kudos to Tony for sneaking one in there. Based on all the acclaim for his work, he is obviously a talented writer and I wish him the best going forward. I haven't read Rejection, but I did read the story The Feminist in the magazine. Based on your review, it sounds like Tony had to go behind the lines with a lot of camouflage and the latest in stealth gear. But he did it, and minimized the 'attack surface' of his novel in stories.
Evasion vs confrontation. I guess a few more stealthy writers might sneak something significant in there ('there' being NYC Big Publishing) as well, but I still wonder how long before straight male writers can just strut in there boldly. Publishing used to be that way, maybe a hundred years ago.
You say that Tony writes like an extremely talented writer who isn't playing to win, but not to lose. Well, just getting inside is a win.
So, cleverness instead of 'the bare metal of male interiority' is the ticket. Well, for how long. Now that his cleverness is exposed, will he get in again? Will others? You describe Tony as an institutionally-established writer. Why do I think of terms like token, house slave? Let's hope that more young straight male writers bust in. And, while I'm on a rant here, when will we get back to some semblance of normal-speak. Why must we (not me, but young writers like Tony) use the loaded, stupid language of the woke in our work?
Your intuition is that Tony's book 'was still a form of artistic compromise in lieu of engaging with the more brutal elements of contemporary male psychology.' Well, some others might say it was just a cop-out. Was his strategy one we should all follow? Self-censoring our work to ensure that no one on the planet will be offended if and when we find a publisher?
You wonder if Tony will 'break out of his peer-to-peer panopticon and blow up his entire social and 'professional' network in pursuit of generational literary greatness?'
I don't know. Why would he do that and find himself locked outside the walls of the castle like everybody else?
Well, we all make our own destiny. Tony, good luck!
Try the work of Teddy Wayne, particularly "Loser" which is all first person from a male "incel" character, and "The Great Man Theory," which centers on male anger at a world that's closed to him.
Also "The Dinner" by Herman Koch, and one that's not out yet and I have't read but looks promising, "Flesh" by David Szalay.
"Hawk Mountain" - Conner Habib (though in this one the narrator is not the male rage character, and the heterosexual part of it is complicated)
"The Book of George" by Kate Greathead, which is a bit gentler, but is for sure exploring the anger of a thwarted male
"Last Resort" by Andrew Lipstein
"The Passenger Seat" by Vijay Khurana was just recommended to me, though I haven't read it.
"Blood Test" by Charles Baxter tackles male heterosexual rage by constructing a conceit where the main character is given permission to let it loose without restriction, but chooses not to do so. A clever inversion, and quite funny.
Loser is good but comes up short in the end. Barely any engagement with the character post Harvard. That's where the darkness truly begins. We are only halfway there.
Is “the literary establishment is corrupt” as a framing for a review a house requirement or recommendation for The Metropolitan Review, or is it just a coincidence that quite a few of the offerings so far use this? As a reader who is rooting for the success of a new venture in books and literary criticism, I can say it is has already become incredibly tiresome, even when I might agree with the structural critique.
Hi John,
Speaking from the perspective of the Review, it's more of a coincidence - or zeitgeist - than anything. We certainly didn't ask our reviewers to write with this idea, or even select reviewers thinking that this is what they would say. But you're right that a lot of people who've turned in pieces to us have wanted to make this point. I would interpret that as meaning that this is something a lot of people want to get off their chests. I'd also make the point that this isn't something writers would feel comfortable saying in other publications, in case they come across as whiners or whatever. Sorry if it's tiresome! We do hope we'll have more positive reviews and a variety of content, but frankly I think this is something that has to happen. The literary world IS very conformist, and self-reinforcing, and the result is a lot of mediocre work that doesn't called get out as such. If reviewers are allowed to call spades spades, as they are here, there will tend to be a lot of pieces that are more negative and more inflammatory.
Cheers!
- Sam
Just to be clear, I don't mind negative reviews - I enjoy a good one - but I want my negative reviews to deal with the book itself rather than some boogeyman of the "conformist establishment" which is, as a reader of books, entirely mindless and irrelevant to me, a reader who is looking for interesting insights into books. I can't even find something to agree or disagree with here because I have to wade through performative anti-elite bullshit to get to something that address the book itself, and then when I get to that, there's such a hangover from the other stuff, I can't grapple with the commentary on the book.
You've become what you've beheld, a counter-clique to the clique. I don't know what "the literary world" even means. We've got books and we've got readers. The stuff you call "mediocre" someone else genuinely loves, not because they're conformist or engaged in a circle-jerk but because that work speaks to them. You have reviews calling books "misfires" where the review doesn't even attempt to grapple with the target that the author was aiming at, instead arguing that the writer should've been aiming somewhere else entirely. The implication that people who read and praised and liked "Rejection" are dupes or lying for cred inside the establishment is absurd. I mean, yes, I'm sure some of those people exist, but why even give those people any consideration? They're irrelevant. They aren't doing the work, but neither is this kind of piece, IMO.
Fair enough John.
A couple of things. 1.We don't just have "books" and "readers." Those books are the result of a long production line within the publishing industry, and if there are kinks within the industry ("kinks" being here, I would say, a very polite word) then it's the responsibility of independent-minded reviewers to point those out. "Literary world" means something pretty straightforward - the publishing industry and then the MFA programs, trade reviewers, and general hangers-on who are all ultimately part of that production line. People who are in that world and maybe somewhat disingenuously praise a work that they secretly have misgivings about are, on the contrary, very "relevant." They're responsible for what gets selected, published, praised, and sent out to the public as a whole. 2.We really don't have a line here, so it's a bit hard for us to be a "clique" or "counter-clique"! All we've been doing - at least so far - is identifying reviewers we like and whom we would like to promote to a wider audience and then commissioning pieces from them. The emphasis is on a genuine heterogeneity. The reviews belong to the reviewer, not to us.
That being said, we also have opinions about what we like and don't like. Personally, I really like ARX-Han's piece. Maybe it's a little more "performative" than standard reviews, but what you're calling performative I would treat as an honest, emotional response to a text. And, by the way, there's plenty of writing in the review that engages directly with the novel. It's lower in the piece but that's pretty standard for reviews.
Anyway! Thanks for the honest critique! This is exactly what we're hoping for, actually, and we really would like to be part of a rolling conversation about what is of value in reviews and criticism.
Best,
Sam
I don't know man, I think you've really created a phantom here with this "kinks in the publishing industry" (by which I think you mean the Big 5) thing as though the publishing industry has any genuine connection to the pursuit of literary quality or art or culture. I don't think you're naive enough to believe that's true.
The publishing industry is not "Rejection, it's Rebecca Yarros. It's capitalism as practiced by giant conglomerates. The books we would agree fall under the umbrella of "literary" (perceived quality aside) are a vanishingly small part of this machinery. The idea that these companies spend any time truly worrying about "quality" independent of what they think they can effectively sell for more than they invested in it is absurd.
Now, despite this disconnect sometimes, even often, really interesting stuff gets put into the world by these Big 5 publishers, but the notion that they're sorting for literary quality first is just not in touch with the reality of the business.
"Rejection" and "Headshot" for all of the review and award attention mean nothing to the publishing industry as an industry. If either of these books sold over 20,000 copies in hardcover, I would be surprised, and my guess, especially for Headshot would be closer to 5-10k. Now, that number is fantastic if you're publishing literary fiction, but this is not an industry. It's a rounding error.
This "literary world" you cite is what? A few thousand people? Maybe smaller, a few hundred? MFA programs outside of a very very elite few aren't part of any production line. They're remora that significantly increased in numbers so creative writers who could not hope to live off their books had a secure job. The vast majority of what happens in the vast majority of MFA programs is entirely irrelevant to the literary world. I'm on record in print (or screen, or whatever) on how silly it is that MFA programs have proliferated and that far too many of them have a whiff of pyramid schemes meant to separate the hopeful from their money, but the notion that most of these have any impact on a larger "literary world" is purely fantastical.
I'm actually well-primed to agree with your critique. I wrote at my own newsletter this weekend about how the structure of the creative writing workshop is largely antithetical to individual writers developing their unique selves. I was chewed up and spat out (in terms of my work as a fiction writer) by the New York publishing industry and could not sell a second novel to save my life, despite writing a couple more that were (in my view, and some others) pretty fucking good! But my first novel sold less than a thousand copies. Some sour dickhead at Kirkus called it "smug," despite it being the opposite, I didn't get any major review attention, and that's all she wrote. I'll be honest, that shit stung for a long time, but this rejection had nothing to do with the kinks of an industry. It was simply how these things go the vast majority of the time when we're talking about a fundamentally capitalist, commercial equation.
I agree that reviews belong to the reviewer, but are you not editing your writers? Why gather as a publication if there isn't at least some attempt at a sensibility not of thought, but of care and attention. Less than half of this review deals with the book itself. After the panopticon business it segues into a "diagnosis" of what ails Tulathimutte's writing before sharing a single word about the book under discussion. At the very least this is upside down in terms of presenting an argument to the reader. Being told this is shit because this guy is too enmeshed in the creative writing industry before I know what I'm dealing with doesn't even make sense unless the purpose of the review is to grind an axe against the groups you think need straightening out.
When I say there's only "books" and "readers" I'm talking about the experience of what happens when you crack open the product of someone else's mind and spirit. When I'm reading a book I don't know shit about no publishing industry or literary world. I've got a text and I've got my unique intelligence, and we're going to see what's doing when those things intersect. If me and the book don't connect, so be it. Could be me, could be the book, could be the nefarious literary world poisoning the well, but the only remedy to that is go pick up another book and over time, try to articulate to other readers what it is about the books that crack open something meaningful in me, and test if others may feel similarly.
Here's my wish from a reader who is still rooting for your success. Ignore the literary world - whatever that is - and tell me about the actual world, and the books that come from it.
Why would we ignore the "literary" world? Rebecca Yarros is very rich and successful. I also do not give a shit. I care about literary fiction (a vague category, but one that isn't Yarros or Maas or EmHen - such is life!) I care about a novel that won the NBA and got nominated for the Booker. (I care about many smaller books, too.) We are literally anti-clique because we do not have a single sensibility. We aim to publish a range of talented writers, and we are doing just that. Anyone can pitch us - literally anyone. We read the emails. Some pitches get accepted, some get rejected. ARX-Han is one of the most interesting voices working today and is probably better positioned to write on "Rejection" than anyone else I can think of. I am sorry this didn't resonate with you. But, gosh, you are being condescending right now.
"Are you not editing writers?" John, did it occur to you a person can be edited and their voice can, you know, still exist? That individuals have sensibilities? If I wanted to be mean here, I could ask something like "do you have taste" for thinking certain celebrated recent books are actually good. But you've got taste, and we've got it, and sometimes they vary. Sam and I do not tell reviewers what to do or how to feel about a book. I literally had no idea what Kanakia or Han were going to say about their novels until they turned them in. But if a writer WANTS to make a structural critique of contemporary publishing, they may - especially if it's interesting. Not all of our reviews carry this critique. Crispin's didn't, Waldman's didn't, Burton's didn't. That's the beauty of the individual voice. Kanakia's didn't, either.
Not to chest-thump here, but in the span of a single week, between this review and several others, we've got more people talking about *actual book reviews* than anything published in most outlets. And I follow this stuff very closely.
Of course I have taste. We all have taste, the important thing about taste is that our taste is our own and that it's rooted in our genuine selves, rather than governed by algorithms or outside expectations, or what have you. The irony is that you're not allowing for the possibility that people other than you have taste. You accuse them of saying they like something because they're supposed to, or they're kissing up to the establishment, or whatever. I'm not denying anyone's taste.
Editing writers doesn't mean getting rid of a voice, it means helping a writer come across to the audience in the way that best reflects that writer's argument. But you know this, you've been edited.
John, Headshot sold at auction to Viking. The publisher invested significant amounts into marketing it. The book sold at least 50k copies. Rejection was acquired for 350k by William Morrow.
Rebecca Yarros, on the other hand, is published by Entangled, a small indie press. You've got this completely backwards. Romantasy is the organic trend. Lit fic is the manufactured corporate product.
It's a great point
It’s interesting. We have pretty different framings of what the “publishing industry” is. I’ve been offline for a bit and the conversation has moved on, but happy to chat this out further!
John stop and think what you're mad about. This is a review that commissions reviewers to write reviews of books. Do you think that if we turn in a negative review, Ross and Sam shouldn't print it? Or that people who sometimes write negative reviews shouldn't be commissioned to write for this journal? That the journal should have some sycophants on hand who can reliably turn in positive reviews?
I mean...I didn't like James. Is that opinion not allowed? Should that not be printed?
Please...this is frustration, rooted in genuine disappointment, not anger. I've read with pleasure both the masthead and several of the reviewers (including you) and had significant hopes for what was being proposed here and so far, I'm getting The Free Press for literature, tilting against imagined windmills of elites who are keeping the good and righteous artists down.
It's not even that I disagree. As I said above, I think the structural critique of what happens in creative writing workshops is valid. I published a chapter in some academic book no one read on these problems 20 years ago. But diagnosing an ailing literary consensus that only the righteous can see past while the rest of us are simply sheep enslaved to the establishment is dull. It's beneath the people who have put this together.
I don't want positive reviews, I want reviews that deal with the book in a way that helps illuminate the book so I can be more thoughtful about the book (if I read it) or have a deeper appreciate of what it and the conversation might be about (if I didn't).
But what you're asking for is what Arx-Han did. He likes the book, despite its flaws, because he thinks it's the best book about incels that could've actually been published. That's not just his reaction, that's the reaction of many men in the literary world who read it. He's happy that it exists at all, even though he feels like it's a bit of a caricature. It's the same reaction Ralph Ellison had to Huckleberry Finn--he hated the portrayal of Jim, but thought it was courageous of Twain to actually write about race.
If you aren't allowed to discuss the literary context in which you experience the book, then it's very hard to give an honest account of your reaction.
You obviously aren't reading most of what we publish. None of this - literally none of it - fits your definition.
https://metropolitanreview.com/dream-warrior/
https://metropolitanreview.com/a-flawed-novel-addresses-a-failed-utopia/
https://metropolitanreview.com/discovering-a-great-american-writer-on-inter-library-loan/
https://metropolitanreview.com/against-self-actualization/
https://metropolitanreview.com/a-tepid-search-for-genius/
You keep flogging Pistelli and his review was much of the same tedium. And I like and have read Wagner! His review did not enhance my engagement with Wagner, it just wasted time with rehashed asides and more substack anti-wokeness.
What John was saying was that the view that you and ARX and Perez and others seem to think is so urgent and new that it must always be a topic of discussion (on your own stacks) just isn’t. Sam K had a thoughtful response; Naomi had a thoughtful response. You got defensive and started whining.
TMR is of course free to run anything it wants, and if its house style is what it has shown so far then I will remain free to critique it and not read further. The anti-woke and anti-mfa thing is both very dull and very over, and complaining about wokeness is very dumb and very dull and you should stop doing it. TMR should not (in my opinion) stake its identity on reviews that are obsessed with those things if it wants to be a review of books and not of culture war distractions you took the bait on.
To put this as simply as I can, and not really for your benefit because I know you are not listening, reading the first issue, and seeing who was in it and how they reviewed, made it clear to me (and I have to assume to others) that I should not bother pitching a review or article to TMR because I would not include the in house obligatory viewpoint and am not part of the Ross Barkan club here. TMR is not a welcoming review, it is an exclusionary one. I think that was not what the stated goal was, but it certainly is the effect. Maybe that will improve with new features and writers; I understand that initially going to friends is logical to get sufficient content. But as soon as i saw the contributors I knew to brace myself for the same old same old. I hope it changes and grows, but I think that requires conscious effort to exit the comfort zone.
Beware of giving too much credence to these comments, lest TMR become the thing you deplore.
It's baked in because of who is behind the publication. All reviewers will have to bow to this restriction, even as they claim they are writing for the freest, most unwokiest, super cancellation-free place. ARX-Han is also one of the most exhaustingly tedious practitioners of this framing, so it's overdetermined. Agree with you that it's tiresome, cripples reviews, and makes the Metropolitan Review a major disappointment as merely another online echo chamber of complaint.
It seems that most TMR pieces can be summarized as "a negative review of a book that the NYT Book Review liked." That's fine, for what it is, but there isn't much discovery of new literature here. And for their insistence that "at The Metropolitan Review, we read books," there's a whole lot of ancillary material in their reviews of books which have already been widely reviewed. Which again, fine. That's what basically all book blogs are doing, let's just not pretend it's something else.
I couldn't agree more, John. I am also rooting for success, but the snarkiness Factor is saddening me.
I don't even mind snark, but it has to be fresh snark, if you know what I'm saying.
90% of these pieces do not have any snark at all. To be honest, it's getting to the point where I am doubting your reading comprehension skills.
Wow. What a great piece. Thanks for this.
I was going to keep this complaint to myself on the grounds that it was nitpicky and only incidentally related to Han's review, but it's certainly more on-topic than the current meta-debate in the comments, so sure, let 'er rip: if you're going to title your piece "Escaping the Panopticon," it would behoove you to accurately describe a panopticon!
> "We could imagine the minimalist version of the panopticon, one that does not require any technology: a small group of prisoners seated in a circle, with one guard seated in the middle."
Um... not really? A panopticon isn't just a generic system in which people watch people; the key feature of Bentham's panopticon is that the people in it DON'T know whether they're being surveilled at any given moment, and thus learn to surveil their own behavior even in the absence of an audience, developing something resembling a conscience. A relevant metaphor in smartphone world, I guess, but... does it really apply to the MFA milieu? That's just old-fashioned peer pressure, imo.
You’re right. That inaccurate frame somewhat discredits a lot of what follows, imo. The critic is seeing things that may or may not be there
The whole concept of MFA writing programs has always seemed to me ridiculous and in its effect a lot like what Soviet literary union was doing.
Outstanding review. The review of the specific book and author, and the critique of the larger milieu, are well-integrated. The review is a case study of a writer of talent falling short, pulling his punches, degrading his potential, because he faces a Soviet-like system of rewards and punishments for adherence to ideology.
The message is that the existing literary regime is worse than corrupt, it is destroying talent and choking off the voices, the verve, the freedom, the energy, that could bring light and clarity to this historic moment.
That is not a tragedy, it is a crime.
And the panopticon that perpetuates that crime needs to called out. But it won't reform. The answer is to create new institutions and a new regime.
great piece, spicy comments section, what's not to love?
We now all "live" in an enormously huge tower of left brained babble (babel) comprising trillions of words which is growing at an exponential rate every day. Almost every word ever written down about every possible subject in all times and places is now freely available on the internet.
None of which can or will make the slightest bit of difference to anything.
The BORG rules!
ARX-Han is Tony T
I thought it was somewhat thin. I hate to use hackneyed phrases but here you go: it was too clever by half. It ties to be a literary version of Delicious Tacos' "The Pussy". I feel like he read Tacos and said "well I can beat that..." But he can't, and didn't. Tacos rings in my head all the time and this flatly doesn't.
Well, kudos to Tony for sneaking one in there. Based on all the acclaim for his work, he is obviously a talented writer and I wish him the best going forward. I haven't read Rejection, but I did read the story The Feminist in the magazine. Based on your review, it sounds like Tony had to go behind the lines with a lot of camouflage and the latest in stealth gear. But he did it, and minimized the 'attack surface' of his novel in stories.
Evasion vs confrontation. I guess a few more stealthy writers might sneak something significant in there ('there' being NYC Big Publishing) as well, but I still wonder how long before straight male writers can just strut in there boldly. Publishing used to be that way, maybe a hundred years ago.
You say that Tony writes like an extremely talented writer who isn't playing to win, but not to lose. Well, just getting inside is a win.
So, cleverness instead of 'the bare metal of male interiority' is the ticket. Well, for how long. Now that his cleverness is exposed, will he get in again? Will others? You describe Tony as an institutionally-established writer. Why do I think of terms like token, house slave? Let's hope that more young straight male writers bust in. And, while I'm on a rant here, when will we get back to some semblance of normal-speak. Why must we (not me, but young writers like Tony) use the loaded, stupid language of the woke in our work?
Your intuition is that Tony's book 'was still a form of artistic compromise in lieu of engaging with the more brutal elements of contemporary male psychology.' Well, some others might say it was just a cop-out. Was his strategy one we should all follow? Self-censoring our work to ensure that no one on the planet will be offended if and when we find a publisher?
You wonder if Tony will 'break out of his peer-to-peer panopticon and blow up his entire social and 'professional' network in pursuit of generational literary greatness?'
I don't know. Why would he do that and find himself locked outside the walls of the castle like everybody else?
Well, we all make our own destiny. Tony, good luck!
What is an example of a recent novel that you think takes on the risks you believe this author hesitated to do.
Good question for ARX-Han but tbh I can't think of a recent novel that has tackled heterosexual male rage very well.
Try the work of Teddy Wayne, particularly "Loser" which is all first person from a male "incel" character, and "The Great Man Theory," which centers on male anger at a world that's closed to him.
Also "The Dinner" by Herman Koch, and one that's not out yet and I have't read but looks promising, "Flesh" by David Szalay.
"Hawk Mountain" - Conner Habib (though in this one the narrator is not the male rage character, and the heterosexual part of it is complicated)
"The Book of George" by Kate Greathead, which is a bit gentler, but is for sure exploring the anger of a thwarted male
"Last Resort" by Andrew Lipstein
"The Passenger Seat" by Vijay Khurana was just recommended to me, though I haven't read it.
"Blood Test" by Charles Baxter tackles male heterosexual rage by constructing a conceit where the main character is given permission to let it loose without restriction, but chooses not to do so. A clever inversion, and quite funny.
Loser is good but comes up short in the end. Barely any engagement with the character post Harvard. That's where the darkness truly begins. We are only halfway there.
Screen shot your list so I can read * one * of these. Thank you for sharing it, as well as your insightful critiques of the critique.