NYRB

posted by James Reel

    New York Magazine has an article about the history, and purportedly the future, of the New York Review of Books, the publication that has been rubbing ink onto the fingers of left-leaning American intellectuals since 1963. James Atlas’ article provides a nice account of where NYRB has been, with vivid if compact portraits of its three founders, but it’s rather helpless at forecasting what will happen now that longtime co-editor Barbara Epstein is gone (she died in June). Surviving editor Robert Silvers claims that everything will continue just as it has, and nobody dares to suggest that it may be time for change.
    Atlas quotes Philip Nobile’s description of the magazine: “a literary magazine on the British nineteenth-century model, which would mix politics and literature in a tough but gentlemanly fashion.” This has been the magazine’s steady strength, as well as its chronic weakness.
    I was an enthusiastic reader of the NYRB in the late ’80s and early ’90s, but I finally gave up on the publication about 10 years ago. I finally realized how unbearably clubby it really was—its detractors call it “The New York Review of Each Other’s Books”—and how irrelevant its anglophilic tendencies were to my own interests. It seemed that every issue would contain another long article about Henry James (who is more popular among British critics and scholars than American readers), another pointless and clumsily written piece by James Fenton, another “review” by some English armchair critic that amounted merely to a detailed plot summary of the novel at hand, including spoilers galore, and never a single word of analysis or context. Then there were the endless articles about what a genius Hannah Arendt had been, and how right-wingers were screwing up Israel, or displays of how knowledgable John Updike was about obscure American visual art. Even the once wickedly but subtly witty David Levine caricatures were becoming dull. And I grew increasingly furious every time I happened upon curious comma-less constructions involving the word “not” (“The cat was black not white”), and the ridiculous Britishism “take a decision” (from whom do you take it?).
    Surely Robert Silvers doesn’t care in the least that I no longer read his magazine. But he, and especially the successors he seems in no hurry to appoint, should care about my reasons for not reading it if the New York Review of Books is to be anything more than a fusty vehicle for scholarly-press ads.