This piece isn’t poorly written, and I don’t necessarily disagree with its conclusions (I haven’t yet read either of the novels). But the framing is symptomatic of a lot I find dissatisfying about a certain kind of contemporary literary criticism. “They write often and make connections. Isn’t that what we all want to do?” No. Of course, we all know that you can’t solely rely on the quality of your work to get published and read. But some of us are saying that we’d prefer a world in which how hard you network and how frequently you publish shouldn’t be the only criteria of literary access. It’s scary to me that that even needs to be said.

Then there’s the extrapolation from this. Even though the reviewer ultimately determines that the books are empty and misogynistic, those who criticize the authors’ visibility are themselves also misogynists. Can’t we come up with a better way to have this debate? I’m all for a(nother) sociology of the downtown NY literary scene, but this is ostensibly a review of two novels. We still have many serviceable literary terms, and we can still use them to analyze the structures of narrative fiction. If we begin to see everything as one pile of cultural discourse, we’ll continue to bulldoze through it with our own personal ideological vehicles. I get that this review is an attempt to see through or around the contemporary scene, but it is so thoroughly immersed in the style and thinking of that scene that it never succeeds in escaping it. Again, I don’t think the piece is bad. It’s just worrisome as an indicator of how we talk about contemporary

fiction.