Useless book reviews in the FT

And I started reading this “review” with much anticipation, too. But as soon as you decided to claim the new “style” of inanity and ignorance in British newspapers must be “Americanisation” I knew that this post was going to be as bad or worse than everything you were complaining about.

What you don’t like is the vested interests created and promoted by the cross-ownership of media. While that’s also a problem in The States, it is actually more of a British born and bred behaviour. We used to have strong rules against such conflicts and concentrations in the US, but the “successes” fostered by the corrupt business-friendly Thatcher administration were foisted on us by her boyfriend Reagan (if Maggie told Ronnie the sky was purple he would have changed the colors of the flag to match). That it’s come home to roost in the FT should be no surprise, since they’ve owned Penguin for forty years.

“Corporatisation” is the applicable term, and if it wasn’t invented by the Brits, they certainly perfected it.

As a general rule, I find that the jobbing book interviews that they sometimes run next to the editorial page in weekday editions are much better than the ones in the weekend supplement. They’re by staff, and sometimes the common prejudices of the FT are just a little _too_ prominent, but they often cover books that would never get reviewed in any other major newspaper (academic books with an interesting twist etc).

David – threadjacking a bit – I’ve been meaning to say somewhere how much I liked “A Soldier of the City.” A really great short story – the economy with which you depict the main setting and hint at a future trajectory is admirable. Looking forward to when that novel mss hits the presses …

The problems of British newspapers — opinionated proprietors, differentiation by political and social tribe, intensely competitive markets, editorial standards compromised by commercial interests — are longstanding. The best source is probably still Scoop (published 1938). If you want to make a comparison with America — and imajoebob is clearly keen to — I’d say these features are most obvious in the area of TV news.

Turn the comparison around, and compare British TV news with American newspapers, and again you find factors in common. The BBC aspires to impartiality, and manages in some nontrivial sense to define the boundaries of what audiences find acceptable. Sky News is frequently crass, but exists in a different universe from Fox. They are subject to regulation, of course, but what governs their behaviour is a knowledge of how much overt bias the market will tolerate. This is not a constraint the editor of the Sun has ever struggled with. Similarly, the New York Times sets famously lofty standards, which account for the greyness of the Grey Lady. In doing so, they have managed, at least historically, to set some kind of tone.

How to Spend It only appears about once a month.

It’s worth noting that both the Economist and FT have changed markedly within the last 10 years – and that change coincides with a big marketing push from both publications to broaden their readership in the US.

Correlation is not causation, but it can alert us to causation.

Is the difference between the FT and the Economist not that the FT is the paper of choice among the European elite, while the Economist strives to (and somewhat succedes in) acting as a signaling mechanism for a certain US audience. This results in a difference in tone between the two publications.

My favorite Saturday treat is Ta-Nehisi Coates. It means staying away all week, but the writing is stellar, the book reviews are wonderful, etc. The Economist started going American in the mid-nineties, though it seems not to have hit bottom yet. Never got the FT habit, fortunately it sounds like.

@Henry — Thanks! I’m delighted to hear you enjoyed the story. I’ve got roped into another anthology this summer and that’s taking time away from novel revisions, but I hope to get back to it soon.

Back-scratching in book reviewing has plagued British papers for many years (see, as they say, Private Eye passim) so that it is often hard to tell whether a book is any good. I am wary of making definitive claims about about trends (qualities expanded their book review sections compared to the 1980s but they now seem to be falling back) or particular publications – I don’t share Maria’s enthusiasm for Lionel Shriver, but never mind. With the Saturday Guardian at it’s best it’s very good but often employs reviewers with no obvious competence – e.g. solipsist columnist William Leith reviewing Paul Krugman, English literature dons like Terry Eagleton apparently being qualified to write on just about anything. And don’t get me started on how the notionally pr0gressive Guardian and New Statesman use John Gray as a reviewer.

‘I don’t share Maria’s enthusiasm for Lionel Shriver . . .’

I’ll say. As if ‘We Need To Talk About Kevin’ wasn’t bad enough – and it was! – here’s Lionel with her submission on public intellectuals:

‘I guess I understand a public intellectual to be somebody who moves public discourse forward. Someone who either says something new or says something that everybody knows to be true but is afraid to express.’

‘One of the people I would consider a public intellectual, for example, is David Coleman. He’s a demographer. And he’s written some very brave analysis [sic] of immigration to Britain. Some of his ideas are growing more acceptable to give voice to: asking the hard questions about what is a country, what is a culture? And he was writing about [sic] this kind of material when multiculturalism was all the rage.’

So when asked about ‘public intellectuals’, she voluntarily gave a shoutout to a leader of deeply xenophobic right-wing pressure group who campaign against immigration, who is coincidentally a prominent member of the Galton Institute, and then had a quick bash at multiculturalism while she was at it. What an iconoclast!

Is the difference between the FT and the Economist not that the FT is the paper of choice among the European elite, while the Economist strives to (and somewhat succedes in) acting as a signaling mechanism for a certain US audience.

I think the Economist is extremely efficient if you look at its opinions not as valuable intrinsically, but as advisory items to people with money on the line. So, for example, they give the entirely sound advice of putting no money in Kirchner’s Argentina, while investing in Lula’s Brazil. I do think their anti-Berlusconi campaign has jumped the sharp, though. In any case, the Economist is tremendously popular in the rest of the world too, outside of Europe.

You’re absolutely right though that the Saturday edition comes wrapped around the offputting turd of How To Spend It, in which advertisers compete to exploit the status anxieties of City workers and their grasping wives.

People who are complaining about How To Spend It are missing the fact that it is actually objectively the best lifestyle insert among all English-language newspapers.

I do think their anti-Berlusconi campaign has jumped the sharp, though

In what sense? I quite liked the latest instalment – which is more anti-everything that’s wrong with Italy than anti-B specifically – and I think they’re going to turn out to have been right all along very soon, possibly by this time next week.

in which advertisers compete to exploit the status anxieties of City workers and their grasping wives.

So even on this blog, in 2011, it is assumed that a City worker will be a man and the “wife” will spend the money? How very Mad Men of you.

I’m also not suggesting the wife spends it. The advertising in How To Spend It divides evenly between ludicrous knobbly watches and jewellery.
Both have their status anxieties, as I think you’ll find I said.

FACT: The Serious Elite Media — the Doshbladet (“FT”), the Dismalbladet (“Economiste”) and local equivalents elsewhere (here, NRC Handelsblad) — are firmly in the grip of Big Chronometry, a sinister cabal of steampunk entryistes.

the Serious Elite Media—the Doshbladet (“FT”), the Dismalbladet (“Economiste”) and local equivalents elsewhere

I like this system of classification.
The Scotsman, or Jockbladet
The Independent, or Skintbladet
The Daily Telegraph, or Tweedbladet
…

bert, wtf else are you suggesting with the misogynist phrase “their grasping wives”?

32 is great.

One of the people I would consider a public intellectual, for example, is David Coleman.

I was incredibly disappointed to find that this was the demographer and not the fons et origo of Colemanballs.

#32 is paywalled, and I did the Coleman gag at #22. H’mph.

Chris is right. It’s beautifully put.
I hope I’m not infringing somehow. If I am, delete this of course:

From Ms Emily Brearley.

Sir, Unlike many of your readers during and post the financial crisis, I have never found your magazine How To Spend It either ridiculous or offensive, because I knew better than to be offended by the illusory.

I’m a working-class girl made good through sheer hard work and determination. And though I’m a poor PhD student, and my chosen career in development will never make me rich, I never cared.

I knew that the sparkling things in your magazine would never make me happy. I knew that what really counts is intellectual discovery, good friends, a supportive family and good music.

But then you had to go and present Back to Glamour – six pages of fashion heaven (September 4). Normally your fashion pages consist of bored-looking stick insects wearing utterly unattractive and impractical clothes. But this time the garments were glorious, feminine and thoroughly wearable.

Suddenly I thought, damn it! I would look great in those outfits! My life really would be better if I could just have that delicious Louis Vuitton wool bustier (even if I wore it in the library).

Please could you go back to featuring ridiculously expensive, ostentatious and ultimately ugly items in your magazine – it would make me feel so much better.

Emily Brearley,

Johns Hopkins University,

Washington, DC, US

Phil @#22, Ajay @#35:
Never mind David Coleman.
I think Jonathan at #17 is being unduly hard on John Gray.
I found Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus to be profound, insightful and deeply moving. (Some commenters may have known this already without being told.)

bert@#41 – kicking myself now for missing that one.

I can’t take issue with the general point that it’s way awkward to have writers reviewing books by fellow writers, nor am I particularly going to take issue with the specific criticism of Proulx’s review as being lacklustre. It might well be. Nevertheless, this:

Without the name recognition of Proulx, it’s hard to imagine the review being published anywhere except, perhaps, a town newspaper wishing to fill up space and appear cultural by inviting the doyenne of the local book club to write a little something.

The apparent implication that Toews — a Governor General’s Award-winning author with at least one bestseller to her credit — would be for some reason unworthy of attention outside of whatever obscure tundra-bound slum she’s presumed to hail from without Proulx’ name recognition is… well, what?

I mean, it may be a worthy criticism of the FT’s editorial staff that they thought Proulx was needed to do the review. Or it could be (more likely) that Proulx pitched them the idea of bigging up whatever writer she’s big on at the moment, and they accepted, and you can criticize them for that. Either of those positions would be understandable. But blathering as though Toews ought to be some sort of nonentity outside the pages of her podunk local rag is ignorant in a way that directly undermines the credibility of your commentary on the diminished state of book reviewing in the FT.