Bestselling author attacks New York Times for narrow focus of its review coverage
Alison Flood , guardian.co.uk, Friday 20 August 2010
Bestselling author Jodi Picoult has criticised the New York Times for focusing on "white male literary darlings" in its book coverage, following Michiko Kakutani's rave review of Jonathan Franzen's new novel Freedom.
Earlier this week Kakutani's review of the novel – Franzen's first since his 2001 hit The Corrections – praised its "visceral and lapidary" prose, calling the author "as adept at adolescent comedy ... as he is at grown-up tragedy" and applauding "his ability to throw open a big, Updikean picture window on American middle-class life".
"[He's] completed his own transformation from a sharp-elbowed, apocalyptic satirist focused on sending up the socio-economic-political plight of this country into a kind of 19th-century realist concerned with the public and private lives of his characters," wrote the influential reviewer about the novel, in a huge change of heart from her dissection of Franzen's memoir The Discomfort Zone in 2006, which she called "an odious self-portrait of the artist as a young jackass: petulant, pompous, obsessive, selfish and overwhelmingly self-absorbed".
Picoult, whose popular novels of everyday people facing awful dilemmas have sold more than 12m copies worldwide but are largely overlooked by the literary establishment, was quick to respond. "NYT raved about Franzen's new book. Is anyone shocked?" she wrote on Twitter. "Would love to see the NYT rave about authors who aren't white male literary darlings." For every review of authors such as Haitian-American writer Edwidge Danticat or the Dominican-American Pulitzer winner Junot Díaz, "there are 10 Lethems and Franzens," she added later.
Picoult also criticised Kakutani's use of the word "lapidary". "Did you know what [it] meant when you read it in Kakutani's review? I think reviewers just like to look smart," she tweeted.
As well as Kakutani's Franzen piece, the most recent fiction reviews in the New York Times range from a piece on Gorky Park author Martin Cruz Smith's latest novel Three Stations to critiques of Norwegian novelist Per Petterson's I Curse the River of Time and Suzanne Rivecca's debut story collection Death Is Not an Option, along with shorter pieces on Ann Weisgarber's Orange-longlisted The Personal History of Rachel DuPree and Helen Grant's debut novel The Vanishing of Katharina Linden. Chick lit fails to make an appearance.
More at The Guardian.
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