The New York Times Book Review's retirement plan - is it on the way out?

The Book Review was once American literary culture's holy of holies, but neither books nor criticism count for much any more

Sam Tanenhaus and Pamela Paul, outgoing and incoming editor, respectively, of the New York Times Book Review. Photograph courtesy of the New York Times

Not long ago, an old friend with whom I've lost touch, the writer Susan Braudy, surfaced in the letters column in the New York Times Book Review. This is a kind of pitiable place for writers to show up. They are usually either protesting their treatment by the Book Review, or, at least in the years before Amazon, begging for copies of their out-of-print books.

My old friend, however, had a grander mission, one that seemed to have weighed on her mind for many years – how to get the Times to be more joyful and energetic about promoting books. Why, she wondered, does the New York Times Book Review, the last freestanding book section in the nation, so often treat books so dyspeptically? And why are our enemies allowed to review our books while it's verboten for our friends to say a kind word about us? (Reviews pay so little that only our enemies are motivated to do the work.)
Her letter reminded me that the New York Times Book Review still occupies a whale-like place in the minds and careers of all diligent book writers in America. The literary world may have come undone, newspapers may be finished, and books may be morphing into some unrecognizable multimedia affair, but the NYTBR continues to be our ultimate judge and real Harvard. We live and die by its sudden enthusiasms, certain tetchiness, unstated rules, and hard-won acceptance.

And then, a few weeks ago, I noticed, in a small announcement in the New York Times, the appointment of a new editor at the Book Review – once a major transfer of power in New York. Indeed, the editor of the Book Review, and his or her general literary disposition, is pretty much synonymous with the Book Review itself.
The new editor is Pamela Paul, and quite unlike any before her. (I believe I can reel off all of them from the mid-seventies on without any effort … the columnist and reviewer John Leonard; the poet and editor Harvey Shapiro; one of the big newsroom bosses, Mike Levitas; followed by Times heavy, Rebecca Sinkler; then former New Yorker editor, Charles (Chip) McGrath; then Vanity Fair writer and Whitaker Chambers biographer Sam Tanenhaus.)

Paul has, pretty much, no writerly or literary credentials. She's written some straightforward, but non-literary nonfiction – a book about marriage, a book about parenting, and a book condemning pornography – and she's been the children's book editor at the Book Review for a short time. Her resume includes two years as a blogger at the Huffington Post, which, it doesn't seem entirely churlish to point out, is not a job, and a stint writing a column for the Times' Style section.

Anyway, it's a perfectly reasonable but not distinguished freelance journalism career. So why a major post in the world of literary journalism?
There is an untested assumption among some long time New York Times readers and among writers who measure their careers in the Book Review's pages that the NYTBR is quite a vital and even necessary part of the Times – that the identity of the New York Times is integrally related to higher culture and that there are few more important reflections of that high culture than the Times Book Review. But this, of course, is nonsense.

That day is gone. Only the awkwardness of admitting otherwise maintains the assumption of a necessary Book Review.
It quite simply has no ads. The entire newspaper is challenged by falling advertising, but the Book Review is really at the end of this road. Practically speaking, it has no revenue.

This is a long slide, reflecting not just a hard market but the manners of a bygone world. Once, I wrote a piece about the Book Review when it was edited by Chip McGrath; I asked McGrath what an ad in his pages cost. He had no idea. Advertising had never crossed his mind.
Later, I asked Sam Tanenhaus why the NYTBR didn't use its muscle with book publishers and say, with more politesse, "you don't advertise, you don't get reviewed." He seemed appalled by the idea of such blackmail.

In a way, it might be a good thing to have recruited a new editor without literary conceit whose success depends less on taste than it does on the Book Review's very survival. Maybe, she has a really smart and aggressive new approach, which she's sold to the Times' management.
On the other hand, the approach so far seems just to give less space to reviews. The bestseller lists, derived from overlapping and trivial new methods of categorization, now fill most of the back pages. Pamela Paul herself seems to be responsible for a particularly empty weekly Q&A interview feature with celebrities and other banal sorts about their love of books.
Book reviews, I am afraid, are a downer, an outdated form. Literary editors – hell, literary people in general – are mightily outdated, too.

And while the NYTBR has been at the very center of the book business in New York and has been the most influential voice in book culture for the better part of a century, it is surely hard to say quite what to do with this weighty history. Not to mention, how to squeeze a buck out of it. The New York Times has other things to worry about.
Not too long ago, the Times converted its Sunday "Week in Review" section, a hoary idea in a real-time age, into something called the "Sunday Review", a showcase of health-focused and sociological trend opinion pieces. I'd bet good money that, in an epochal passing that few will really notice, the NYTBR will soon be merged into this new, all-encompassing, flattened section.