At Ward Six the other day, J Robert Lennon tossed in a note about Tadzio Koelb’s deflating review (in the NYTBR) of Rebecca Hunt’s Mr Chartwell.  Koelb wrote,

Now England has seen the rise of “Mr. Chartwell,” a humorous and amiable novel about which such extravagant claims have been made — for its prose, psychological insight and emotional depth — that one might imagine a work to rival Robert Burton’s “Anatomy of Melancholy” instead of what is, in fact, well-packaged chick lit.

The end of Lennon’s note stuck with me: 

While I am enjoying the democratization of literary discourse that the internet has brought us, the trend Koelb describes is a consequence of the decline of newspapers and print magazines–hardly anyone is being paid to recognize artistic value anymore. And so, I fear, hardly anyone is bothering.

My first reaction was to protest: I’m not being paid, and yet I am bothering to recognize artistic value. My second reaction was to wonder if the first was actually correct. I’m conscious of being on the lookout for interesting things, and of trying to explain what it is about things that interest me that interests me. But: recognizing artistic value? I’m not sure that I believe in it. And it’s not as simple as doubting that “artistic value” exists. There’s the matter of recognition, too, the sense, which I think Lennon intends, of making an award. You pin a blue ribbon on something, and, voilà, it has artistic value. (The ribbon is what you have to say about it, and the quality of that ornament is for others to judge.) You go on to the next thing, leaving your little ribbon behind for all time. 

This old model of critical authority has almost completely broken down, not because we don’t have faith in people who make authoritative pronouncements (we’re if anything too credulous) but because we don’t have time for them. All we want to know is whether to read the book or not. Will our friends all be reading the book? There is no need for much of a ribbon; a letter grade will do. This is indeed what has happened in “the democratization of literary discourse.”  I’m unfamiliar with the string of admiring reviews that Mr Chartwell evidently garnered — I hadn’t heard of the book before reading Koelb’s review — but his description suggests an excited readership enthusing over a shiny bauble. I daresay that careful readers of those reviews were not deceived into thinking that Rebecca Hunt might take a place alongside Trollope and Tolstoy. They could probably tell that satisfaction was guaranteed by a plaubile patina of “history.” I’m reminded of Frederick Arbuthnot, the happily faithless husband in The Enchanted April, who writes sexy potboilers under an assumed name. 

He wrote immensely popular memoirs, regularly, every year, of the mistresses of kings. There were in history numerous kings who had had mistresses, and there were still more numerous mistresses who had had kings; so that he had been able to publish a book of memoirs during each year of his married life, and even so there were great further piles of these ladies waiting to be dealt with. 

What has changed since those days is that nobody is being punished for publishing critical flummery anymore; it’s unlikely that anyone is going to lose a gig because Tadzio Koelb has seen through a gushing review or two. The people who care about psychological insight and The Anatomy of Melancholy won’t be lodging complaints, because they won’t have been tricked into buying the book. 

So, then, what am I doing? I’ve already said, putting it with cheeky complication: I’m “trying to explain what it is about things that interest me that interests me.” What’s left out of that formulation is the time-stamp, which is always set to “right now.” What interests me now? It’s not necessarily what interested me last week or last year, or when I was in my twenties. And what interests me now has been shaped by what has interested me (recently, for the most part, but not always), so that my liking a book this week may be tied up in my having liked another one last week, or last month, or whenever. Far from being an unchanging authority who makes judgments according to some fixed protocol, I’m more or less impressed, literally, by everything that I read. It would almost be better to say that the book judges me. 

That’s what I was thinking on Saturday night, listening to Rudolf Buchbinder and Orpheus play Mozart’s D minor concerto — the most dramatic of the lot and destined to stand at or near the top of anyone’s ranking. I was trying out a new metric: the measure of a performance’s excellence is the extent to which it blots out all others. It would not occur to me, in connection with any actual concert, to judge the concerto itself.  I might say that it reminds me of my sheltered youth, when I could hardly imagine what real tragedy would be like; or I might wonder what the first audience made of it — I expect that everyone who stopped talking and listened was aware of unprecedented music; or I might quote Donald Francis Tovey (well, no, I couldn’t; Tovey didn’t write it up). But nothing in any of these passing, colorful remarks would address the music that Mozart wrote. I am no longer sufficiently conceited to believe that I have anything useful to add to the overflowing store of Mozart commentary. So much for his artistic value. As for that of the performance, my new metric keeps things simple. I can report that the horns had a bit of a flub in the Romanze — one that happens often enough to make its way onto recordings — but I don’t expect you to be find this news interesting.

Of Mr Buchbinder’s reading, I’ll say that it coincided with an ideal of the concerto that I carry around in my head. His playing was temporally acute (by which I mean that he kept time in an interesting way) and dynamically expressive (he used the shift between loud and soft to structure the thematic lines). His left hand was particularly gratifying: the low notes were always sonorously there, assuring us that the current of music was flowing through clear and capacious channels. But because I never heard a thing that I did not hope or expect to hear, I cannot say that it was the best imaginable performance of the concerto. I have to be content with pronouncing it extremely well done, and very satisfying to sit through. What I hope I’m conveying is that this “judgment” is really about me. Beyond a presumable level of competence, the performance of music is so peculiar to time and place, to the vibration of the air between player and listener, as to have the quality of magic. It makes no sense to attempt objective descriptions of such things. 

In his blog entry, Lennon mentions Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom. 

I am still bewildered by the fact that nobody seems to have recognized Freedom as Jonathan Franzen’s worst book; it’s a lopsided domestic drama with a lot of timely and unnecessary sociopolitical nonsense slathered over it.  (FWIW, I enjoyed it anyway–but it is not up to Franzen’s usual standard.)  In that book, we were seduced, I think, by its ambitious title, its environmental subplot, its political undertones.

Worst book? That’s more impish than intelligent. “Least successful,” perhaps — and I say that not because I agree with Lennon about Freedom but because there is no call to speak of the “worst book” of a writer who always turns out excellent, sometimes extraordinary, work. I do agree that there was a lot of tedious hype about the novel last spring and summer, and that the novel was tedious to write about because one couldn’t begin without clearing away at least some of the critical lumber.

What matters more, in Lennon’s commentary, is that he enjoyed the book even though it wasn’t, in some way or other, good enough. What is the point of Jonathan Franzen’s maintaining his “usual standard” if readers will like what he writes even if he doesn’t? What is this standard, this excess beyond enjoyment? Let’s talk about that. 

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Monday, March 21st, 2011 at 6:00 pm.