Steiner Slags Barth and ‘Big Time Publishing’
This from the excellent George Steiner at the New Yorker:
"The sadness of the whole affairs goes well beyond the particular case [Barth's Letters]. It involves the current climate of "big time" publishing – the hunt, at once arrogant and spineless, for the "blockbuster." It engages the avsence of an authoritative body of reviewing, especially of "big-name fiction." How many harried reviewers can have had the time to plow through, let alone give criticical thought to, this "new comic masterpiece"? (Blurb writers have to say such things.) Yet is is only where criticism is stringent and unashamed that literature is honoured. Narcissism is, just now, the fashionable tage attached to the American situation. Much in that ascription is obviously maodish and oversimplified. But to a degree at once precise and grotesque "Letters" seems to document such a view.
Letter to the Author: Dear John Barth, In France – where (as said by one of your favourite masters, the Sterne Laurence) they order these matters better – there is a proverb: A bad book is the death of a good forest."