If Muriel Spark had drunk a little too much Sir Thomas Malory
Over at the New Yorker‘s Page-Turner blog, I write about stumbling across War in Heaven, a 1930 novel by Charles Williams about satanism, publishing, and the Holy Grail.
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First impression of Norman Foster’s NYPL plans
This morning, I attended a press event at the New York Public Library for the unveiling of Norman Foster’s architectural plans. The library administrators’ proposal to replace the bookshelves of the 42nd Street research branch with a new circulating library has been controversial, and I was curious to know what the proposed renovation actually looked like. I’m still mulling over my impressions, but I want to convey two things, quickly (and to post my photos of the architectural model, which doesn’t seem to be available on the library’s website).
The first is that I am deeply grateful to the administrators and trustees of the library for agreeing to double the library’s storage capacity under Bryant Park. Library trustee Abby Milstein and her husband Howard Milstein gave $8 million to the library in September, for the purpose of outfitting the second, currently unused level of the Bryant Park Stack Extension, soon to be renamed in the Milsteins’ honor. The library administrators’ original plans called for a reduction of onsite book storage from 4.5 million to 1.5 million volumes, but thanks to the Milsteins’ gift, the reduction will only be to 3 million. I appreciate the generosity of the Milsteins and the flexibility of the library’s trustees and administrators.
The second is that I remain a skeptic of the proposed renovation nonetheless (though out of a recognition of personal limits, probably a less vocal one than I was last spring). Books used to arrive in the Rose Reading Room via an elevator under the delivery desk in the center of the room. Squinting at the architectural model this morning, I saw that the space under the delivery desk is now empty, so during the question-and-answer period, I asked how books would arrive under the new plan. There’s currently a conveyor belt that brings books from the Bryant Park Stack Extension into the library building, and in reply to my question, Marx said that a second conveyor belt would be added to it, and a new elevator built somewhere on the south end of the building. The architectural historian Charles Warren followed up my question with a few others: Would the new elevator be put where the Art and Architecture reading room is now located? No, it was to be to one side, probably in the southeast corner of the Rose room. How would books get from the southeast corner of the Rose to the delivery desk? There might be room to build yet another conveyor belt in the crawl space between the floor of the Rose Reading Room and the drop ceiling of the new circulating library. Was this crawl space large enough for a person to walk in it? No. Then how would the conveyor be repaired if it broke?
Marx and Foster assured Warren that they would be able to come up with an answer, and I have no doubt that they can and will. But it seemed telling that getting the books into the reading room was an afterthought, a detail not yet worked through. In Carrère and Hastings’s original plans for the 42nd Street building, the concern was central. The whole structure was designed around it. I look forward to reading what others, especially architecture critics, make of Foster’s plans.
Those people were a kind of solution: the future of books and copyright, part 2
It’s bracing to spend time with people who know in their hearts that your way of life is going the way of the horse and buggy.
In an earlier post, I described a few legal concepts in vogue at In Re Books, a conference about law and the future of the book that I attended on 26 and 27 October, and I characterized the conference as haunted by the ghost of the late Google Books settlement. In this post, I’d like to relay what the conferencegoers had to say about the future of publishing, including the problem of how to price e-books.
Most of the conferencegoers seemed to be lawyers, law professors, or librarians. One of the exceptions, the author James Gleick, noted that everyone present was united by the love of books—and then added that the love sometimes took the form of a wish to have the books for free. But the lawyers themselves didn’t seem to think of their doomsaying as in any way volitional. Some of them even seemed to look upon the publishing industry with pity; they hoped it would soon be out of its misery.
Consider, for example, the battle being waged between Amazon and traditional publishers over the price of e-books. Most people in publishing see their side as waging a crusade in the name of literature. Their version of the story goes like this: A few years ago, Amazon had managed to establish a near-monopoly on e-books by offering low prices. Amazon in many cases sold e-books to customers for even less than the wholesale price that publishers demanded, losing money for the sake of market share. Publishers were alarmed. If customers came to expect such low prices habitually, and if Amazon’s monopoly remained unbroken, publishers would be forced in time to lower their wholesale prices radically. Editors, designers, publicists, and sales representatives would lose their jobs, and books would no longer be made with the same level of care—if publishers managed to remain in business at all. When Apple debuted the Ipad in 2010, publishers saw a chance to rebel. They agreed with Apple to sell e-books on what was called the “agency model”: publishers were to set the retail price, and Apple was to take a percentage, the way it did with the apps sold through its Itunes store. With many titles, the publishers were agreeing to sell e-books to Apple for a wholesale price lower than the one they had been getting from Amazon, but the power to control retail price seemed worth the sacrifice. The publishers gave Amazon a choice: accept the agency model or lose access to books. Amazon complained that the publishers were abusing their “monopoly” over books under copyright, and the retailer briefly tried to coerce publishers by erasing the “buy” buttons from the Amazon pages of the publishers’ print titles. In the end, though, Amazon gave in, and over the next couple of years, Amazon’s market share in e-books fell. Today the Nook and the I-Pad offer the Kindle stiff competition. In April 2012, however, the Department of Justice accused the publishers and Apple of antitrust violations. A few publishers settled, for terms that required them to allow Amazon to discount their e-books as before. Others are still fighting the charges. Amazon, meanwhile, has become a publisher itself—of serious books, as well as vanity titles. How, most people in publishing want to know, can the Department of Justice fail to see that Amazon is trying to drive traditional publishers out of business?
The lawyers at the In Re Books conference were able to see that, as it happens. They just didn’t see it the way people in publishing do. They saw, rather, a historical process of Hegelian implacability, and they saw the publishers as desperate characters who had resorted to possibly illegal maneuvers in a futile attempt to prevent it. “You know, the agency model,” said Christopher Sagers, a law professor at Cleveland State University who specializes in antitrust, “we used to just call it price-fixing.” Sagers allowed that a recent Supreme Court ruling, the Leegin case of 2007, was somewhat indulgent toward so-called “vertical” price-fixing, which consists of a series of contracts between a manufacturer and its distributors and retailers, along the vertical axis of the supply chain, that allows a manufacturer to determine retail prices of its goods. (Apple famously prohibits its retailers from discounting its products without permission, for example.) But “horizontal” price-fixing remains illegal, as do certain strains of “vertical” price-fixing, Sagers said, and the Department of Justice thought that the publishers and Apple were guilty along both axes. It was no defense, Sagers pointed out, to say that the publishers were choosing to lose money. The law didn’t care about that. Nor was it a defense to say that publishing is special. Throughout history, Sagers said, companies have responded to antitrust accusations by claiming to be special, and Sagers didn’t think publishing was any more special than, say, the horse-and-buggy-making industry had been. In Sagers’s opinion, publishing is suffering through the advent of a technological change that is going to make distribution cheaper and, through price competition, bring savings to consumers. Creative destruction is in the house, and there is no choice but to trust the market. “Someone will figure it out,” said Sagers, “it” being a new economic engine for literature, and he apologized for sounding like Robert Bork by saying so. As for the charge that Amazon was headed for a monopoly, Sagers’s reply was, in essence, Well, maybe, but the answer isn’t to let a cartel set prices.
The legal question at issue is somewhat muddied by the fact that publishers are allowed to set the retail prices of books and even e-books in a number of other countries, where publishing is heralded as special. Germany, France, the Netherlands, Italy, and Spain allow the vertical price-fixing of books, as Nico van Eijk, of the University of Amsterdam, explained at the conference. The United Kingdom, Ireland, Sweden, and Finland, on the other hand, do not. Van Eijk thought he saw a pattern: The warm and emotional countries indulge their literary sector, while the cold and as it were remorseless ones subject it to the free market. The nations that allow for “resale price maintenance,” as it’s called, in publishing justify the legal exception for three reasons. They believe that it brings a bookstore to every village, that it makes possible a wide selection of books in those bookstores, and that it enables less-popular books to be subsidized by more-popular ones. In other words, the argument for resale price maintenance rests largely on the contribution that local, independent bookstores make to cultural life. And bookstores do thrive in countries where publishers may set retail prices. The trouble is that the same arguments don’t work as well with e-books, as Van Eijk pointed out. E-bookstores are virtually ubiquitous, thanks to widespread internet access, and every e-book available for sale is available in almost every e-bookstore. As for cross-subsidization, van Eijk dismissed it as already doubtful even as a justification for printed books. (In fact, though several people I spoke to at the conference seemed either unaware of it or not to believe in it, the current publishing system does allow for cross-subsidization. Most books of trade nonfiction wouldn’t get written without it. Publishers advance substantial sums to writers who propose books that sound promising, and publishers can afford the bets because they’re buying a diversified portfolio: if the biography of Henry VIII doesn’t make it big, maybe the cultural history of the Mona Lisa will. If publishers are driven out of business, only heirs and academics are likely to be able to put in the years of research necessary to write a book of history, unless the market comes up with a new funding mechanism.) Most European countries seem skeptical of allowing resale price maintenance for e-books, but “we’ll always have Paris,” van Eijk joked. French law, he explained, not only allows but requires fixed pricing for e-books. Moreover, France insists on extraterritoriality: even non-French booksellers must comply if they want to sell to French customers.
Niva Elkin-Koren, of the University of Haifa, predicted a “world of user-generated content,” where the tasks of editing and manufacturing books will be “unbundled,” and “gatekeeping,” which now occurs when Manhattan editors turn down manuscripts, will take place through online reviews after the fact. She seemed to see the “declining role of publishers,” as she put it, as a liberation, but I’m afraid I found her vision bleak. In the future, will we all be reading the slushpile? Jessica Litman, of the University of Michigan, also thought little of publishers, accusing them of angering libraries and gouging authors. As a bellwether, Litman pointed to the example of a genre author whom she likes who now sells her books online. I found myself wondering if Litman was extrapolating from an experience with academic and textbook publishers, some of whom do bully authors and have resorted to extorting the captive markets of university libraries and text-book-buying students. In my experience, trade publishers go to great pains to keep prices low and authors happy.
In the last panel session, a masterful analysis of the economics of publishing in America and Britain was presented by John Thompson, of the University of Cambridge, author of Merchants of Culture. Thompson began by surveying the forces of change in the last couple of decades. In the 1990s, the rise of bookstore chains killed off independent bookstores. The introduction of computerized stocking systems brought greater control over when and where books appeared in stores. Once upon a time, paperbacks were publishing’s bread and butter, but mass-marketing strategies originally devised for paperbacks were applied to hardcovers, and in time hardcovers became the moneymakers. Literary agents grew more powerful. A handful of corporate owners consolidated control.
Thanks to these changes, said Thompson, today there are large publishers and many tiny ones, but very few that are middling in size. That’s because a midsize publisher misses out on the economies of scale available to a large one, and misses out on the barter-circle of favors that indie presses are willing to exchange with one another. Large publishers are preoccupied with “big books,” which Thompson defined as “hoped-for best-sellers,” because their corporate owners demand annual growth of 8 to 10 percent, even though the overall market for books is stagnant. At a large publisher, the only way to keep your job is to pursue big books, however mathematically doomed the pursuit may be in the larger scheme of things. Big-book status depends, in Thompson’s formulation, not so much on fact as on “a web of collective belief”; big books are identified by the “expressed enthusiasm of trusted others.” Certain people—often, literary agents—become brokers in this economy of belief, enabling them to extract higher prices. Thompson called the result “extreme publishing.” Every year, the reasonable sales predictions aren’t good enough, and editors are forced to try to “close the gap,” that is, to come closer to the sales figures that their corporate overlords are demanding—a task for which only big books are big enough even to be plausible. Meanwhile, as bookstores are shuttered, it’s becoming harder and harder to bring new titles to customers’ attention. In hopes of making a big book, publishers pay to feature their books in store windows, where a new book has about six weeks to prove itself. If it shows signs of doing well, publishers have become adept at “pouring fuel on a flame,” as Thompson put it. But they’ve also become ruthless at killing off the weak. About 30 percent of books are returned from bookstores to publishers, and most are pulped.
In the United States, said Thompson, publishers face agents who are able to demand higher advances for their authors. In the United Kingdom, where the Net Book Agreement, which allowed publishers to set retail prices, collapsed in the 1990s, publishers face powerful retailers like Tesco who not only sell at a discount but demand cuts on wholesale prices.
As for e-books, Thompson stressed that the market is changing fast enough to make a fool out of anyone claiming to know what it will do next. He noted that when e-books were introduced, most analysts expected business titles to be the pioneers, but instead genre fiction led the way. Forty to fifty percent of romances, science fiction novels, and thrillers are now sold in digital form. (I thought I saw a hint of an explanation for the divergence in a talk given by Stuart M. Shieber, a professor of computational linguistics at Harvard. After analyzing the pros and cons of print books and e-books—including such factors as resolution, weight per reading unit, capacity for random access, and pride of ownership—Shieber predicted that when display technology has been perfected, “E-book readers will be preferable to books” but “Books will still be preferable to e-books.” If Shieber is right, then perhaps what differentiates is where a reader’s attachment lies. If your attachment is to the experience of reading rather than to a particular set of titles, you’re more likely to prefer an e-reader. But if your attachment is to particular books, you’ll prefer to read them in print. After all, at the extreme, if all you want to do is re-read a single text, you probably won’t bother with an electronic device.) But even literary fiction is shifting, Thompson noted. Twenty-five percent of the sales of Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom were e-books, and fifty percent of Jeffrey Eugenides’s The Marriage Plot.
Though he stressed the hazards of guessing, Thompson concluded by making a number of short-term predictions. He thought Amazon would continue to grow and bookstore chains to wither. He foresaw more consolidation, as weak publishers fold and impatient corporate owners decide to get out of the publishing business. As bookstores vanish, they will be taking their windows and display tables with them, and it will become harder and harder to introduce new books to readers, a battle that will have to fought online. Thompson expected that different kinds of books will continue to shift from print to digital formats at different speeds. Price deflation for e-books will be perhaps publishers’ greatest challenge, and publishers will very likely be forced to reduce costs in order to remain profitable—shedding staff and limiting themselves even more rigidly to big books than they do now. Nipping at their heels, all the while, will be an army of small presses and start-ups, many of whom will be trying to come up with new kinds of “disintermediation”—new ways to abridge a book’s journey from writer to reader.
What does it all mean? In looking over these notes, I find myself wondering if copyright is meaningful in the digital world without some power to set retail prices. The rigorous application of free-market logic to issues of copyright sounds slightly off-key to me. It is nowhere written that the law has to defer to macroeconomics, which copyright, by its very nature, defies. No market left to its own devices would come up with copyright. The whole point of it is that society has decided that the written word is special, and has recognized that perfect competition in the literary sphere quickly leads to prices so low that no writer can make a living. (An important subsidiary point is that society demands, in exchange for granting this exceptional economic protection, a temporal limit to a copyright’s term, but we’re not litigating that aspect of the case today.) Amazon’s publicists had a point when they lamented that copyright is a monopoly. In the market for a particular work of literature, it is one, a legal one. It is authorization to sell a work of literature at a higher per-unit price than the market would support if everyone were free to print it. Authorization alone would be meaningless, however. The government also has to prevent a publisher’s competitors from selling the same work at a lower price. In her remarks at the conference, Elkin-Koren predicted that as books turn into e-books, they will move from being commodities to being services, and publishing will merge with retailing. “There is no difference between a bookseller, a publisher, and a library,” she said. But if she’s right, then if copyright is to have any force, shouldn’t the power to set a book’s price at its “first sale” be extended to the price of the license sold to the reader-consumer? The extension might be necessary to preserve the spirit of copyright. And given the ease with which digital copies can be made and shared, it might also be necessary to retain beyond the “first sale” of an e-book the copyright controls that are exhausted upon the first sale of a printed book. That may sound inelegant, but there’s no reason to think that the best way for law to foster literature is going to be natural-looking. Copyright never has been natural, and it never will be. The challenge is to find the least amount of legal protection adequate to retaining publishing as a viable business.
The Future of books and copyright
This past weekend, just before the hurricane, I attended In Re Books, a conference about law and the future of the book convened by James Grimmelmann at the New York Law School. Playing the role of Luddite intruder among the futurologists, I gave a talk about the hazard that digitization may pose to research and preservation. Though there were a few librarians, leaders of nonprofits, and even writers present, most of my fellow conference attendees were lawyers who specialize in copyright, and I discovered that copyright lawyers see the world rather differently than do the writer-editor types with whom I usually rub shoulders. They don’t expect publishing as I know it to be around much longer, for one thing. I thought I’d try to write up my impressions of the time I spent in their company. Please keep in mind that I’m not a lawyer myself. I’m just a visitor who went to the fair.
A specter was haunting the conference: the ghost of the settlement that Google Books tried to make with the Authors Guild several years ago. That settlement, slain by Judge Denny Chin in late 2011, had attempted to obtain digital rights to what are known as orphan works, books that are protected by copyright even though the author or publisher who holds the copyright can no longer be found. The settlement had proposed to set up a collective licensing system that would charge for digital access to all books under copyright, parented and ophaned. Proceeds from orphan works, it was suggested, might be shared with findable authors, if no actual rightsholder could be found and if anything was left over after the rights management organization was done paying for itself. The proposal was far from perfect. Why should Google get to sell orphan works and nobody else? Why should the profits from orphan works go to people who didn’t write them? It turns out that the death of the agreement is not much lamented by the copyright lawyers. When Minda Zeitlin, president of the American Society of Journalists and Authors, asked, “Is there anyone better to represent dead and unfindable authors than living and findable ones?” the retort from Pamela Samuelson, a copyright law professor at the University of California at Berkeley, was sharp: “I’m a better representative of an author like me,” Samuelson said, her implication being that an academic author aims in publishing to further knowledge and build a reputation, not make money. Roy Kaufman, who works at the Copyright Clearance Center, a collective licensing agency founded in 1978 in response to the disruptive technology known as the photocopier, was at pains to distinguish his employer’s system from the one advanced by Google Books and the Authors Guild. The Copyright Clearance Center is opt-in and nonexclusive, he assured the audience. His message was studiously non-threatening: mass digitization could involve rightsholders. Maybe it could take the form of collective licenses arranged between social-media networks and publishers. Facebook, for example, could pay the New York Times for articles and photos that its users posted.
Kaufman’s support for collective licensing, however cautious, was atypical. Most at the conference were against it. Samuelson thought it inadvisable in general, as did Matthew Sag, of Loyola University Chicago, who justified his dislike by pointing to the failures and subsequent reboots of a compulsory licensing system recently set up in the United States for the webcasting of music.
What, if anything, will take the ghost’s place? At the conference, a leading contender was the idea that fair use might solve the orphan works problem—an idea recently advanced by Jennifer Urban of the University of California at Berkely. Fair use, as I wrote in a review-essay for The Nation earlier this year, is an exception to copyright written into American law in 1976. It’s because of fair use that a reviewer doesn’t need to ask permission before he quotes from a book, and it’s because of fair use that an Obama campaign commercial can quote a Romney speech, or vice versa, without paying for it. In the last few years, courts have been more and more generous in how they define fair use, perhaps because Congress seems so unlikely to help sort out the tangles in copyright. In a recent case between the Authors Guild and a digital books repository called Hathi Trust, for example, a court found that three of the four things that Hathi wanted to do with digital texts were fair use: data-mining, indexing, and providing access to the blind. America’s 1976 copyright law specifies four factors to consider in determining fair use—the nature and purpose of the new use, the nature and purpose of the original work, the amount taken, and the impact on the original creator’s income—but in the last couple of decades, judges have focused on whether a new use is “transformative” of the old content it borrows from. Whatever purpose Thomas Pynchon had in mind when he wrote Gravity’s Rainbow, for example, he probably didn’t imagine computerized search of his novel along with a myriad of others in order to find patterns of word usage. That’s a completely new use, a transformation of the purpose of his words unlikely to interfere with the money he expected to make from his novel, so the judge in the Hathi Trust case found it fair.
Sag and Samuelson favored Urban’s idea, which was also mentioned by Doron Weber of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, which funds the Digital Public Library of America. Since I hadn’t read Urban’s paper, I asked Sag what kind of transformation lay behind her deployment of fair use. There wasn’t any, he explained, to my surprise, and now that I look at the paper, I see what he means. Urban thinks libraries and universities should be able to provide digital facsimiles for their patrons to read—exactly the same use for which the books were originally published. She also frankly admits to wanting the right to reproduce entire works, not just samples or snippets of them. But she argues that such use would be fair nonetheless, based on the four factors conventional in fair-use analysis. She maintains that libraries and universities are nonprofit institutions, who would be offering access to the texts as a noncommercial service for such public-spirited purposes as research and preservation. (For this part of her argument to hold water, would a university library need to open itself to the public in a general way? Right now the services of a university library, however worthy, are for the most part bestowed only on its own students and faculty, and their character is not purely altruistic.) And she argues that the orphanhood of an orphaned work is more important than previous analysts have seen: “Orphan works,” she writes,
represent a clear market failure: there is no realistic possibility of completing a rights clearance transaction, no matter how high the costs of that transaction, because one party to the transaction is missing.
Therefore market harm, the fourth factor of fair-use analysis, is nugatory, in Urban’s opinion. The trouble with her argument here, I think, is that it’s impossible to know whether a so-called orphan work is really an orphan or merely a work whose parents haven’t shown up yet. If the parents do exist, the market harm to them is real, and it would be as wrong for a court to give the value of their work to Urban’s university library as to give it to Google or a third-party author. Urban seems to be transferring the copyright rather than carving out an exception to it, and I’m afraid that only Congress, in its capacity as the sovereign power of the United States, has the authority to dispose of someone else’s copyright, in an act of eminent domain. Without any claim of a transformation, it seems unlikely to me that Urban will convince a court to define fair use so broadly that it includes reproducing whole works for much the same purpose that they were originally published. But this is just my opinion. The copyright lawyers seem excited by her idea, and as yet no one knows how far it will go. It’s up to the courts. As Jule Sigal, of Microsoft, noted in his presentation, the orphan-works problem has passed through the Age of Legislation (2005-2008) and the Age of Class Action (2008-2011), and we are now living in the Age of Litigation.
The other big new idea at the conference was that the first-sale doctrine might be extended to e-books. That sentence will sound like gibberish to the uninitiated, so let me back up and explain. The first-sale doctrine is a legal concept that limits the control that copyright affords. Specifically, it limits copyright control to the period before an item under copyright is first sold. Once you buy an ink-on-paper book, for example, you’re free to re-sell the book on Ebay at a fraction of the cost. Or give it to your boyfriend. Or take an X-acto blade to it and confuse people by calling the result art. You don’t have the right to sell new copies of the book, but you’re free to do almost anything else you like with the specific copy of the book that you bought. Without the first-sale doctrine, used bookstores would be in constant peril of lawsuits.
Two speakers at the conference told the story of Bobbs-Merrill v. Straus, the 1908 case that established the first-sale doctrine. On the copyright page of the novel The Castaway, the publisher Bobbs-Merrill set the retail price at one dollar and threatened to sue discounters for breach of copyright. Macy’s sold the book for eighty-nine cents anyway, triggering a lawsuit, and the court ruled that copyright afforded Bobbs-Merrill control over the book’s price only up to the moment when Bobbs-Merrill, as a wholesaler, sold copies to Macy’s, which then became free to set whatever retail price it wanted. Ariel Katz, of the University of Toronto, noted that the story is usually told as if the case involved an attempt at what’s known as “vertical” price-fixing—that is, an attempt by a wholesaler to fix the prices charged by independent retailers further down the supply chain. But Katz maintains that it was actually a story of “horizontal” price-fixing—that is, an attempt at collusion in price-fixing by companies that are supposed to be in competition with one another, wholesalers in collusion with wholesalers, and retailers with retailers. The Straus brothers who ran the Macy’s department store were “retail innovators,” Katz explained, who sold a wide variety of goods, including books, at steep discounts, thereby angering publishers and traditional booksellers. The members of the American Publishers Association publicly swore to refuse to supply retailers who discounted the retail price of books, and the American Booksellers Association publicly swore to boycott any publishers who didn’t toe the American Publishers Association’s line. It was the Straus brothers who first went to court, accusing the publishers and booksellers of antitrust violations, but the outcome of this first case was ambiguous: the court ruled that publishers could only set the prices of books that were under copyright. It wasn’t until the 1908 case that the court limited price-setting even of copyrighted books to the period before their first sale.
(As Katz pointed out, it isn’t obvious why publishers and booksellers should have been willing to collude in fixing prices, and he proposed an economic explanation that I wasn’t quite able to follow. He suggested that the price-fixing was an attempt to solve a challenge first discovered by Ronald Coase: if you sell a durable good and you’re a monopolist, you soon find that your monopoly isn’t as profitable to you as you’d like it to be, because you’re in competition with yourself—that is, you’re in competition with all the durable goods you’ve already sold, which suppress demand. The only way to keep prices from falling is to convince consumers that you’ll never let them fall. Katz argues that the limit to booksellers’ shelf space helped publishers make credible their promise never to lower prices, and that in the digital world, where shelf space is unlimited, no similar promise will be as credible. He ran out of time before explaining in detail how this mechanism would work, and as I say, I didn’t quite follow. I also wasn’t quite certain that books qualify as durable goods. Most people, once they’ve read a book, prefer to read a new one instead of re-reading the one they just finished, a fact that suggests that books are more like loaves of bread than refrigerators. But I may be missing something.)
Aaron Perzanowski, of Wayne State University, framed the story of Bobbs-Merrill v. Straus in the context of a common-law tradition of rights exhaustion—the word exhaustion here having the sense of a thing coming to its natural end. In Perzanowski’s opinion, the right to control price is not the only aspect of copyright that expires when an item under copyright is sold. The owner of a work has purchased the use and enjoyment of it, Perzanowski argued, including perhaps the rights to reproduce the work and to make derivative works. Perzanowski made explicit a further leap that remained mostly implicit in Katz’s talk: Shouldn’t the first-sale doctrine apply to e-books, too? As a contractual matter, e-books are rarely sold, in order to prevent exactly this eventuality. In the fine print, it transpires that what distributors purchase from publishers, and what readers purchase from distributors, are mere licenses. But if courts were to recognize readers of e-books as owners, the courts could grant readers the right to re-sell and a limited right to reproduce what they had purchased. Jonathan Band, of Policy Bandwidth, in his assessment of recent legal victories won by university libraries on the strength of fair-use arguments, noted that he saw the first-sale doctrine as likely to be important in future disputes over digital rights. Libraries, he said, felt that they had already purchased the books in their collection and ought to be able to convey them digitally to their patrons.
Extending the first-sale doctrine to e-books might make libraries happy, but it would horrify publishers. Right now, only two of the six largest American publishers allow libraries to lend all of their e-books, and one of those two sells licenses that expire after twenty-six check-outs. Librarians sometimes become quite indignant over the limitations and refusals. “Are publishers ethically justified in not selling to libraries?” one asked at the conference. A recent Berkman Center report, E-Books in Libraries, offered some insight into publishers’ reluctance:
Many publishers believe that the online medium does not offer the same market segmentation between book consumers (i.e., people who purchase books from a retailer) and library patrons (i.e., people who check out books from a public library) that the physical medium affords.
When was the last time you checked out a printed book from the library? My own impression is that gainfully employed adults rather rarely do. (At least for pleasure reading. Research is a different beast.) Maybe they prefer to buy their own books for the sake of convenience, which ready spending money enables them to afford. Or maybe it’s to signal their economic fitness to romantic partners, or to broadcast their social status more generally. But whatever the reason, the fact is that publishers don’t sacrifice many potential sales when they sell printed books to libraries, because library patrons by and large aren’t the sort who purchase copies of books for themselves. The case seems to be different with e-books, though, especially if patrons are able to check them out from home. E-book consumers signal their economic status by reading off of an I-pad XII instead of a Kindle Écru; the particular e-book that they’re reading is invisible to the person on the other side of the subway car, so it might as well be a free one from the library. That means that e-book sales to libraries cannibalize sales to individual consumers. Publishers have tried charging libraries higher prices for e-books. They’ve tried introducing technologically unnecessary “friction,” such as a ban on simultaneous loans of a title, or a requirement that library patrons come in person to the library to load their reading devices. The friction frustrates library patrons and enrages librarians, and even so, it hasn’t been substantial enough to reassure the publishers who are abstaining from the library market altogether. If the future of reading is digital, the market-segmentation problem raises a serious question about the mission of libraries. In his remarks at the conference, the writer James Gleick, a member of the Authors Guild who helped to negotiate its late settlement with Google Books, said that he doubted that every lending library needed to be universal and free, and that he wished the Digital Public Library of America, which is still in its planning stages, were trying to build into its structure a way for borrowers to pay for texts under copyright. The challenge of bringing e-books into public libraries turns out to be inextricable from the larger problem of how authors will be paid in the digital age.
I’ll try to report what the lawyers think of that larger problem in a later post.
UPDATE: Part two here.
Hide and Seek
The English writer Elizabeth Taylor drew on her real-life affair with the painter Ray Russell in her 1951 novel A Game of Hide and Seek, and earlier this year, in the introduction that I wrote to the New York Review Books Classics reprint, I mentioned this long-secret fact lying behind her fiction:
Taylor and Russell exchanged hundreds of letters. . . . She burned all the letters in her possession. “Every single loving word you have written to me is gone,” she wrote to him. “I cannot endure the thought of it. No one has ever written to me like that before, or said such wonderful things to me, & now I have nothing left.” She seems to have asked him to destroy hers as well, but he copied her early letters into a notebook before doing so, modestly changing some of the names as he transcribed. Later, apparently repenting of even this much discretion, he resumed saving the letters she sent. Their survival, and the fact of Taylor’s affair with Russell, was disclosed in Nicola Beauman’s 2009 biography, The Other Elizabeth Taylor.
Evidently Ray Russell saved Elizabeth Taylor’s books as well, because his collection of her works, including several inscribed by her to him, are now for sale from the London booksellers Bertram Rota Ltd. The inscriptions seem quite formal. “Ray from Elizabeth,” most of them read. The fact that Russell kept twenty-four of her books seems more revealing. Beauman wrote in her biography that Russell “never fully accepted that [Taylor] had broken with him.”
Axis of freedom
Over at the Paris Review Daily, I wax cod-philosophical about the freedoms and constraints of book reviewing.
Build More Deliberately
On Monday, 12 March 2012, I was a guest on WNYC’s Leonard Lopate Show, along with the journalist Scott Sherman. We were invited to discuss Scott’s recent article for The Nation about the $350 million renovation that the New York Public Library is contemplating for its landmark building at 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue. (The New York Times has also written about the plan, and the library has released some details on its own website.)
The proposed renovation, known as the Central Library Plan (CLP), is making scholars like me nervous, and to spell out why involves thinking about the library’s mission. Or rather, missions. The New York Public Library isn’t one thing. It’s two: a circulating library system and a research library system. The circulating library is primarily for readers. The flagship is the Mid-Manhattan building on 40th Street and Fifth Avenue. In that building and in eighty-eight other branches, any New York City resident may check out books, movies, and music for enjoyment at home. These books and DVDs aren’t meant to last forever. They’re meant to be enjoyed now. If you bring the latest Franzen novel home from the library and your dog eats it, the library may ask you to pay for a replacement, but the mission of the circulating library system is not thereby impaired.
The research library system, on the other hand, is primarily for writers. Its flagship is the white marble building at 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue—the one with the lions out in front. There are three other locations: the Science, Business, and Industry Library (SIBL) at Madison Avenue and 34th Street; the Schomburg, which is in Harlem; and the Library of the Performing Arts, which is in Lincoln Center. It’s not considered okay if harm comes to the books, manuscripts, and works of art in the research library system. Many are irreplaceable, and the intention is to keep them safe for future generations, as well as make them available for use by the present one. Access is balanced with preservation. There are different ways for a research library to protect its collections. Historically, the New York Public Library has done it with a simple rule: Nothing leaves the building. Nonetheless, anyone who walks in the door is free to read, watch, and listen to all of these works. It doesn’t matter who you are or what your motive is. (As I mention in the radio show, the NYPL has, however, begun to experiment with altering this bargain, in a pilot program that allows a vetted group of researchers to take books home. I signed up myself, but I have strong reservations about it.) The NYPL’s research collection is world-class, containing in its four locations and in an offsite storage facility in Princeton, New Jersey, more than 15 million books. In North America, only the Library of Congress (22 million books) and Harvard’s library system (16 million books) are comparable. Harvard’s library isn’t open to the public, and the Library of Congress is in, well, Washington, D.C. The New York Public Library is in New York —where the writers are. To single out a particular strength, the NYPL’s collection of books from Russia and Eastern Europe is sometimes said to be the greatest on this side of what used to be the Iron Curtain, and given the checkered history of free expression in that part of the world, it may in some cases document the twentieth-century history of those countries better than their own libraries do.
On the third floor of the library’s 42nd Street building, there’s a grand, city-block-length reading room. It sits on top of Carnegie-era shelves that house 3 million books. If the library’s administrators carry out their Central Library Plan, they will remove those shelves and ship the books on them to an offsite storage facility in Princeton, New Jersey. In the books’ place, they will install a new circulating library, full of public computers—a substitute for the Mid-Manhattan branch library across the street. The Mid-Manhattan building would be sold. The space currently occupied by SIBL would also be sold, and SIBL’s books would be consolidated with the research collection in the 42nd Street building.
As a personal matter, I have many reasons to be grateful to the New York Public Library’s research division. I was a fellow at the library’s Cullman Center in 2002 and 2003; for a year I received an office and a stipend, and I experienced the fellowship as a vote of confidence in my writing, which felt to me like a lifesaver. But for several years before, and over the decade since, the library also mattered to me in a very practical way: It made possible the research that is the basis of my career. In writing about everything from abolitionist Thomas Wentworth Higginson to the inconvenient truth about the original Tea Party, I have depended on the library. My review-essays have sometimes been pretty research-intensive, but I haven’t had regular access to a university library, as most scholars do. Thanks to the NYPL, I’ve been able to write my essays anyway. In fact, I’ve come to feel that the NYPL is much better than the library at Columbia, where I earned my doctorate. Most of the books at Columbia circulate, and it often happened during my research there that a teacher or another student had checked out the book I wanted. Or that the book had been lost long ago, and I was chasing a ghost that haunted the library catalog. Books are sometimes stolen from the research collection at the New York Public Library, but by and large, the NYPL has what its catalog says it has, which is quite a bit. In nineteenth-century American history and literature, it’s hard for me to imagine a collection more comprehensive.
So it’s as someone who loves the library that I am concerned about the recent proposals to alter it. Unfortunately, my confidence in the decision-making process of its administrators was shaken by their controversial 2005 decision to sell off Asher Durand’s famous painting Kindred Spirits, and I think the administrators’ new plans ought to be scrutinized carefully.
To put my concerns bluntly: What problem is the Central Library Plan (CLP) meant to solve? It will cost $350 million, it will disrupt the research library during construction, and it will permanently impair the ability of the research library to serve scholars. I’ll explain more about that impairment shortly. But I want to begin by stressing that I simply don’t understand what the CLP is for.
Is it to make the 42nd Street building more democratic? There have been suggestions of that in the administrators’ rhetoric. A research library, however, is as democratic as a circulating library. Technically it may even be a little more democratic. Literally anyone can use the NYPL research libraries; only New York City residents can check books out of the circulating libraries. True, there are fewer writers than readers in the world, so a library that serves writers will never be used by as many people as a library that serves readers. But it’s a mug’s game to pit writing against reading. They’re necessary to each other, in complex ways. The question that the CLP poses about the 42nd Street building isn’t democracy; it’s whether the allocation of space between book storage and visitor space is balanced and is appropriate to the library’s two missions. It seems misguided for NYPL administrators to suggest that one mission should give way to the other.
Is the goal of the CLP to make available more internet access? Publicity materials on the library’s website note that library users have said in surveys that they wish there were more computers. Libraries should offer computer access, but it would be risky to stake too much of the library’s identity on providing a particular technological service. Technologies change, and lately they’ve been changing quickly: witness all the now-little-used Ethernet ports in the tables of the third-floor reading room. What if the mayor’s office were to decide a decade from now to provide city-wide wireless internet access? What if a decade from now, almost everyone has a smartphone and almost no one uses a laptop let alone a desktop computer? Then what would the purpose of the new CLP library be?
Is the goal to bring literacy education to children? To bring them instruction in English as a second language? These goals, too, are mentioned in the publicity materials on the library’s website. But you don’t need a new central library to accomplish either. It would make much more sense (and cost much less) to upgrade the branches of the circulating library, as needed, and conduct education programs there, closer to where people live.
Is the goal to save money? Then why not just renovate the Mid-Manhattan library? That’s not likely to cost $300 million. You could probably knock down the Mid-Manhattan library and build a whole new one in the same place for less than the cost of retrofitting a new facility into the marble landmark on 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue. (For a rough comparison: Wikipedia claims that the 52-story Random House Tower cost $300 million. That was in 2003, but the library doesn’t need 52 stories.) It does seem reasonable to me to close SIBL and return its collections to the 42nd Street building, their original home. Closing SIBL will save the library a fair amount of money, in both the short and long term, and it can be done without altering the structure of the 42nd Street building. Moderation in all things. The shrinking of institutional footprints is not an end in itself.
It’s worth pausing on SIBL as a cautionary tale. It was installed in the old B. Altman department store building in 1996 in the hope that local proprietors of small businesses would be attracted by access to CD-ROMs and online databases. This was a bold guess about the future of information technology, and like most bold guesses about the future, it turned out to be a little off target. Today SIBL isn’t much used as a research library. The lesson, perhaps, is that cultural institutions like the New York Public Library shouldn’t aspire to be bleeding-edge. The marriage of computers and literature is still very much a work in progress. Every year of late has brought sweeping and unforeseen change. (Blogs! Kindle! Twitter! Google Books! The Nook! Amazon is a publisher! Blogs are dead! Google Books is dead! The Ipad! Etc.) Are we sure that researchers of the future won’t much care whether they have access to ink-on-paper books? One of the hottest scholarly fields in recent years has been the history of the book, which requires hands-on access to real physical volumes. What if it turns out that the e-book is a great invention for reading as a consumer, but not much use for reading as a scholar? What if it turns out that it’s simply not possible to apprehend a book in electronic form the way it can be apprehended in print form? I know that whenever I try to imagine reproducing my scholarly methods electronically, I halt at the problem of how to reproduce digitally the phenomenon of having a dozen physical books open to different pages at once on my work table. In the future, will I need to buy a dozen Ipads? Why not wait to reconceive the library until we know a little more about how scholars will use books and e-books in the digital age?
The library’s administrators have suggested that “certain materials [in the offsite storage facility in Princeton] could be requested for online delivery.” Columbia has a scan-and-email service of the sort that they probably imagine, and a few years ago, when I had access as an adjunct to Columbia’s libraries, I used it. It’s great for articles in scholarly journals and individual chapters of books, but the legal rationale depends on not scanning much more than one article or chapter at a time. The Google Books deal is dead, so most books published in the twentieth century—which is to say, most books period—will remain under copyright, and there’s not going to be any legal way for the library to transmit digital versions of entire books unless Congress intervenes. I wouldn’t advise holding your breath for Congress. (As I mentioned in the radio show, it’s also worth bearing in mind that electronic versions of books have no proven archival value. File formats change, and they often can’t be opened on new operating systems. I know I’m not the only person who keeps his old laptops because his new one can’t read the files on the old ones. Even apart from compatibility questions, it’s simply not known how stable electronic data is over the long term. Paper and ink, on the other hand, seem to last indefinitely, as long as they stay dark, dry, and relatively cool.)
If the CLP goes through, scholars will be dependent on the physical delivery of books from Princeton to 42nd Street. How much of an obstacle will this be? Administrators have promised delivery within twenty-four hours. Alas, that’s hard to credit. I’ve looked through my old emails, and in 2003, when the offsite storage facility was young, I did indeed get offsite materials the day after requesting them. In 2006, the emails confirming my requests grew a little more cautious, and promised only that the materials “should” be available for use within twenty-four hours. By 2010, the emails said that my materials “should” be available for use within forty-eight hours, and added that “Any requests submitted on Friday, Saturday and Sunday should arrive by the following Tuesday.” But by this time I, like most researchers at the NYPL, had learned to allow three to five days for delivery of offsite materials, and to let myself be pleasantly surprised if they came sooner. So I expect that if the CLP does go through, the library will be pretty good about twenty-four-hour delivery—for a year or two.
If you know in advance which books you’re going to need, and if you’re starting far ahead of your deadline, a three- to five-day delay isn’t lethal. But it will put a crimp in your style. It may not be until you get one of those offsite books and start leafing through it that you’ll realize that it’s another offsite book altogether that you really need—and now you’ll have to wait three to five more days to get it. If you’re on a tight deadline, though, a delay renders the library useless. A book you can’t get to in time might as well not exist.
As you may have gathered, I already find the library’s use of offsite storage fairly annoying. How much worse could it get? The library’s website claims that the 42nd Street building now holds 5 million research collection volumes. If the CLP were put into effect, only 1.5 million would remain at 42nd Street and there would be 6 million in offsite storage. That means there must be about 7.5 million books total, and about 2.5 million books in offsite storage now. So the ratio of present books to absent ones today is 5 : 2.5, or 2 : 1. After the CLP, it would be 1.5 : 6, or 1 : 4. To put those numbers another way, if you want to see a book in the NYPL’s 42nd Street research collection now, your odds that it’s on site are about 67 percent. After the CLP, your odds would drop to 25 percent. Actually, the odds would probably be even worse, because the research volumes currently at 42nd would be competing for space with those moved in from SIBL.
The greater number of delays will likely become so irritating that researchers who can go elsewhere will. If the research library becomes unusable, the next step will be to phase out its mission. Does this prediction sound alarmist? Unfortunately, in the past decade, we’ve seen that cultural institutions rarely have the good fortune to die suddenly, at the top of their form. Usually they go a little cruddy first, as their stressed-out custodians lose track of priorities. A newspaper sheds reporters, stops printing book reviews, forces its more-experienced editors into early retirement, and by the time it actually goes bankrupt and closes, few are sorry to see it go.
There are other signs that the NYPL is shifting away from its research mission. Many senior staff have been let go, a loss of human capital that has been largely invisible, except for the 2008 shuttering of the library’s Slavic and Baltic Division. I’ve translated Czech literature and written about it. The Nation will print next month an article of mine about Václav Havel that draws in part on notes I took while reading in the Slavic and Baltic Division years ago, before it closed. During my fellowship year, I gave the division a set of Czech literary journals that I thought they would be better custodians of than I could be. With the closing of the division there seems to have come a loss of curatorial expertise. In preparation for the Leonard Lopate show, I tried a simple test: I looked up the recent winners of three Czech literary prizes: the Jiří Orten Prize, the Jaroslav Seifert Prize, and the Magnesia Litera Prize for book of the year. It turns out that the New York Public Library has no copies of the books that won these prizes in the past three years. And as it happens, the book that won the Jaroslav Seifert prize four years ago was the eighth and final volume of Václav Havel’s collected writings. The NYPL doesn’t have that book, either—an embarrassing lacuna not only on account of Havel’s importance as a politician and writer but also because Havel gave a signed copy of the first seven volumes to the library in person in 2003. (I was there. I was too starstruck to speak, but I tagged along and rode in the elevator with him and his security guards.)
An example of an omission in a rather different field: I’ve been revising a novel, and a friendly reader recently wondered about a piece of slang that one of my characters uses. I heard it twenty years ago and I could swear I’ve remembered the word and its meaning correctly, but the internet isn’t backing me up. Fortuitously, a few weeks ago the New York Review of Books described Green’s Dictionary of Slang, three volumes compiled on the historical principles of the OED, as “truly great.” I’d like to look my word up in it. Unfortunately, Green’s Dictionary costs about $600, and although Chambers published the book in 2010 and Oxford in 2011, the New York Public Library doesn’t own a copy.
Should the library continue to collect foreign literature, just because it used to? Should it continue to serve scholars and writers, when most public libraries limit themselves to lending out books for casual enjoyment? These are fair questions, if sad ones. When, in advance of the radio show, I canvassed a dozen colleagues about the CLP, a few were angry, but others expressed a mix of regret and resignation. Though they appreciated a proposal in the CLP of more desk space for writers, they saw that the CLP would make their lives harder overall. But they wondered if maybe it was fitting for them to give way. Maybe in the modern world, with its shrinking affordances, the convenience of scholars is simply fated to take a back seat to . . .
I might be able to share in this resignation if I understood exactly what we were being asked to take a back seat to. Library officials claim that fewer people are using the physical books, though it’s not clear to me that they were able to track such numbers until the past year or so, when they began scanning users’ library cards and books’ bar codes. (Before that, the library paged books with slips of paper and pneumatic tubes.) It may be that usage by dedicated scholars was never much higher than it is now. In the age of Wikipedia, the library probably no longer sees many high school students writing term papers, and in the age of the NYTimes.com website, far fewer need to trudge to the microfilm room. But the library’s core collection remains as indispensable to scholars as ever, and the ideal of the library—the belief that anyone should be able to walk in off the street and find out as much about a topic as has ever been published—is not susceptible to “metrics.” Still, maybe it’s the case that because writers migrated into universities over the past half-century, there are relatively few writers today without a university library. Maybe there’s less need for a public research library than there once was, even in the intellectual capital of America. If so, it’s still worth stopping and thinking about what’s happening. The New York Public Library is a scholarly resource of national, if not international, significance. If it is abandoning its research mission, the larger community of writers and scholars should be alerted. Should the research collection and its buildings be given to the federal government, and operated as a second campus of the Library of Congress? If the library isn’t abandoning that mission, it needs to renew its dedication to it. Instead of a grand building project, it needs to return its focus, and its money, to the hiring of staff with expertise as librarians, curators, and scholars, and to the collection of books, manuscripts, and works of art.
Postscript. On Monday afternoon the library responded to the treachery of my appearance on the Leonard Lopate Show by inviting me to join an advisory panel. So there’s reason to think an earnest debate on these issues may take place.
Penguin will publish my novel in 2013
I’m very happy to announce that Penguin will be publishing my novel Necessary Errors as a paperback original in 2013. My editor will be Allison Lorentzen; the deal was negotiated by Sarah Chalfant of the Wylie Agency.
The title comes from a phrase in an Auden poem. I haven’t yet quite risen to the challenge of saying what the novel is about; when asked, I murmur, “Youth,” and gesture vaguely and wistfully upward. But it’s probably too soon to say more to the world at large anyway. More news in a year or so!
I review a book without meaning to
I'm tempted to do something I don't usually do: write critically of a book that I have no intention of finishing. The book in question bothered me. I've been tussling with my botheration, trying to figure out what exactly I disliked, and I wonder if it will clarify my objections if I try to put them into words. Since it doesn't seem quite fair to the book to judge it without finishing it, I'm not going to name it or its author. This disguise is not meant to be impenetrable. Please understand the anonymity as a polite veil, not at all hard for an internet user of average resourcefulness to tear away.
As a reviewer, I'm sent a fair number of books by publishers, and I don't remember whether I happen to have requested this one, though I suspect I didn't. It arrived while I was suffering from a mild fever, a condition that's relevant because I won't be able to get to the bottom of my final dislike of the book unless I start with its initial appeal, which was considerable. I was feeling muzzy, bored, and a little vulnerable. My attention had been tenderized by a sick-day's indulgence in Twitter. The book in question is a novel, written in the first person. In the first few pages, in simple and declarative sentences, modestly spiced with British slang, the heroine-narrator lets herself be seduced into a risky sexual encounter. She enjoys herself intensely—the experience seems to fracture an idea of herself that she has—but she doesn't seem to have done this kind of thing before, and it isn't at all clear that she's going to be all right.
I kept reading, conscious that the plain grammar (subject-verb-object) and the explicit sex suited the debilitated state of my mind. The sentences practically read themselves. Sometimes, as a writer, one is aware that one also has the specious motive of doing something so as to be able to write about it later, and my conscious rationalization for continuing the novel included the somewhat recursive notion that if I did continue to read, I might be able to mine the experience for an essay about the kind of book that appealed to people who were spending too much time on Twitter and whose brains were befogged by toxins, viral or otherwise—about the limitations that the novel as a genre might have to accept in order to seize and hold attention in the current environment.
Less consciously, I had perhaps identified with the heroine, as someone who, like myself in an earlier era of my life, was putting herself in danger through a sexual responsiveness that she didn't understand.
My resistance to the text first became conscious to me in questions of style. Though technically written in the past tense, the short, plain sentences and their narrow time-focus gave the impression of a story unrolling in the present tense only. The heroine never thought about her past, though visits with a grandmother and with parents suggested that she did have one. She never reflected on how she had come to have the career that she did, or what had drawn her to her best friend, let alone on how she had become so cut off from her inner life that she could only return to it through episodes of violent, near-anonymous sex. This limitation in the telling of the story seemed one, however, with the urgency of the story's appeal. The narrator was Everywoman; the reader was not put at a distance by any details of her past or by any elements of her personality that the reader might not happen to share. On the contrary, the reader was constantly being invited to join in a fantasy: What if I were to have an irresponsible fling? What if I were to antagonize my friends? What if I were to mess up my safe but boring job? There was no awareness of anything in the heroine's life or mind that might hold her back. She was completely free. Or, to look at another way, her vanity and neediness were uncompromised by any consideration of other people as beings just as real as she was. The book began to remind me of Jay McInerny's Bright Lights, Big City, which I read twenty years ago when I was under the impression that I ought to keep up with best-sellers; the transgression began to seem monotonous in a similar way.
Because of the narrow focus—limited to the narrative's present, and to the perceptions of a narrator not motivated to understand anyone around her—a number of scenes had the flat feeling-tone of a certain kind of comedy routine, which depends for its success on the audience's collusion in a sadistic ridicule or dismissal of embarrassing feelings. Some of these scenes "worked" as jokes, but on second thought, seemed unlikely to be able to "work" in the real world. In one such scene, the heroine half-jestingly hits some children that she has been asked to take care of, and the children respond by precociously and coldly turning against her and voicing their hatred of her. I found myself thinking, well, in fact it is kind of awful of the heroine to have hit the children, but I doubt that real children would be able to find on such short notice sufficient insight and sufficient confidence to punish a faulty caregiver. In another scene, the heroine undresses while drunk for a man who is disgusted by her drunkenness, and I found myself thinking that if this character was charming enough to hold my interest as a reader, she probably wouldn't be the sort who, even drunk, would so badly misjudge the responsiveness of a potential suitor. In real life, she would have noticed his recoil, even through the haze of alcohol, before going quite so far.
I stopped reading when I found myself resorting to diagnosis of the characters. The heroine becomes obsessed with the man she has the sexual encounter with, despite his commandeering, abusive manner, or maybe because of it. He is portrayed as someone at ease with himself—at ease with his sadism and manipulation. Oh, I thought, a sociopath, charming and dangerous. And the heroine's focus on connection with him as the only source of meaning in her life: Oh, I thought, she's a borderline personality, who disintegrates unless she maintains contact yet needs the drama of always falling out of contact. It occurred to me that in real life the story of these two people would be so exhausting to hear about that it would be hard to stay focused, while listening, on how sad it was. In real life, it would end badly, unless disrupted by care and insight. It would probably end badly even if it were disrupted by care and insight. One way for it to end would be by his killing her. I thought of a book with a similar setup (whose plot and ending I will implicitly be giving away, in order to make my analogy, so look away if you need to), Muriel Spark's The Driver's Seat, though Spark's heroine understands herself in a way that this novel's heroine does not seem to. Though I admire Spark and would be happy to re-read her Girls of Slender Means or Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, I didn't enjoy The Driver's Seat and have no intention of ever re-reading it. Once I made the comparison, I couldn't bear to keep reading the novel at hand—the thought of having to sit through the tedium of a borderline's relationship with a sociopath, only to be punished for my patience with an unhappy ending, was too much.
Does he kill her? I flipped to the end. (Spoiler ahead, obviously; if you think you might track down this book and read it despite me, stop reading now.) It turns out that the author—in a reversal of expectations that to my eye again functions better as a joke than as a plausible rendering of human experience—gives her heroine the opportunity and the strength of purpose to kill her beloved torturer. I don't think this is really a happier ending than it would be if he killed her; it certainly wasn't an ending that I wanted to spend any amount of time or effort reaching, once I knew it. What keeps Spark's Driver's Seat interesting (though it remains unpleasant) is that the borderline personality in that novel fails to find the sociopath she's looking for and has to make do with another personality type altogether, by blackmailing him. There's no such complexity of motive and outcome in the new novel. I don't think the unexpected reversal would have any chance of convincing a reader if it weren't for the stylistic constraints on its telling, which make it harder to see how unlikely it is—if it weren't for the impairments that also function as appetite stimulants.
Admittedly, I broke the rules of the reader-writer contract. It's possible that if I read every word of the novel in sequence, I would find the reversal of roles at the end psychologically plausible. I doubt it, though. I suspect that if such "funny," impoverished consciousness—the final triumph of "showing" over "telling," in the specious language of writing instruction—is the only way to hold attention in a splintered world, the novel is in trouble. If the novel must always be recapturing the reader's attention, by prurient means, the novel is in the plight of a needy borderline, doomed to tedious pursuit of the cruel, elusive reader, who alternates between taking his pleasure from the book and dropping it for more compelling pleasures elsewhere. My own reading pattern here—beginning to read almost in scorn for the book, finding itches scratched by it almost despite myself, ultimately dismissing and abandoning the book—is weirdly complicit. I've even kept my encounter with the book, like the heroine's with her sociopath lover, anonymous, as if my meeting with this book were somehow disreputable for both of us. I must have fallen more under its spell than I realized. For the sake of disenchantment, then, maybe I should reveal the name of the book after all: True Things About Me, by Deborah Kay Davies. It comes out next week in paperback from Faber & Faber.
Packing my library
Peter and I have moved! My Earthlink email address is kaput, though my Harvard forwarding email address (the one on my About page) remains intact. Here it is again, should anyone need it:
If anyone has a wish to snail-mail me something, please get in touch by email and I’ll let you know the new address.
Apologies for the blog silence. I have discovered that the reason that there are so many essays about unpacking one’s library and so few about packing it is that the latter process more or less does to you what Dave does to HAL at the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey, and it begins to seem prudent, with such a diminished capacity, to remain silent. Today, on day five of a flu of some kind, I seem to have lost my corporeal voice as well, so the silence apparently is to continue. We love our new apartment, thanks for asking, except for the bathtub drain that had to be unclogged by professional “snake,” the two successive leaks under the kitchen sink, the busted lock on the front door, and the fiendishly permanent child guards on the windows, which required five trips to the hardware store in order to collect all the equipment necessary for their uninstallation. (Babies apparently wish to hurl themselves out of apartment windows with all the ingenuity and resourcefulness of inmates at a Supermax prison, and must be correspondingly restrained.) Air conditioner brackets were my Waterloo.
The last count that I made of our book boxes before moving was 146, and we packed for another full day after that, so I think we ended up moving about 200 boxes of books. (We were able to stack them in an empty apartment on the floor below us, thus the weird orderly accumulation of volume in the photo above.) Furious and hasty has been the deaccessioning, but we still haven’t found enough bookshelf space in the new apartment to fit what remains. Some day soon I plan to return to being a writer, instead of just a subpar handyman and occasional haunter of Twitter, but that day is not yet, alas. There are no plans to acquire an e-reading device. Where would it go?
