Lee Smith on the Changes at the Raleigh News and Observer

The National Book Critics Circle has launched a Campaign to Save Book Reviewing. This post is part of the campaign's blog series, which features posts by concerned writers, op-eds, Q and As, and tips about how you can get involved to make sure those same owners and editors know that book sections and book culture matter. Today novelist Lee Smith writes about the changes in the literary life of Raleigh.

Last Sunday, May 6, the Raleigh News and Observer contained our excellent book review editor Peder Zane’s goodbye column, “Back to the Mainland,” in which he likened the book pages to “an island off the coast of the News and Observer. While the rest of the paper reports the news of the day, we carry news of the spirit,” he wrote, using one of my favorite phrases.
In fact, I once named a book “News of the Spirit,” a phrase George Garrett had employed in critiquing a somewhat pedestrian and obviously commercial short story in a long-ago creative writing class. “It’s very well done,” he said gently, “but I’m not reading any news of the spirit here….”

No literature, that’s what he meant. No serious discourse upon art, philosophy, history, religion, culture, morality, beliefs and ideas; no insight into how it is and what it means to be human in this world.

No news of the spirit, in other words. And we are not going to get much news of the spirit in the future pages of the News and Observer, either---not to mention the Atlanta Constitution and all the other newspapers that are “re-organizing” their book pages out of existence. Many smaller papers have already---quietly---stopped their own local books coverage, now relying on chain and syndicated columns and reviews.

But literature is relentlessly local, of course---whether the locale is Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha or Eudora Welty’s Morgana or Wendell Berry’s Port William. Writers are local, too. In the Raleigh/Durham/Chapel Hill area where I live, you can’t throw a rock without hitting a writer. If local books coverage stops, then the local writing community---with its corollary culture of literacy work, readings, school visits, workshops, classes, and festivals of all kinds--- will have no voice, no forum, no billboard. Our cultural literacy will decline immeasurably.

Peder Zane wrote, “When newspapers diminish books, they diminish themselves.” They also diminish the readers, who are being dumbed down from the top by corporate consensus. Zane’s new job as “ideas writer” cannot possibly come anywhere near replacing all the ideas contained in all the books reviewed in depth and substance on a ny Sunday in his former pages. I’m going to miss him. We are all going to miss him, as we are all going to miss Teresa Weaver. But I have a cynical hunch that no matter how vocal our large literary community is about it, it just won’t matter. It’s all about money, and it’s a done deal. Atlanta has called itself (famously) “The city too busy to hate.” Now it’s the city too busy to read. These big chains don’t care. Books coverage doesn’t bring in any money; and newspapers are all about money now, threatened as they are by the uncertain future of print journalism as a whole.

And on a very personal note…..what does this change mean to a novelist with a new book just out? I found out with my recent novel “On Agate Hill,” published last fall. It was getting pretty good reviews most places-----though fewer reviews, I felt, than with previous books. Then I got one really unfavorable review by an influential critic in a major city----which was reprinted in about 20 other newspapers that had cut back on their own local coverage and were using syndicated book reviews. I was talking to my husband about “all those bad reviews” the book got---this is my own negative sense of the experience, my feeling about it-----and he said, “Wait a minute! It got ONE bad review, carried in 20 papers.” I was stunned to realize that this was true. But as newspapers decrease their own reviews, this scenario will happen more and more often to all of us, on a larger and larger scale. (I imagine ONE reviewer, finally, who will decide everything……)

Another impression: I would take issue with the notion that blogs will somehow replace newspaper book reviews. During a recent visit with a local book club, a group of 16 well-read, highly intelligent women, I asked how many of them had recently read a book review on a blog. The answer was, nobody! Then I asked if any of them had EVER gone to a blog to read book reviews. Again, nobody. The average reader---the average person---just doesn’t do this yet. Maybe we read reviews on Amazon, but that’s it. Readers read book reviews because they happen upon them in the newspaper.--Lee Smith