Juliet Lapidos | The Atlantic

There Is a Culture Industry That Gives Its Top Prizes to Women

2020-01-14T06:40:00-05:00

Yesterday, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences produced yet another all-male slate for the Best Director category of the Oscars—and provoked yet another round of outrage that America’s culture industry is incapable of recognizing the achievements of women. But there is, in fact, a major creative industry in which women are routinely awarded the top honors. It's called publishing.

The big literary awards this year have been positively dominated by female writers and—remarkably—this is considered totally unremarkable. This is the good-news story contradicting persistent gender inequities in, it often seems, every other field.

Two days before the Oscar nominations were made public, the National Book Critics Circle announced the finalists for its 2019 prizes. Four out of five nominees for Autobiography are women, as are two out of five for Biography, three out of five for Criticism, three out of five for Fiction, two out of five for Nonfiction, and two out of five for Poetry. Both winners of the 2019 Booker Prize were women, as were the winners of the National Book Awards for Fiction and Nonfiction. A woman won the 2019 Pulitzer for General Nonfiction, and while the Fiction prize went to a man, a woman was among the two finalists. (The 2019 Pulitzers were awarded for work published in 2018.) Not much attention was paid to this pattern, probably because women's names have been filling the literary award slates for the better part of this century.

[Read: The men of #MeToo go back to work]

It's not just the award-givers who recognize female talent. Readers do, too. Of the 10 best-selling books of the past decade, eight were written by women, including three by one woman in particular: E. L. James. (Incidentally, three of the best-selling titles have the word girl in them.)

The dominance of women in the book trade is most apparent in fiction. In New York magazine, Hillary Kelly argued recently that female novelists replaced white male authors in the 2010s, observing, “Over the past ten years, it was women who were celebrated for experimenting, women whose work redefined genres.” This phenomenon extends beyond, or below, the elite ranks as well. Flip through a publisher’s catalog or walk through the new-releases section of a bookstore: You’ll notice novel after novel written by women, with the men sneaking in like time travelers from the more masculine 20th century. I published a (not-celebrated) novel last year and never had the experience—so common in the sciences, in government, in Hollywood—of being the only woman on a panel. In fact, I participated in two or three in which the men took on the role of token and were expected to speak for a whole gender’s point of view.

It wasn’t always thus—obviously. Not long ago, it seemed the most famous up-and-coming novelists were all men named Jonathan (Franzen, Safran Foer, Lethem). And fiction, let alone book writing generally, is hardly an all-girls club; the most promising novelist in America is probably a man named Ben (Lerner). This feminizing trend, moreover, would have to continue for roughly 2,000 years to balance out the canon.

Still, the view from New York is markedly different than the view from Hollywood—with New York here being a metonym for the publishing industry, since, oddly, there is no metonym for the publishing industry.

The history of women’s rising literary success has yet to be written, but I suspect it’s an organic consequence of the long-standing fact that women read more than men, and more novels in particular. You have to grow up reading to want to grow up to write. The room-of-one’s-own problem once prevented most bookish girls from becoming authors. We’re only now seeing what happens when that constraint is lifted. Apparently when women have time to write, they find a ready audience.

[Read: How 'Fifty Shades of Grey' dominated publishing]

Or maybe the real answer is more depressing: Women are succeeding because men are no longer competing. They’re abandoning the field of literature as its commercial prospects plummet. Women read more than men—but Americans in general read very little. They watch TV instead. So writing-inclined men are following eyeballs and money to Hollywood. Michael Chabon used to be considered a great American novelist. Now he’s the showrunner for Star Trek: Picard.

Where all this leaves women filmmakers, I can’t say. But I suppose they can hope that Hollywood will eventually solve its problem by doing once more what it’s done so often before: Adapt a literary success for the screen.

The Day I Learned I Was American

2019-07-23T06:00:00-04:00

When I was about 5 years old, I learned I was American. I was sitting at a Japanese restaurant a few blocks from my parents’ apartment in Manhattan. I remember the exact moment, though I can’t remember what led to it. Maybe I’d parroted some comment about what Americans are like that I’d heard one of my immigrant family members make, and my mother felt the need to set the record straight. I’m not sure. But I remember that my mother got a funny look on her face and said, in French, “You know, you’re American, too.”

On the walk home, I cried. Not tears of joy. I wondered if this could really be true, that I was American, and I was told there was no doubt about it, since I was born in New York.

Up to that point, I believe I thought I was French, although I’m not positive. My family is not exactly French. Like many Jews, we’re from many places, some friendly to the United States, some not; some the current president would probably consider “shithole countries” and some he seems to admire. We had lived for centuries, or resided for a few years, in France, Morocco, Iran, Turkey, Latvia, and Poland. But we spoke French at home because that was my parents’ common language, so probably I thought I was French. As best as I can piece together, I felt devastated to learn I was American, because I associated America with things my parents didn’t like: Ronald Reagan, for instance, who was then president, and Wonder Bread. To be American seemed embarrassing.

[Ibram X. Kendi: Am I an American?]

I was a child; I was not an independent thinker. I’m certain no one had ever told me, directly, that Americanness was embarrassing, but I must have received that impression from somewhere. Nor was I particularly discerning, because I hadn’t absorbed the complexity of my family’s feelings about their adopted home.

My mother, father, aunt, and uncle came here by choice, in pursuit of what is generally called “opportunity.” For various reasons, their birth countries were not viable options. And they felt that in other nations, they would stick out as immigrants, never really feel “of” the place, whereas in the United States they could blend in, if they so desired. Many times, I heard some version of the following: “In France (or Spain, or England), we would never have been French (or Spanish, or English); but we came to America, where we can be American.”

Often, my relatives were asked where they were from originally, but not with malice; people were curious, and in New York, at any rate, their stories were no big deal. Virtually everyone was from somewhere else originally, and lots of people were from somewhere else recently. This meant that New Yorkers had a lot of culinary options. In a five-block radius of the building where I grew up, there was the Japanese restaurant where I learned I was American, a Turkish restaurant, a Korean corner store, a few Chinese restaurants, a few Italian places, and an Afghan restaurant. It was the United Nations in food form.

Foreign languages and customs were about as common as English and domestic customs. I may be the rare person to have been told I was American in French at a Japanese restaurant, but conversations in foreign languages were common enough where I lived that no one had turned around to check us out.

My family chose America, and was happy to have chosen America—but my parents’ embrace of their adopted home was neither complete nor blind. Both were able to start businesses here and go about their lives, raising their children as they saw fit, without interference. They liked that. But my mother in particular didn’t like Reagan, and she evidently communicated this to me. She also didn’t like that, in a country as rich as the United States, there were so many homeless people on the streets and desperate people in emergency rooms. She communicated this to me, too, and long after I first learned I was American, I continued to feel a little iffy about the whole thing. My education reinforced that iffiness; I had a socialist history teacher from Ireland who’d been welcomed in New York but wanted his students to know that New York, and America as a whole, had hardly welcomed everyone. The very people who had not come here by choice, who had been forced to come here, were—generally speaking—the least welcome.

[Adam Serwer: What Americans do now will define us forever]

So I wanted to have it both ways. I still do. I want to be able to say, “I’m as American as the next guy, even if the next guy’s ancestors came over on the Mayflower.” But I also want to be able to say, “Don’t blame me; blame the next guy, whose ancestors came over on the Mayflower. We just got here.” I often feel compelled to note that I am, specifically, a first-generation American. That seems like a good way of conveying Yes, I’m American, but also only somewhat American. Technically, there was never any doubt about my Americanness. Emotionally, there was and there is.

When my relatives said that we came to America because in America we could be American, the could was key. We could be American, but we also could be that and something else—newcomers, with a sense of how things were done in other places, including things that were done worse, and things that were done better.

I’m reflecting on this now because, in this political moment, it occurs to me that my ability to only tentatively embrace America is a privilege that makes America great. More than that, it’s what makes America America. This is a country where immigrants can come and decide precisely how much they want to be American, and how much they’d like to retain of the “places from which they came.” I suppose that’s another way of saying: This is a country where immigrants can come and decide what it is to be American, for themselves.

As far as I’m concerned, there is no such thing as the quintessential American, but there is a quintessence of American identity: habitually asking oneself what this country is all about, and answering that question differently at different times. The United States offers immigrants the freedom of self-definition, which is not a small thing.

My family and I could code-switch identities the way some people switch accents; sometimes we were immigrants, sometimes we were hyphenated Americans, sometimes we were Americans, full stop. We were allowed that latitude by the society we lived in. We could love or leave these different American identities, secure in the feeling that there was no need to love or leave America itself. We could love certain things about America, hate certain things, feel embarrassed by certain other things—and we could still call it home.

A Brief Taxonomy of Fictional Academics

2019-01-29T07:00:00-05:00

Readers of detective fiction look forward to a big reveal: Whodunit? Readers of campus fiction hold out for a quieter pleasure. If a character is an academic, at some point the author will divulge the topic of the character’s book or dissertation. Generally speaking, writers don’t let this opportunity go to waste. You know how dogs look like their owners? The bouncy, athletic guy matches his golden retriever, and the tall, skinny lady with a long nose, her greyhound? Likewise, fictional academics resemble their work.

Perhaps because creative writers have reductive opinions of their scholarly counterparts, though, the question What breed is this academic? tends to yield one of only two answers. Many works in progress expose that the academic is a Tesman or a Lovborg.

Those labels are a reference to Henrik Ibsen’s realist masterpiece, Hedda Gabler, the story of a bored and jealous newlywed who destroys everything she touches (my subjective interpretation). The play contains two topic-reveal moments, with the second giving a whole new meaning to the first. Hedda’s husband, the aspiring professor George Tesman, explains that his book “will deal with the domestic industries of Brabant during the Middle Ages.” His aunt exclaims, “Fancy—to be able to write on such a subject as that!” A few scenes later, Eilert Lovborg, Hedda’s former lover and Tesman’s rival-in-scholarship, says that his book “falls into two sections. The first deals with the civilizing forces of the future. And here is the second … forecasting the probable line of development.” Tesman exclaims, “How odd now! I should never have thought of writing anything of that sort.”

No, he wouldn’t have. A book on at-home labor in one region in one time period, versus a book on the future of civilization: Ibsen’s not generally thought of as a humorist, but that contrast is as funny as it is obvious. Knowing nothing else about these characters, a reasonably astute reader would surmise, accurately, that Tesman is dull and reliable, Lovborg brilliant and extravagant.

As often as not, authors play the topic-reveal for laughs. Of course that’s how Kingsley Amis approaches the moment in Lucky Jim, the tale of a two-bit lecturer at a middling British university, because he plays just about everything in that novel for laughs. When a colleague asks Jim Dixon the title of his article, the narrator goes off: “It was a perfect title, in that it crystallized the article’s niggling mindlessness, its funereal parade of yawn-enforcing facts, the pseudo-light it threw upon non-problems … The Economic Influence of the Developments in Shipbuilding Techniques, 1450 to 1485.”

Was Amis thinking of Tesman when he came up with that? I have to think he was. Such specificity, such drudgery, such a waste of time. Granted, Dixon, who has a flair for the romantic, isn’t nearly as yawn-enforcing as his topic. In this case the dissertation doesn’t reflect the character so much as his dim view of his chosen profession; Dixon believes that the ivory tower rewards Tesmans, so he has strategically chosen a Tesmanian topic. Yet Dixon and Tesman do have this in common: a total inability to inject the spark of life into their work.

The campus novel furthest from Lucky Jim in sensibility is probably Stoner, by John Williams, a depressing cult classic about a man born into a Missouri farming family who develops an abiding passion for literature. William Stoner’s dissertation, which he eventually reworks into a book, is not obviously woeful: “The Influence of the Classical Tradition Upon the Medieval Lyric.” Stoner’s particular sphere of interest, however, is as death-infused as the novel he animates. “He spent much of the summer rereading the classical and medieval Latin poets,” the narrator says, “and especially their poems upon death. He wondered again at the easy, graceful manner in which the Roman lyricists accepted the fact of death … and he marveled at the bitterness, the terror, the barely concealed hatred he found in some of the later Christian poets of the Latin tradition when they looked to that death which promised, however vaguely, a rich and ecstatic eternity of life, as if that death and promise were a mockery that soured the days of their living.”

At the end of the novel and of his days, Stoner reaches for his book, the great production of his intellectual life, which he must now leave behind. Although, like the classical and medieval Latin poets, Stoner accepts his death, readers will find it hard to come away with anything other than bitterness and a feeling of mockery when the narrator notes that “the book was forgotten and that it served no use.” In Stoner’s final line, the book falls “into the silence of the room,” like its author into the silence of the universe.

A small, forgettable book by a small, forgettable man. Definitely on the Tesman side of the Lovborg-Tesman spectrum.

Grandiose Lovborgs crop up fairly often, too. The title character of Saul Bellow’s Herzog is an intellectual historian and the author of the book Romanticism and Christianity. Oh, is that all? In Changing Places, by David Lodge, Morris Zapp embarks “with great enthusiasm on an ambitious critical project: a series of commentaries on Jane Austen which would work through the whole canon, one novel at a time, saying absolutely everything that could possibly be said about them.” How greedy. If a sure sign of a Lovborgian personality exists, it’s “absolutely everything.”

Perhaps the greatest Lovborg of them all is Mary Shelley’s Victor Frankenstein. Although Frankenstein hardly qualifies as an academic novel, the man who propels the narrative is certainly a scholar—a scholar-scientist, to be precise, who develops a technique to impart life to nonliving matter. He succeeds, as everyone knows, but his creation is monstrous, as everyone also knows. It annoys purists to no end when readers refer to the creature as Frankenstein. (That’s not his name; he doesn’t have one.) To me, though, the error serves as a convenient reminder that fictional scholars have a God-to-Adam—or owner-to-dog—relationship with their work. Lovborgs choose Lovborgian topics, and Tesmans choose Tesmanian topics.

I wrote a novel set on a college campus and, as I revised this piece, I finally bothered to ask myself: Is my protagonist, Anna Brisker, a Tesman or a Lovborg? My first thought was that Anna fits into neither category; I’m obviously far too original for typecasting, I said to myself. But no, I must admit that I fell into the binary trap. Anna’s researching an intellectual history of inspiration—roughly, other people’s ideas about how words get on the page—which she can’t finish, because she isn’t disciplined enough to ground her airy notions in a specific case study. She’s a Lovborg, that is to say, who’s fallen behind because she lacks Tesmanian focus.

The Key to Nell Zink's Subversive Satire

2016-10-07T10:29:00-04:00

Many writers who are said to “come out of nowhere” are just young—what makes their fame surprising is their youth. The novelist Nell Zink’s route to success has been genuinely unusual. Until a small publisher released The Wallcreeper in 2014, she was a complete unknown, a bricklayer turned secretary turned translator from Virginia who moved to Bad Belzig and wrote fiction in private. Zink’s closest brush with the literary world had been exchanging letters (about birding) with Jonathan Franzen, who encouraged her to get serious about her writing. In short order, she has developed a reputation as an idiosyncratic talent, had her work long-listed for the National Book Award, and been profiled in national magazines.

Zink, 52, has now published her third novel, Nicotine, which is a disappointment compared with its two wily, almost unclassifiable predecessors. About halfway through, the protagonist says of her mother, “I don’t know what she’s going to get up to next, but it’s sure to be a tragicomedy with much OMG.” And that’s a fine encapsulation of the novel. By turns dark and funny, the drama inspires a careless, off-the-cuff response: OMG, or maybe LOL.

Yet beneath the froth runs the same rich theme that has informed her distinctive satiric perspective from the start: the slippery nature of our public identities and loyalties. Zink takes a special interest in how we present ourselves socially—how we navigate the mutable relation between private reality and appearance, between insider and outsider status. In prose that deploys social theory and delivers one-liners with equal antic verve, Zink makes sure that her role-shifting characters keep her readers off-balance.

The Wallcreeper, a manic monologue that skewers middle-class social mores and sacred cows, turns on the conceit that everything is a sham—and on the notion that nobody is totally convinced. The narrator, Tiff, barely knows her husband. How could she, having married Stephen mere weeks after their first meeting? What’s more, Stephen’s “ruling principle” is “let’s not and say we did.” He believes that “most people don’t give a fuck what you’ve done and not done,” so all that matters is the facade.

Zink creates amusing mayhem by planting doubts about such confident cynicism. Good luck figuring out why Stephen abandons his job as a pharmaceutical researcher to join the environmental movement. Is he passionate about restoring rivers, or is he trying to please his paramour, Birke? For that matter, is Birke pure of heart, or is she drawn to activism because she likes making posters and giving interviews? Whatever the truth, they successfully pass for true believers at conferences. But even, or especially, Stephen isn’t spared a dose of angst about his bona fides.

Zink captures his predicament in a brilliant bit of marital byplay. To Stephen’s complaint that engineers and ecologists condescend to him, Tiff offers what she thinks is a comforting reality check: “You’re an activist running a media campaign. They know that.” Stephen takes umbrage. “I know I’m a self-styled activist promoting a slogan. You don’t have to remind me.” Grudgingly, Stephen concedes that styling and being, publicizing and doing are not the same.

Zink’s second novel, Mislaid (2015), is more ambitious—a screwball, vaguely Shakespearian comedy of errors in which the protagonist tries on and casts off characteristics we generally consider immutable: sexual orientation and race. As a teenager, Peggy comes to the conclusion that “she was intended to be a man,” by which she means that she’s a lesbian. At college, however, she and a gay male poetry professor fall for each other, to their complete surprise.

Their attraction is sincere, which isn’t to say that Zink presents sexual orientation as wholly situational, much less imaginary. Eventually, the spell wears off. Lee goes back to liking men, and Peggy goes back to liking women. They would probably remember the affair as nothing more than a puzzling interlude if it hadn’t had consequences: a son and a daughter. Of course parenthood doesn’t stop Peggy from challenging the contours of identity even further as the novel barrels on. She and her daughter run away from Lee, and they impersonate “tawny black people” to elude the authorities. Although this is absurd—they have blond hair—it is no more absurd than American racial categories. “Maybe you have to be from the South to get your head around blond black people,” the narrator explains:

Virginia was settled before slavery began, and it was diverse ….The only way to tell white from colored for purposes of segregation was the one-drop rule: if one of your ancestors was black—ever in the history of the world, all the way back to Noah’s son Ham—so were you.

Just when it looks as though Zink is delving into pure fantasy—a world in which appearances don’t matter in the slightest— in fact she is exposing the reality of the one-drop rule, a system that has nothing to do with skin color. Two white people can easily pass for black and, in effect, be black. Indeed, everyone treats them as if they were black, and that is their lived experience: White girls call Peggy’s daughter “nigger” and black girls call her “half-white.”

The third time around, Zink skips the telling nuances and settles for hurried farce. Once again, her characters don different hats, as it were; the difference is that in Nicotine they’re more obviously poseurs, their morphing less self-aware and more frivolous. Penny, the central character, is a flighty 20-something surrounded by flighty 20-somethings, and eager for distance from her hippy family. Zink gives her an exotic backstory—her mother was a 13-year-old member of the Kogi tribe in Columbia when her father, a middle-aged white American, spotted her, adopted her, and then married her. But the focus is on the present, not the past.

Sent to inspect her father’s childhood home, Penny discovers that it’s been turned into a squatters’ co-op, one of several in his old New Jersey neighborhood. Although she’s supposed to move the squatters along, she decides to join them instead after falling for their de facto leader, Rob, who’s alluring in part because he is off-limits (he claims he’s asexual).

Nicotine serves up light sexual comedy and broadbrush satire of social activist pretenses, recalling Zink’s previous work in what almost feels like self-parody. “The requirement to live in [a co-op] is that activism be your main occupation,” Rob explains. “The houses all have themes,” of rather different calibers:

Some [themes] are pretty trivial—bicycle activists like me, tree tenders, you know, small-time BS—and some are big mainstream political issues like environmental stuff, disarmament, different health issues, AIDS and TB and whatever.

Actually, Rob’s house barely has a theme at all; the only unifying factor is that its residents are addicted to nicotine and rail against a society that ostracizes smokers.

Sincere commitment to a cause is hard to find among any of the squatters, who seize opportunities to join the bougie world as soon as they arise. Rob’s claims to being asexual don’t amount to much either. It turns out he’s been numbing his desires with nicotine because he’s ashamed of his penis size. All it takes is a little nudging, and he’s ready to embrace sex. Maintaining an outsider pose, Zink has shown before, is hard—not because against-the-grain allegiances go deep, but because they don’t. Yet on this occasion the astringent insight can’t rescue a narrative that ends up feeling as silly as the characters.

What about Penny’s parents, a couple who evidently violated social norms with their May-December, cross-cultural romance? An odd kind of spoiler is in order: Zink leaves the potentially discomfiting implications of that storyline unexamined. In Penny’s family, a relative suggests, people may be adopting rebellious poses out of more conventional motives than she realizes. Since we never find out for sure— Zink opts for loose ends— Nicotine feels unfinished. Lore has it that she writes astonishingly quickly, drafting her novels in less than a month, so here’s hoping Zink was simply in a rush to turn to something truly different.

Finish That Book!

2014-11-05T14:44:53-05:00

I finish every single novel I start. If I happen upon the first line of a 1,000-page novel, I of course don’t feel compelled to read to the end. But as a matter of personal policy, when I decide I’m going to read a novel, I read the whole thing.

I’ve gathered over the years that my persistence—or stubbornness, depending on your point of view—is unusual. Most people I encounter think nothing of dropping a novel halfway because they find it boring or because they can see where it’s going or because they forgot it on the subway and moved on to the next thing.

This behavior, common though it may be, seems lazy to me. Wrong, even. Once you start a book, you should finish it.

I realize that cultural judgments like this are no longer broadly acceptable. When Ruth Graham wrote in Slate that adults should feel embarrassed if they read literature written for children, she was attacked as a condescending snob. Didn’t she understand, critics argued, that fun-seeking was the only reason anyone did anything anymore? And if a 45-year-old enjoyed reading Harry Potter, then who was Ruth Graham to say he should feel ashamed? How dare she even use the word “should”? (I’m caricaturing, but only a little.)

At risk of offending the no-judgments crowd, here is my case.

First: Pleasure. When you stop short, you risk missing something incredible. I can’t count how many novels have bored me for a hundred or even two hundred pages only to later amaze me with their brilliance. Charles Dickens’s first novel, The Pickwick Papers is long and dated. I quickly grew tired of Samuel Pickwick’s adventures, which were probably funny for 19th-century readers but which I found annoyingly quaint. Yet I stuck with it, because I always stick with books, and also because I thought I should give the benefit of the doubt to an author who would go on to write several masterpieces. I’m glad I did.

Deep into the novel Mr. Pickwick is incarcerated at Fleet Prison over a financial dispute. Suddenly Pickwick Papers isn’t quaint at all but social satire that skewers the absurd unfairness of debtor’s prison. Dickens cared deeply about that subject and would return to it many times over the course of his career. So when that turn happened in the novel, I felt as though I were watching Dickens become Dickens before my eyes. That sensation more than compensated for the previous few hours of tedium.

That’s just one example. With the exception of Portrait of a Lady, every Henry James novel I’ve read has tested my patience. Yet in each case I’ve hit a transcendentally good scene that makes up for all the preceding irritation.

Second: Fortitude. When a book makes me antsy I sometimes think of the famous Stanford marshmallow experiment from the late 1960s, which found, in brief, that children who were able to wait longer before stuffing themselves tended to do better in school and have a healthier body mass index later in life.

It may be disagreeable to slog through a novel that you stopped liking after 50 pages, but it’s a sign of strength. Resisting the impulse to stop midway also teaches strength; it works out your mental-resilience muscles, wherever those may be.

I found Part I of Ian McEwan’s Atonement quite good and despised the rest. Part I, about a country dinner party experienced from a child’s perspective, was suspenseful—almost a page-turner. Parts II, III, and the Postscript, which span the length of World War II and then land the reader in London, 1999, were mawkish. All that nursing of fatally wounded soldiers felt cribbed from a soap opera rather than life.

Yet I don’t wish for those hours of my life back, because they built up my ability to endure intellectual anguish—something I need in my job as an editor. This essay is terrible, I think to myself, but I got through Atonement. I can get through anything. Readers in other professions will reap the benefits of finishing, as well. A waiter, for instance, might think: Serving this table of European teenagers, who probably don’t understand the concept of tipping, is terrible, but I got through Atonement. I can get through anything.

Third: Respect. As any agent will tell you, it is one thing to start writing a novel and another thing entirely to finish one. Many would-be authors simply cannot bring a work of fiction to completion, which is part of why publishing houses, as a rule, won’t enter into contract until they see an ending. The difference between being able to write 50 pages and being able to write a whole novel is the difference—at least, one major difference—between a professional and a dilettante.

To drop a novel after a few chapters is, then, to disregard what makes it a formal work of art rather than a heap of papers that reside in a desk drawer. Today, books and authors need all the help they can get; if you care about literature as an artistic endeavor and the people who create it, then you should do so fully. If you consider yourself a literary person, you shouldn't just embrace the intellectual cachet that starting books gives you. Starting, but not finishing, books is one step above saying, "Oh yeah, I've heard of that author."

The most common defense of book-dropping I hear is that because there are more good books than any one person could possibly read, it’s stupid to waste time on a dull or otherwise unsatisfactory novel. That argument makes sense if the novel is utter trash—if it’s so bad that the reader needn’t respect the author and would possibly get dumber by going forward.

But if a novel starts well and descends into trash, then it seems to me that it’s worth continuing to see if it gets better, or to see where the writer went wrong. And if it was bad from page one, then the whole “should I drop it?” issue is secondary. The best way to avoid wasting time on trash is to avoid trash entirely—i.e. to not start reading it. That shouldn’t be too hard. Skim a few book reviews, ask a few friends, flip through the first chapter before starting a novel in earnest.

When you do start a novel—in earnest—just finish it.

The Accidental Spectator’s Guide to Improving Sports

2013-12-22T21:25:31-05:00

I did not grow up watching sports. My family did not gather around the television for the “big game.” Since reaching adulthood, however, I have watched, or rather been in the room while other people have watched, countless hours of throwing, catching, and flopping. For this I blame my husband, who, like most American males, follows sports with a near-religious dedication.

Bearing witness to sports without any real emotional attachment, I’ve noticed several problems endemic to baseball, basketball, football, and soccer—and like a McKinsey consultant at a steel mill, I’ve developed ideas for how to remedy them. As you slog through the Super Bowl, consider these suggestions for a superior spectating experience.

Baseball: America’s pastime is always around and therefore easy to take for granted. Teams play 162 games each season—and that’s before the endless playoffs, whose monotonous best-of-fives lead up to the agonizing best-of-seven World Series.

Luckily, there’s a simple solution. Major League Baseball could inflate the value of each individual game by reducing the total number played each year. Chop the regular season down by 25 or 30 percent. Give the postseason a haircut, too: best-of-three is good enough for the earlier playoffs, and best-of-five is plenty for the World Series.

Basketball: Reversals of fortune are so common in basketball that the significance of the first 36 minutes pales in comparison with that of the last 12. Team A wins because it happens to be on top at the final buzzer, but if the game were a beat longer, Team B would go home victorious.

The NBA could re-weight the game by changing the way it calculates league standings. Teams should get three points for winning a game, and one point for winning a quarter. If Team A wins all four quarters, it’ll shoot up in the rankings with seven points. If Team B wins three quarters and chokes in the fourth, it’ll still get three points.

Football: The thing about watching football is that you don’t actually watch much football. A Wall Street Journal study found that, on average, the ball is in play for just 11 minutes each game.

To reduce dead time—when the clock’s running but nothing’s happening—the NFL should reduce the maximum time allowed between the end of one play and the start of the next, from 40 seconds to 20.

The league could also cut down on the need for official reviews by abandoning the rule that requires players to maintain control of the ball after they hit the ground. Let common sense reign. If a catch looks like a catch, call it a catch.

Soccer: This one’s a no-brainer: make the goals bigger. Six more inches on each side and suddenly those close misses that ricochet off the posts would make it into the net. The goalie’s job would get just a little harder; the striker’s job just a little easier; and the viewer’s experience just a little less frustrating.

I know soccer fans pretend to appreciate how difficult it is to score, but this recommendation would not lead to basketball-level tallies. It would merely reduce the likelihood of the scoreless ties and 1–0 “victories” that make “the beautiful game” so awfully dissatisfying.