So, continuing on from my rant lat week about Virginia Heffernan's piece in Slate. Here, about a week late, is part two.

A few months ago, a new monthly, dedicated to the world of Artz 'n Letters appeared -- perhaps mostly the Letters part -- called The Believer. Given that this was back in March, you probably already know all about it: backed by Dave Eggers and the McSweeney's publishing operation, headed up by Vendela Vida (Eggers' wife), it arrived with a bit of a media splash, and editor Heidi Julavits' inaugural essay seemed to announce that its purpose was to counter a dominant book-review culture of self-serving cleverness, envious hostility toward experimentation and creative risk, and just literary playa-hatin'.

I don't mean to overstress the link to Eggers. However, given his well-documented frustration with critical negativity, the founding/naming of The Believer and Julavits heigh-ho concerning its project definitely suggested the extension and fulfillment of something he's been vocal about: re-orienting our literary culture toward more appreciation and support of the literary artist (I'd put that all in quotes, but what the hell's the point?).

I got to thinking more about this after Eric Messinger's Q & A with Julavits in the NYT a couple of weeks ago. In the interview, Julavits decries a "thumbs-up, thumbs-down" culture of book reviewing, and connects the "hot new writer" phenomenon with the practice of overhyping unproven start-ups.

All to the good -- despite the fact that at one point she characterizes The Believer as essentially a vehicle for whatever the editors (herself, Vida, and Ed Park) happen to fancy. Not that there's anything wrong, exactly, with that, especially given that it's my policy here. But, then, I'm giving this away for free: I was a little surprised that when asked by the Times for her editorial mission, there wasn't more than "you know -- good things!" on offer.

Not to worry, as the essay linked above provides copious evidence of there being something more than whim here; indeed, the "Call for a New Era of Experimentation, and a Book Culture That Will Support It" is indeed thoughtful, and full of the evidence that there is a Reason for Doing This (sorry, those Capitals are Catching). She writes of James Wood's bloody-minded review of Zadie Smith's The Autograph Man (and here I am, circling back to Smith) as an example of the danger even an honorable and brilliant reviewer can get into: concocting the review as a means to a different end than critically responding to the work in question in a way that engages the reader's needs. She argues that in using Smith's failure to bash away at a whole subdepartment of literature Wood reviles (the fast-paced, highly referential and by some lights post-psychological fiction practiced by Smith, DF Wallace, Eggers and others -- Wood's list, not mine) he's betraying his own otherwise manifest "faith" in the power of literature to produce (in Julavits' phrase) "feeling on a grand scale." Since, she argues, he's said that he thinks Smith is a talented and intelligent writer (but working in a literary idiom he hates) to crucify her in print runs against what his optimism about literature should tell him to do -- to love the sinner, even while he hates the sin.

Or at least to pass on the assignment, since, she argues, his mind was sort of made up ahead of time. Later in her essay, Julavits points out a review by Sam Sifton of a novel by Mark Nesbitt which used the space to denounce Yaddo and Harpers' magazine, and in short seemed like a vehicle for complaint against the ill-defined mass of MFA-borne writers. Sifton (like other's who spent writing time in the splenetic world of the New York Press) has never lacked for venom, of course. Again, what seems to be the problem is the rather transparent use of the review for a rant against a school, group or method. Hard to disagree -- such reviews are, if sometimes entertaining, usually misleading, and they usually reveal themselves to have begun with their conclusions -- a condition which makes them, in the end, rather stale in the chewing.

Yet as Julavits unfolds her argument -- which gestures back to the Golden Age of lit-crit-wit and namechecks Bunny Wilson as a man who could piss on whom he chose and still retain a clean-handed dignity -- we get into murkier territory. The whole review industry, it would seem is contaminated with self-serving cleverness, and although she's charted it's long pedigree admirably, Julavits insists (without, I think, proving her case), that it's a new thing. "This hostile, knowing, bitter tone of contempt, is, I suspect, a bastard offspring of Orwell's flea-weighers. I call it Snark, and it has crept with alarming speed into the reviewing community..."

I'll admit it: it flat-out bugs me that Julavits capitalizes "Snark," a word (particularly in the form "snarky") that's been so overworked over the last half-decade that some sort of better-than-Safire investigation into its Carrollian origin and subsequent lexical hijack into the territory of sarcasm is more than required. The arrogation to herself of its use is baffling, but the royal pronunciation that attends it is where this essay breaks in half for me. By itself, this is a trivial tone-misstep: since it's true that what she's describing is what many people have termed "snarky," she's not wrong in her use of the term. But I think Julavits runs off the rails her when she lands on this concept as the Big What's Wrong. Far more reviews, after all, suffer from the fact that they generate naught but fulsome praise, a phenomenon she discusses but oddly sidelines behind the supposedly larger threat of mad-dog reviewers looking for raw meat in the form of hapless, fleshy-legged novelist strollers. Even more of an issue -- one Julavits doesn't touch upon, is the preponderance, particularly in the Times, of reviews which resist any kind of engagement in favor of summary, a few tentative thoughts, and a safe retreat.

Moreover, her biggest concern is that experimentation is ruthlessly punished -- though in point of fact the savage reviews she cites (including Dale Peck's famed takedown of Rick Moody's The Black Veil) have all critized the predictability and conventionality of the works in question. The Autograph Man and its readers may have deserved better than Wood gave that book -- but it was not an experiment.

Julavits writes "I am not espousing a feel-good, criticism-free climate, where all ambitious literary books recieve special treatment...I'm simply asking that we read between the lines and see what value systems these reviews [the snarky kind] are really espousing." I think she means that conservative anti-intellectuals of the type who currently own the country's political discourse are the ones leading the charge into dismissive, bitter contempt for all things experimental. It's an interesting idea -- certainly the NY Press and the NY Observer, two big organs of institutional sarcasm, also carry water for conservatives in New York. But as her article lays the blame earlier for sarcasm on a culture of gotta-show-off-my-cleverness among book reviewers, it looks like we have to lay the closet-ideological charge aside. In which case, I don't know what she means there.

What I do know is that while I'm sympathetic to anyone's call for meaning, engagement, and just plain better quality control from our book reviewing establishment, the Believer's call to arms didn't in the end resonate with me. And here's the thing: within this knowledgeable and passionate essay about reviews in our time Julavits evidences awareness that part of the problem is the fear of reviewers (who are to a person trying to get published/reviewed/read with books of their own) that they will piss someone off and lose their shot at what they've been working toward. And another part is the hegemony of a few well-established organs of cultural, um, containment -- we're so relentlessly consolidating our channels of information that it's impossible to really sustain a critical dialogue. In the end, she doesn't seem to think these are important, but that doesn't mean her project won't wind up helping in these departments. For me, the biggest reasons to cheer for The Believer's arrival are two: another voice is another chance to see some mulitiplicity of viewpoints abut books and ideas. And one can hope that Julavits and her fellow editors will involve some regular contributors who don't need to worry so much about who they offend with a (thoughtful) pan, or even an extremely mixed review. That's a tall order, but it's what I'm waiting for.

I was going to connect this all to the Matthew Barney show at the Guggenheim, which I saw this weekend, and to William Gibson's Pattern Recognition, which I just finished. But it's one AM, and if you've read to the end of this, well, you've had enough out of me for today, haven't you?