Last thing first: your attack on the “Contemporary Themed Review” was really an attack on doing culture war disguised as literary criticism. I agree that doing culture war is predictable and boring, so I try not to do it. In defense of my colleagues, at least of the critics who do mostly literary stuff, it seems to me that reviews of fiction, author biographies, and other literary miscellanea (I’ll leave out the poets, who can speak for themselves) are one media zone that hasn’t been thoroughly colonized by culture war arguments. I think it’s because we critics are interested in other things, like stories and how they’re put together, which is also known as form, plus language, which sometimes rises to the level of style. (Personally I just love analyzing that kind of shit.) Sure, there are pieces around that ask questions like “Should we cancel James Gould Cozzens?” and proffer the answer: “Maybe not entirely!” (Actually, Cozzens was canceled long ago by Dwight Macdonald on entirely other grounds, namely being a lousy writer of pure kitsch — ha ha ha, great piece, Dwight!) But even the New Yorker has seemed to tire of running such pieces in the past year. Still, you do get a lot of short stories in that magazine that are more or less allegories for cancel culture. Some of them are funny! Oh well.

More troubling to me is your sympathy for the “Contemporary Reader,” who gets confused reading Goodreads, Twitter, and the Times Book Review. If this guy can’t keep up, fuck him. Let him read Sally Rooney, or whichever novelist the hype barnacles attach themselves to next. Critics need not internalize the mentality of literary consumerism. It’s reasonable for publishers and authors to worry about who reads what and why and how many of those readers (the saints! Spending their money on books!) there are, but as you point out, book reviewers don’t get paid very much. And here is the thing we buy with our penury: total indifference to the wider literary marketplace. We write our pieces, we have our say, we don’t care what you strangers are reading.