In late October, on the New York uberblog Gawker, a young writer named Jessa Crispin became the latest target of author and critic Dale Peck’s famously vicious verbal abuse. Peck, the subject of a recent New York Times Magazine profile, is perhaps best known for his starring role in an ongoing lit-world debate over harsh reviews, or “snark,” which many say began when he kicked off his June 2002 New Republic review of Rick Moody’s The Black Veil with the fighting words “Rick Moody is the worst writer of his generation.” Peck had never heard of Crispin before Choire Sicha, his interviewer (and roommate), told him during an IM interview that Crispin had trashed Peck’s oeuvre and called him a “twat” to boot. But he was ready with a comeback: “i can see that someone who appears to be as ditch-dirty stupid as jessa crispin wouldn’t get what i’m doing,” he typed, and then, several paragraphs later, “i think that people like jessa crisp-tits dislike my books precisely because they like books by industry favorites–they’ve had their tastes co-opted, as it were.”
Ever since March, when Heidi Julavits, coeditor of the literary magazine the Believer, appropriated the term snark to describe the “hostile, knowing, bitter tone of contempt” that she argues is threatening the enterprise of book reviewing, a wild and woolly debate on the nature and purpose of criticism has barreled through the literary community. Are book reviews too mean? Or are they too puffy? Whose interests do they serve? The readers’? The author’s? The critic’s? For months now pro- and antisnark pundits have weighed in on these and other questions in just about every publication with New York in its title, a few alt-weeklies, and (most rabidly) on Web sites, blogs, and chat rooms across the Internet, producing an impassioned, seemingly unstoppable loop of posting, cross posting, linkage, and feedback.
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“Most of the time the problem is reviews aren’t harsh enough,” Crispin wrote in May. “Not that every book deserves to be skewered, but there are too many mediocre books that are touted as the Hot New Thing! and Best Book Ever! when really they’re far from it.”
A native of Lincoln, Kansas, Crispin spent two years at Baker University, outside of Lawrence, before she bailed to move to Dallas with a boyfriend in 1999. When the boyfriend didn’t work out she headed downstate to Austin, toiled for a while as “a corporate whore,” and eventually landed a job at Planned Parenthood.
The site gets about 3,000 hits a day, and Crispin’s regularly referenced and linked to by other “blogerati” like Brooklyn fiction writer Maud Newton and the anonymous host of the wildly popular and equally withering site The Minor Fall, The Major Lift. Time Online included Bookslut in its June list of “50 Best Websites,” and the now defunct Book magazine pegged it as one of four notable book review sites in its November issue–along with Newton’s, the Literary Saloon at the Complete Review, and the blog run by the East Waterboro, Maine, public library. Early this month the Complete Review, in its own roundup of literary Web sites, lauded Bookslut as “a must-visit.”
“We hated Austin,” says Crispin. “There’re so many nice things about it, but we weren’t really looking for any of those things. It’s great to raise children–we don’t want children. If you’re a tech person it’s great, if you’re into outdoorsy sports it’s great, but we needed an actual city and Austin’s not an actual city.”
In flew the angry e-mails, but, at least in Crispin’s case, it appeared the writers were enraged more by her steamrolling tone than by the substance of her review, which also contained a fair share of perfectly reasonable observations. “Their book is white, white, white,” wrote Crispin, “with small token passages about women’s involvement in civil rights, never mentioning whether these women identified as feminists….Whether Baumgardner and Richards want to admit it, feminism did shove race issues aside throughout most of its history. The women who fought for civil rights tended to do so separately from feminism because the white leaders just weren’t interested.”
