Unlike critics who write about film or food or music, book critics are rarely required to engage with popular material. Critics ignore the books that people are actually reading; readers ignore the critics and the books they tout; everyone goes home happy.
But, every once in a while, a literary novel becomes tremendously popular, transcending the typical sales for literary fiction and making its way onto bestseller lists. About 15 years ago, books might have gotten a boost from Oprah’s endorsement; these days, it’s word of mouth that propels lucky titles – a magical synchronicity that publicists try to plot and editors pray for that gets not only devoted readers but casual ones to give a long, literary novel a try.
Those juggernaut books have a few things in common: they’re written by women; they are read (as is most fiction) mostly by women; and, as they ascend toward peak popularity, perhaps even winning a prize or two, some highbrow critic will announce that they are not literature at all but, in fact, sentimental trash, unworthy of a single honor or accolade, written by bad people and read by awful – or, at least, silly and stupid – fans.
Call it “Goldfinching”, after Vanity Fair’s 2014 yes-but-is-it-art interrogation as to whether Donna Tartt’s Pulitzer prize-winning, mega-bestselling book The Goldfinch is or is not literature. It’s the process by which a popular and previously well-regarded novel and, more importantly, its readers, are taken to the woodshed, usually by a critic who won’t hesitate to congratulate himself on his courage, as if dismissing popular things that women like requires some special kind of bravery – as if it doesn’t happen all day, every day.
Examples of the critical walk-back include the consideration of Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones in The New York Book Review and Mary Gaitskill’s better-late-than-never pan of the blockbuster Gone Girl. Sometimes, slamming a single title isn’t enough – think of Slate’s sneering dismissal of Young Adult literature and the ought-to-be-ashamed adults who read it , or novelist Jonathan Franzen’s disdainful characterization of “most of what people read” as being YA in its “moral simplicity”.
Which brings us to Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life, a 720-page behemoth which many readers started off thinking they couldn’t pick up and ended up being unable to put down. Released last March, the book began its life as one of the most praised and buzzy titles of the season, earning rapturous reviews in the New Yorker and the Atlantic.
Of course, even rapturous reviews are often meaningless, given that critics have chosen to ignore regular readers and regular readers have learned to ignore critics. Literary novels – even highly praised ones – often sink without a trace. In A Little Life’s case, word of mouth built over months, sending the book surging into the public consciousness and onto the bestseller lists.
A Little Life also won the Kirkus Review Prize, was short-listed for the Booker and was a finalist for the National Book Award, all the while swallowing readers’ weekends whole. This impermissible combination of rapturous word of mouth and critical approval all but begged for a Goldfinch-style tune-up, which the predictable crowd of critics have happily delivered.
There are, by now, certain conventions of a Goldfinching. First: the book’s writing will be blasted as sloppy or sentimental. Most of the Goldfinchers appreciate lapidary language and lovely sentences more than brisk plot or compelling character, so they naturally dislike any novel that inverts those priorities. (Spoiler alert – this will never, ever prevent them from reviewing such a book.)
Next, the work will be dismissed in specifically gendered terms. At least one part of the Holy Trinity of Lady-Trash (Harlequin novels, soap operas and Lifetime movies) will be invoked; female-coded plot twists or character traits will be held up for particular mockery.
For instance: the tormented, horrifically damaged and self-harming hero of A Little Life is a lawyer and an amateur chef named Jude or, as Daniel Mendelsohn wrote in the New York Review of Books, “a brilliant, tormented litigator (he’s also a talented amateur vocalist and patissier)”. Only one of Jude’s identities is translated into French, to devastating rhetorical effect on American ears: the word “patissier”, with its hissy sibilance and its echoes of prissy, pissy, pretty, petty, diminishes Jude more thoroughly than paragraphs of contumely ever could.
In The London Review of Books, Christian Lorentzen also picked up the foodie/girlie theme, complaining that “there’s an oppressive amount of culinary detail early on in A Little Life: oyster mushrooms and braised tofu, gougères, herbed shortbreads, cornmeal gingersnaps, lobster, shrimp risotto, banana bread, cakes covered with fondant, duck à l’orange with kumquats, cilantro and upscale hummus”.
You can smell the subtext, like burning cornmeal gingersnaps: real literature does not wear oven mitts, and real literary heroes do not spend large portions of a long novel baking gougères or bleeding in bathrooms. That’s what girls do.
Speaking of girls, a good Goldfinching must include considerable smirking about the immaturity and childishness of the book, its author and, most tellingly, its readers.
In The New Yorker, James Wood called The Goldfinch “a virtual baby”, “a fairy tale” whose “tone, language, and story belong to children’s literature”. In The New York Review of Books, Mendelsohn accused A Little Life’s Yanagihara of “falling prey” to “a deep and unadult sentimentality”. Worse, “the guilty pleasures (the book) holds for some readers are those of a teenaged rap session, that adolescent social ritual par excellence”.
Not only are the readers who like these books childish, they’re stupid. Paris Review editor Lorin Stein told Vanity Fair in the ur-Goldfinching: “What worries me is that people who read only one or two books a year will plunk down their money for The Goldfinch, and read it, and tell themselves they like it, but deep down will be profoundly bored, because they aren’t children, and will quietly give up on the whole enterprise.” Just sit with that for a minute: you, dear reader, might have thought you enjoyed that book you just read, but you’re wrong. You didn’t. Lorin Stein knows better than you.
And you, dear (female) reader, are ultimately the object of the Goldfinchers’ ire. The books you’ve insisted on making popular are bad ones: sentimental, mawkish and manipulative. You’re a dim bulb, a fumbling, rattle-grasping baby, unable to digest anything but the watered-down pablum that Tartt or Sebold or Yanagihira are serving; incapable, even, of correctly determining whether or not you liked what you read.
Disliking a book is one thing; this kind of deep-seated bitter disdain for readers – for female readers – seems like something else.
Sometimes the source of the antipathy is obvious. “This is not a book I would normally read,” Mary Gaitskill announced, before teeing off on Gone Girl. “Perhaps I’m in thrall to current literary taste,” Lorentzen admits, at the end of his pan of A Little Life. There’s a comfort in falling in line with influential critics like Wood; there’s also a thrill in believing you’re the only one with the guts to announce that the emperor has no clothes.
Sometimes, you literally need only follow the money. In addition to being a critic, Stein is an on again/off again editor at Farrar Straus Giroux (where, as Vanity Fair puts it, he “struggles to keep strong literary voices alive and robust”). FSG publishes the kind of high-end fare that critics praise and that, absent Oprah, most readers ignore. When a book like A Little Life takes off, that’s one less reader Stein can hope for.
Of course, there’s always the long game: the hope that history will relegate the merely popular books and their bleeding patissiers to history’s garbage disposal, while enshrining the correct books in the canon, guaranteeing their preferred authors immortality by keeping them on ninth-grade summer reading lists forever and ever, amen.
But when a critic who knows, and announces, that he or she won’t like a certain book and reviews it anyhow, protecting the canon not the goal. As Claire Vaye Watkins’ essay On Pandering reminds us, “misogyny is the water we swim in”. To write like a man is to write well. To write like a woman – or, even worse, to be popular among that tribe of weepy, daytime-TV-watching, Oprah-following, quote-unquote “readers” – means you’ve barely written at all and that you certainly haven’t written literature.
Goldfinching isn’t about elevating good books at the necessary expense of bad ones. It’s about once more reminding the wrong kind of reader of just where she stands, and how little her enjoyment or endorsement matters.
- This article was amended on 1 December 2015 to correct the spelling of Hanya Yanagihara’s name. A previous version of the piece had misspelled it as Hana.