The NYT Book Review Is Everything Book Criticism Shouldn't Be

The Review is famous as an arbiter of taste and quality. But the publication utterly fails to seriously engage with books and the publishing industry.

The year is 2002. It is 5 a.m, Sunday, on a quiet, leafy street. The silence is broken by the sound of metal upon metal as a mailbox is opened and closed. Suddenly, a loud scream rends the air. It is followed by a deep, full-throated sobbing and the soft, raspy sound of paper being shredded.

Someone somewhere has just read a review of her novel in the New York Times Book Review, and it is devastating. Someone somewhere now lies splayed in a fuzzy yellow bathrobe and pink bunny slippers, her left cheek imprinted by the grimy pavement while her right hand pounds desperately at the box, as if the action might reverse time itself. Her roommate, following the sound of her cries, has found her and is trying to get her up. The writer’s left hand clutches the now tattered remains of the review; the name “Michiko Kakutani” appears in the byline. A few phrases and words can be seen here and there: “a lot of pompous hot air,” “a definite dead end.” Slowly, the two make their way back to their house, the writer still sobbing, her roommate gently holding her up.

Michiko Kakutani’s 2017 departure as the chief book critic at the New York Times was greeted with bombastic reverence: Vanity Fair declared that she had been “the most powerful book critic in the English-speaking world.” The New Yorker’s Alexandra Schwartz wrote that “her assessments of novels and memoirs, works of history, biography, politics, and poetry have guided generations of American readers.” The Authors Guild declared that she had been the rare critic whose reviews could “make or break a book.” And the Times, no doubt keen to inflate its own importance, declared her “feared and revered” and noted that her departure—“the changing of the guard among critics” at the paper—was a “seismic change.”

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