Another Book Critic Besieged by Bloggers

For those of you who were wondering why yesterday’s list of potential “Foes of GalleyCat” (for which you can still vote, if you haven’t already) didn’t include John Freeman, a ringleader of the National Book Critics Circle blog Critical Mass. There’s a couple reasons. Despite previous disagreements with Freeman, we’ve had perfectly nice social encounters on the literary circuit, and I don’t think I could bring myself to dump on him often enough and viciously enough to provoke a rebuttal column. Then, too, Critical Mass probably wouldn’t bring us enough lookyloos; we need a grand enemy. And, finally, we need an enemy who can focus his or her anger and frustration on us to near-exclusitivity…and with many of the major literary bloggers taking their whacks at him over the last few months, I feel like we’d just get lost in the shuffle.

Case in point: Freeman reviewed the new Mark Z. Danielewski novel, Only Revolutions, last week, decrying as he did “the stunning lack of experimentation in American fiction during the past two decades” as a means of underscoring the uniqueness of Danielewski’s accomplishment. Scott Esposito of Conversational Reading is having none of that, and offers up a list of recent experimental American fiction, while Mark Sarvas of The Elegant Variation strikes an even harder critical blow: “It’s less of an indication of the state of experimental fiction and more a reflection on how poorly read a critic Freeman appears to be.” Edward Champion takes a lighter approach, offering support to Esposito’s thesis regarding “the long legacy of experimental novelists who have been long ignored by newspaper critics.”

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