Thomas Mullen

A few months ago, while still living in DC, I was wandering through the city and I noticed quite the crowd squeezing into the doors of my local independent bookstore, Olssons. Wow, I thought, is there some big-name author giving a reading and signing? Or perhaps some cool band is playing an impromptu, afternoon set? But no -- I got closer and realized that the crowd was due to the fact that Olssons, a small local chain, was closing this particular location, and selling off its stock at a big discount. What a sad scene, to see that this is what it took to get a bunch of people into a bookstore: the death of the store itself.

Then just last week I learned that, back in September, right after I left town, Olssons filed for bankruptcy, shuttering its remaining locations.

And then the latest bad news for book lovers, particularly book lovers in our nation's capital: the Washington Post has announced that it will soon discontinue its Sunday Book World section. The powers that be claim that they will still run lots of book reviews on Sundays, but will move those articles into other sections. (Which is kind of like the coach taking the aging outfielder out of the starting lineup but insisting that it isn't a demotion and that the ol' slugger will still get plenty of exciting pinch-hitting opportunities in some random 7th innings.)

With various employers in various industries announcing tens of thousands of layoffs last week alone, perhaps the loss of a few book reviews and the closing of a few bookstores don't constitute the end of the world. Still, this is getting depressing. With everyone talking about the Death of Print, and newspapers losing all their ad revenue to Craig's List, the latest news isn't exactly surprising. But it's still pretty alarming when one of the country's last book sections vanishes. How many professional book reviewers are left out there? I have nothing against my books being reviewed on blogs, and I'm happy to read reviews of other books on blogs, but I still feel something is missing when major cities' newspapers no longer devote any resources to covering books. I was very, very fortunate when my first book came out in that it was reviewed by most major U.S. papers. But ten or even three years from now, how many papers will be reviewing books? It seems there will be one or two book reviewers for maybe the New York Times or San Francisco Chronicle, and every other paper in the country will occasionally borrow those two reviewers' copy. But what happens when the opinions of only two people make or break a book? (And don't even get me started on the book "section" of the local paper here in my new home of Atlanta.)

The blogosphere to the rescue, you say. And maybe that's what will happen, with sites like Bookslut.com becoming the new Post Book World. Maybe I'm just a traditionalist scared of change, maybe this won't seem like a big deal in a few years, maybe everything will work out just fine.

Or maybe no one will be reading books anymore?

Considering all this doom-and-gloom about literature's place in the contemporary world, this probably isn't the best time for me to be reading Roberto Bolano's The Savage Detectives. Anybody who's anybody in letters seems to be praising the late Mr. Bolano, whose work has only recently been translated into English. The Savage Detectives, a long book that made Bolano's reputation internationally, is a series of vignettes about a group of young writers in 1970s Mexico City (and, later in the book, all over the world). They fall in love, they have sex, they get in trouble, but mostly they write and talk about writing. They try to make it as writers. They wait tables, they publish short-lived literary journals, they bum around Europe, they pick grapes in France. They fight over favorite writers, they attack each others' reputation. The book is supposedly autobiographical (although there's a new controversy about that), but while reading it, I found myself thinking the same thing I'd thought when reading On The Road or Tropic of Cancer: "Gosh, this would have been fun to live through, but it's awfully dull to read about." Bolano is a great writer, and there are some wonderful passages here, but I found myself getting tired of this gaggle by the time I was less than halfway through this 649-page opus.

In general I've been wary of Books About Writers, wary about stepping into that hall of mirrors. That way lies solipsism, narcissism, self-importance. Bolano's book seems to be poking fun at self-important, narcissistic writers, or at least having fun with them, so he gets points for that, but still, one longs for a plot, for a reason to invest so much time in these often-petty characters. The book has been praised (hugely praised) by critics and other writers -- i.e., people whose opinions I respect a great deal (and usually agree with), but people who are predisposed to liking a book about writers, a book that itself puts literature and the struggles to create it on such a high plane. Unfortunately, the book's near-complete lack of plot means that it will pretty much only be read by such people -- it's sort of the anti-crossover book. More than narcisissm and solipsism, I think I feel wary of Books About Writers because of the inherent intellectual snobbery there. I don't want to write books just for other writers and for book critics -- I want them to read my work and love it, of course, but I don't want to aim exclusively at them. I don't want to write books about professors and MFA students. I don't want to close my fictional universe off that way -- I want to open it, I want to reach other people, I want to expand readership. Hey, I loved college, but I fear the growing academization of literature, the MFA industry churning out writers who teach other aspiring writers who will themselves teach other writers, etc etc, creating a legion of writers defined by the academic world.

But since I've been reading The Savage Detectives at a time when book critics are being fired and bookstores are closing, I can't help but wonder if I've been wrong all along, if I've missed the zeitgeist on this entirely. It seems we're reaching a point where the only people who are reading are the professors and the book critics and the MFA students. Maybe writing about writers, writing books about books, is the only way to get by these days. Maybe there's no way to cross over, maybe there is no other side. Maybe I've been wrong to fight this. Hell, maybe my third novel should be about a depressed thirty-something college professor who has an affair with his beautiful twentysomething MFA student and talks to her about Rilke and Rimbaud while they lie in bed together.

The characters in The Savage Detectives want to give their lives to literature (or at least, they want to give their youths to it), but Bolano seems to be asking what the characters are getting back. If he were alive today, and if he were revising his own book, I wonder if he would have made it even darker.

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