So is the NYTRB going to review Protagoras now? My worry that the NYTRB is abandoning fiction should be your lament that the NYTRB never reviews nonfiction that doesn't just hand to the reader information and the author's opinion on a first, easy surface reading. Primary texts from the dawn of philosophy -- even the non-lousy ones -- are not what Keller has in mind when he says that nonfiction is more compelling.
And yes, most good nonfiction is less engaging than most good fiction -- because good fiction doesn't show its cards. Good fiction recruits (engages) the reader to be part of the process of communicating meaning. That's why fiction is hard to review. Most reviews of nonfiction mostly just examine the authors reliability and arguments. Reviews of fiction have to deal with all the layers -- craft, plot and character, and underlying ideas. Nonfiction -- even if richly layered -- can be reviewed exclusively at the level of ideas.
I'm happy that you're getting more from nonfiction than form fiction. You're a good reader, and I don't care how the NYTRB will or won't sway your reading habits. But there are a lot of people out there for whom fiction doesn't seem Smart because it's not actually about anything. (It's telling that The Da Vinci Code, which purports to tell shocking things about the history of Christianity, is the most popular novel in airports these days.) The claim that the NYT is a newspaper and should therefore concentrate on nonfiction just tells me that Keller doesn't get that fiction -- though seemingly about murders and love affairs -- is also about things.
And anyway, if you're getting more from nonfiction, don't you want the book review to spend more time pointing you toward compelling fiction?
Yeah, I also spent a lot of time in literature classes in college, until I got fed up with some people's pomposity and everybody's ellipticality and just ran to the other pole. Now I'm a biologist -- but a theoretical biologist, so I spend a lot of time thinking about things like whether the factual falseness of computer models makes the models useless.
For me, the value of fiction is something like the value of theory in science. It has internal beauty, it allows us to explore relationships among components of the larger system, it helps us work out what is plausible or possible, and it's an intellectual activity like anything else.
I sometimes think all of fiction works as an argument for argument from the particulars. Like in Moby Dick, the stuff of epic-scale dramas is stuff like how you carve up a whale carcass. Or in Pride and Prejudice the way words and sentences (like every sentence in P&P that has the word condescend) can simultaneously carry opposite meanings can completely structure a community's social discourse. How does Austen decide to talk about language? Not by describing it -- but by creating a simulation, in which the relationship between language and social structure are easier to see for themselves.
Fiction is also (like other kinds of art) experimentation in representation and a challenge to the cult of information. So much of the world is made of language (and so many of the world's workings are about signification) that it's good to have and think about writing that's just about representation, with no actual facts to have to deal with.
I found Bob's initial comment completely understandable and laudable. You don't go to ficiton for a stock of facts, to be sure, but to have one's sense of human personality and possiblity deepened. Not to go all Allan Bloom here, but there's a real sense in which fact-browsing habits inculcated by non-fiction lead directly to the narrowness and errors of technocracy.
Plus, bad non-fiction is horrible, horrible! And you know that what this means is more reviews on the evolutionary biology of why there are no left-handed third basemen.
Thanks! And as for why there are no left-handed third basemen: they'd all have been eaten by right-handed T. rex. (That's right, right?)
Am I just being dense? Isn't the simplest explanation for this change that Bill Keller's job is to sell newspapers? Complex fiction is all well and good, but it just doesn't sell well. And the NYT, all pro bono rhetoric aside, is a just another business.
Yes, profit's probably the best explanation -- but explanation doesn't preclude griping. I have a plausible explanation of why tobacco companies advertise to teenagers, but I still think they deserve condemnation for it.
Anyway, I don't think it's fair to dismiss the NYT's mission as just rhetoric. Companies have responsibilities, and newspapers (since they won some of the public's trust on a claim to being more than just a company) have more. And even if it is fair to call it just rhetoric, they've built a readership out of people who, like me, want them to exercise some critical judgment and challenge me a bit.