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Credit Jon McNaught
When a group of people band together to start a magazine, they are sure to make purring noises about creating “a space for dialogue†or “a forum for voices that are not being heard,†but the voices they really want to hear are their own. And usually they’re prepared to spend someone else’s money on it.
When Herbert Croly teamed up with a wealthy couple to launch The New Republic, he told them: “The whole point is that we are trying to impose views on blind or reluctant people.â€
Four important journals that range the American landscape of ideas have published anthologies in recent months, The New Republic the eldest among them. A century ago, the views its founders wanted to impose represented a synthesis of political ideas that were then often in conflict. Big business was compatible with the public interest, the theory went, as long as it was counterbalanced by a strong and active central government. Today this is no longer a novel doctrine: It is modern liberalism, more or less.
In its approach to the arts as well as politics, the New Republic target was and still is the place where impertinence meets rigor. (Disclosure: I have written for the magazine.) The anthology marking its centenary, INSURRECTIONS OF THE MIND: 100 Years of Politics and Culture in America (Harper Perennial, paper, $17.99), fittingly opens with Rebecca West’s essay from the debut issue, “The Duty of Harsh Criticism,†which epitomizes the intended spirit. At the age of 22, West argued in crackling language for “a new and abusive school of criticism.â€
A succession of exacting minds including Malcolm Cowley, Edmund Wilson, Alfred Kazin and Leon Wieseltier has kept West’s ideal in sight while overseeing the magazine’s books coverage. Though the literary section has championed a long line of writers, it has become better known for deflating prominent figures with conspicuous glee. Franklin Foer, until recently the magazine’s editor, collects some of the best takedowns here, such as the brilliant 1986 skewering of the pundit George Will by Henry Fairlie and Hendrik Hertzberg’s hilarious 1991 review of two books about Ronald Reagan. But the anthology would probably better reflect the history if it gave a bit more play to pieces about literature and the arts. We get none of Wilson’s criticism, nor any of Kazin’s. We get James Wood’s evisceration of Norman Mailer’s “The Gospel According to the Son†(not one of the Mailer books that would make for a truly worthy adversary), but missing is Wood’s landmark 2000 essay diagnosing a trend of “hysterical realism†in fiction, a term Zadie Smith called a “painfully accurate†description of her early work.
Foer could have created the space by sacrificing the more windy pieces from the early decades, a few of which read like speeches from a Democratic National Convention. The book is also light on female contributors, a fault that lies with the publication itself, which has long favored young white guys and is hardly alone among political outlets in having done a poor job of cultivating and retaining female talent.
The anthology nevertheless provides a spirited intellectual tour of the century. In his lucid introduction and in editorial notes, Foer is laudably candid about the magazine’s failings at a number of historical junctures, even referring to several “disgraceful contributions to American life,†including Betsy McCaughey’s influential and profoundly misleading 1994 attack on President Clinton’s health care reform proposal.
Foer nonetheless poses The New Republic as a consistent vehicle of liberalism and the anthology as “a refutation of liberalism’s critics,†but in so doing he defines the term rather broadly. As he notes, the magazine has published figures as conservative as Irving Kristol and Charles Krauthammer and wholeheartedly supported, for instance, President Reagan’s backing of the contras in Nicaragua. (That position was attacked, however, within the pages of the same issue.) Part of The New Republic’s value lies in its inconsistency. Some of its most celebrated work grew out of the kind of intramural dissension that held sway in the ’80s, when Hertzberg and Michael Kinsley, as editors, chafed under the active ownership of Martin Peretz, who had taken a rightward turn, particularly on the subject of Israel. George Will deemed The New Republic “the nation’s most interesting and important political journal†in 1984 â€" and two years later, Fairlie expertly filleted his work in the magazine. Don’t get too comfortable.
The New Republic has made some egregious missteps. Its mockery of antiwar voices under the heading “Idiocy Watch†during the run-up to the Iraq war, for example, should be a lasting source of embarrassment. But complaints of incoherence or confusion often read as masks for the true complaint â€" that unlike many of its rivals, the magazine does not indulge a reader’s desire to encounter only the views he already has.
While The New Republic tacked to the right under its editor Andrew Sullivan, a new journal called The Baffler was throwing bombs from its left-hand side. Started by recent college graduates in 1988 and most closely associated with the founding editor Thomas Frank, The Baffler hit its stride in the ’90s. The Berlin Wall had come down, the American economy was steadily expanding, and Bill Clinton was leading the Democrats to the center. We were hearing that it was the end of history, that the free-market system had won. The Baffler was having none of it. What was the almighty free market doing but letting the strong crush the weak, co-opting all resistance and repackaging it as a consumer good? “Commodify Your Dissent†was the delicious title of the journal’s first collection of greatest hit jobs, published in 1997.
The Baffler bears something in common with Ethan Hawke’s character in the 1994 movie “Reality Bites,†who sneered at the squares while sitting out the whole career thing to read Heidegger, but the magazine is angrier, funnier and a lot smarter. It’s also a little juvenile, but that’s the idea.
In a 1994 issue, Frank nailed a certain kind of youthful despond, prevalent in the grunge era but timeless too: “Even while we are happily dazed by the mall’s panoply of choice, exhorted to indulge our taste for breaking rules and deluged with all manner of useful ‘information,’ our collective mental universe is being radically circumscribed, enclosed within the tightest parameters of all time. In the third millennium there is to be no myth but the business myth, no individuality but the 30 or so professionally accepted psychographic market niches, no diversity but the happy heteroglossia of the sitcom, no rebellion but the preprogrammed search for new kicks.â€
The Chicago offices of The Baffler suffered a fire in 2001, and only a few issues appeared for the rest of the decade. NO FUTURE FOR YOU: Salvos From The Baffler (Baffler Books/M.I.T. Press, $27.95) collects essays published since the journal was revived in Cambridge, Mass., in 2012 under a new editor, John Summers. Perhaps it is I who have changed since “Commodify Your Dissent†was a personal talisman in my early 20s, but the new Baffler strikes me as less vital than the ’90s version.
The trouble isn’t the writing, which remains uncommonly fresh and stylish. Standouts collected in these pages include David Graeber’s provocative and original exploration of the once-Âpredicted technological innovations that have not come to pass (“Where, in short, are the flying cars?â€); a bravura Heather Havrilesky performance that frames the “Fifty Shades†series of erotic novels as a fairy tale of class ascendancy; and Evgeny Morozov’s mercilessly precise dissection of the Silicon Valley thinker Tim O’Reilly.
But the rhetoric-to-fact ratio is too high in this book. Pieces stray from analysis into harangue with little groundwork underlying bold claims. When the opening paragraph of an essay characterizes Harvard as “America’s most highly self-regarded institution of advanced credentialing,†it’s good for a laugh, but we get the sense the author is more interested in venting than probing or persuading. Graeber describes antidepressants and Ritalin as if they were corporate tools for social control, meant to placate the workers. One writer picks on one of those glossy free magazines that cheer on local businesses, an easy target, and another zeros in on the banal, misspelled remarks of unnamed Facebook commenters to make a point about Sheryl Sandberg and her following. It’s a little like critiquing capitalism by punching a hapless banker.
During the decade when The Baffler lay mostly dormant, two significant journals arrived. Both were founded by people around the age of 30, but they adopted quite different stances toward their generation and toward the culture at large. The divide between the two has generated a larger continuing debate concerning the tone of literary discourse.
In 2003, the first issue of The Believer came off the presses, another hopeful offering from the publishing mini-empire of Dave Eggers, whose memoir “A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius†had made him something of a cult hero among the young and bookish. The cover of the magazine, then as now, presented a riot of colors and skillful illustrations in a grid, a visual vocabulary reminiscent of the graphic novel. The following year, n+1 showed its severe face. The debut looked vaguely Russian, a no-frills solid red with black and white text. Drawings are for kids, it seemed to say, and in fact the arrogant opening pages criticized The Believer for being fixated on childhood.
Which was unfair, but not untrue. The Believer is interested in many things, childhood among them (and what’s wrong with that? the editors might ask), and it seeks to channel the youthful openness to wide experience that tends to decline with age. Its new anthology, collecting work published in the last five years, leads us by the hand through vistas of oddball endeavors, comic failures and emotional pain. The ideal audience might be the well-educated cubicle-dweller who is bored by an unchallenging job and wants to be reminded that the world can be mysterious and beautiful.
The Believer aesthetic calls to mind the radio show “This American Life,†and both sometimes indulge in a precious whimsy. READ HARDER (Believer Books, paper, $18) reprints an account of 18th-century discoveries concerning the anatomy of beavers. Publishing an essay of such ostentatious obscurity is a kind of stunt. Another piece, by Monte Reel, is an intelligent foray into Victorian travel handbooks, but it veers into gimmickry when the author uses the guidebooks’ advice to survey a shopping mall as if he were exploring uncharted lands.
The editors, Heidi Julavits and Ed Park, have also gathered more forceful work, including Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah’s searching profile of the comedian Dave Chappelle, which examines the roots of his race consciousness and his decision to step away from a major career. And in a short but potent piece, Susan Straight weaves an affecting portrait of her mixed-race family into an unsentimental account of a charged encounter they had with the police.
Although some writers have appeared in both venues, the dichotomy between the aims of The Believer and n+1 remains steadfast. A working title for The Believer was The Optimist, and it often seeks to share enthusiasms and counter the elitism of literary culture. The editors have announced their view that “books are inherently good.†The spirit of n+1 implicitly rejects that notion, suggesting instead that books are situated on a battleground; some of them are misguided or dangerous and must be fought.
In recent years, n+1 has become involved in political activism â€" it produced a spinoff gazette during the Occupy movement â€" but its biggest contribution lies not in advancing a particular set of ideas but in promoting a certain way of thinking, wide-ranging and curious but demanding and rigorous.
HAPPINESS: Ten Years of n+1 (Faber & Faber, paper, $16) illustrates the off-kilter ambition that has made it invigorating to read. The book showcases some of the new voices the publication has brought to prominence, reprinting bold and singular essays from Elif Batuman, Emily Witt, Wesley Yang and Kristin Dombek. These pieces amount to more than a pleasant way to pass time; they knock the reader a little off-balance.
The style of the journal is disputatious, sometimes downright mean. Even the fiction is aggressive. The stories collected here, a strange and darkly funny piece by Rebecca Curtis and a look into Baltimore gang life from Lawrence Jackson, are the kind that make other writers wonder if they’re doing it wrong.
For n+1, the ideal audience might be the self-serious comp-lit graduate student who is committed to the life of the mind but suspects that the world of the pop-culture Internet she encounters while procrastinating might be more urgent than the concerns of the campus. n+1 resides somewhere between the academy and the society, and it pushes both the upper and lower bounds of typical intellectual discourse. It has provoked eye-rolls by knowingly name-dropping impenetrable works of critical theory, and it’s provoked eye-rolls by devoting extended attention to the Octomom, the history of Gawker and extreme online pornography.
Every generation is embarrassed by its own cultural phenomena â€" significant things happen in the past or the White House; n+1, meanwhile, is almost bizarrely unembarrassed to take seriously the ephemera of the times. This is a risky act. It does not always work, but when it does, it’s something to see.
Correction: December 5, 2014
An earlier version of this review contained outdated information about Franklin Foer, who edited the anthology "Insurrections of the Mind." He is no longer the editor of The New Republic. (On Thursday, he abruptly resigned the post in the face of a disagreement about the magazine's direction.)
Evan Hughes is the author of "The Trials of White Boy Rick" and "Literary Brooklyn."
A version of this review appears in print on December 7, 2014, on page BR70 of the Sunday Book Review.
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