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Everyone’s a Critic
Laurel Spellman can admit to herself that she has never been a beauty. Her brains, her wit, her taste, and her discernment, those are her gifts, and she has used them well. From her humble beginnings in Shickshinny, Pennsylvania, the oldest child of a lumpen, factory-working father and a pillowy, dim-bulb, romance-reading mom, she has been able, thanks to the rigorous exercise of intellect and will, to remake herself in the image she has chosen: a flinty, hard-edged woman, a powerful woman, a woman to be feared. When she was forty, at the peak of her power, at her most striking and, thanks to a convenient bout of stomach flu, her thinnest, the newspaper to which she’d just been named lead book critic commissioned a portrait, a stamp-sized caricature, to accompany her reviews. The artist captured Laurel’s heart-shaped face and glossy black bob, her bright red lips, the dark peaks of her brows, and her inquisitive expression.
Laurel loves the little cartoon. She’s used it, online and in print, for the twenty-six years during which she has reigned as the most feared literary critic in New York, which makes her the most feared and respected critic in the world. Beneath the drawing, she has anointed a number of Great American Novelists, and eviscerated existing ones (of Madison Enright’s latest, she wrote, “There could be a good book in here . . . if Mr. Enright had tucked a copy of a Colson Whitehead novel between the covers”). She has gored sacred cows (“If Donald Trump is a poor person’s idea of a rich man, Dora Pye is a poor reader’s version of a literary writer”) and published acid-etched takedowns (“Mr. Leicht’s clanking, overstuffed grab bag of a novel is reminiscent of a child’s toy chest, crammed to the lid with broken, plasticky junk”). Through it all, the flattering cartoon has accompanied her prose, a portrait of Dorian Gray, only in reverse, as one of the more juvenile websites has snickered. Laurel Spellman does not care. Her looks are not what matters. Her words, her wit, her skill, her taste, her power—those are the point. She planned on using that avatar forever, but the new owners of the New York Examiner had other plans. Thus it is that five a.m. on a rainy February morning finds Laurel in LaGuardia Airport, preparing to shepherd sixteen bibliophilic Examiner subscribers on a ten-day tour of “American Writers in Paris.”
The trip is a compromise. The newspaper business is changing. These days, it is not enough simply to provide readers with news, to give them hard facts and artfully written opinions. No, indeed. These days, you have to be their friend. For Laurel, who is both an introvert and a misanthrope, who hates all children, almost all women, and the vast majority of men, this new world is a nightmare. “I don’t even want my friends to be my friends!” she told Gregory Plontz. She and Gregory had joined the Examiner the same year, she as a book critic, he as the Book Review’s editor. Together, the two of them steered the paper’s coverage of the literary world, sorting through the tsunami of advance reader copies that flooded into the office each week, culling them down to a tiny handful, determining which would be assigned to freelancers and which precious few merited Laurel’s own attention.
“I get it,” Gregory said, giving her a sympathetic look and refilling her martini. Gregory was not a friend, not exactly, but she’d known him a long time. They had witnessed each other’s histories, and knew a few of the other’s secrets. Laurel knew about Gregory’s costly divorce; Gregory knew what Laurel liked, when she indulged in intimacy. Each Wednesday night, after putting the Book Review to bed, they’d drink at the seedy bar next door to the newspaper: Gregory rumpled and scrawny, with a bald head and a jutting Adam’s apple, in khakis and a fraying button-down, Laurel with her black bob and one of her little black dresses, which had, over the years, becoming increasingly larger black dresses (her days as a journalistic ingénue, the pretty young thing trit-trotting through the Condé Nast Building in size-two miniskirts and Manolo Blahnik heels, were long gone).
Since the advent of the internet, things had been bad. They got worse when the paper was sold to a conglomerate based in Sweden. The Swedes already owned a car company, a factory that produced frozen foods and another that made textiles, and a global restaurant group when they added the paper to their portfolio. They did not see the New York Examiner as a public trust or as a noble cause or an essential pillar of democracy. To them, it was a business, from which they expected unheard-of profit margins. The way they saw it, Laurel and her colleagues might as well have been producing tires or golf tees or reduced-calorie frozen dinners. Instead of essays or stories or reporting or reviews, the Swedes called it all content, and content was just another product to be sold in the marketplace, like a washcloth or a minivan. They wanted the paper to monetize its brand. They had to locate new revenue streams and launch new verticals. It was all about niche publications and dedicated portals. Most pertinently to Laurel, it was about branding our assets, and the name of that game was making the reporters accessible to the readers.
Resistance was futile. Interaction was mandatory. These days, her reviews run with her beloved portrait and also a comment section, for the readers to dissect her work and offer their own contrary opinions. Her email address is included, too, so that angry readers and sometimes even aggrieved authors can launch their dismay at her inbox. She’s been urged, then ordered, to get on Twitter, and to “engage with her readers” regularly on the site, and if she ever goes more than a day or two without replying to some reader’s inane comments with a thumbs-up or a smiley-face emoji, she’ll receive a scolding email. She’s been similarly required to maintain a Facebook page, on which she ostensibly hosts weekly “chats” (in reality, Laurel makes the intern, who works twenty hours each week in exchange for school credit, impersonate her online, posting recommendations of coffee-table books and advising fans of Tuesdays with Morrie on what to read next). As far as she was concerned, the only good thing about social media is that she is allowed to use her cartoon portrait there, too. For years, Laurel staved off further attempts to make herself accessible, watching with mingled amusement and horror as, one by one, her fellow columnists succumbed. The paper’s travel writers were conscripted to lead tours of Iceland and India; the food writers were required to escort subscribers to Italy to eat pizza and make pasta; and, eventually, the foreign correspondents were ordered to lead intrepid readers through the war zones they covered.
That will never be me, she thought, feeling grateful and—she could admit it now—smugly superior to her colleagues. By then, she’d won a Pulitzer, and the National Book Critics Circle Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing three years in a row. She occupied an exalted spot on the masthead and in the paper’s hierarchy, and enjoyed the appropriate, corresponding benefits. She was allowed to work from home. She was required to write only a single review every week. Her pay was at the very top of the union-mandated scale, and she got four weeks paid vacation each year. Best of all, she had never been subject to the kind of ancillary tasks that her colleagues had to perform. No trips for Laurel; no lectures or workshops, no “Cruisin’ with the Crosswords,” where the puzzle editor was sent off to sea for ten days every six months.
Which was not to say that the editors hadn’t tried. For as long as the tours have existed, the paper has been after Laurel to lead one. They’ve dangled destinations in front of her: Shakespeare�
��s London! Joyce’s Dublin! Dante’s Florence! Sappho’s Greece! Laurel cited illness, seniority, a scheduling conflict, or simply too much to read. She told the Swedes that she was not an asset to be branded or a resource to be exploited. Nor was she interested in being the readers’ friend. If she was their pal, she explained, instead of discovering important new writers and championing worthy literature, she’d spend all of her time writing up romance novels with bright foil covers and heaving bosoms. Instead of Karl Ove Knausgaard and Jonathan Safran Foer, she’d be reviewing thrillers churned out by men with single-syllable names as brisk as slaps. She would have to cover romance novels and erotica and women’s fiction, those soppy, improbable, sentimentality-soaked works of wish fulfillment where the fat girl gets the guy, or learns to love herself through yoga.
“Do you mean bestselling books?” asked the Swedish gal, with an inquisitive tilt of her head. Ebba was a wispy little pixie with silvery-blond hair. She might have been all of thirty-five. “What is wrong with popular?”
Laurel tried to explain. “Nothing is wrong with popular. But popular does not make a book worthy of a critic’s attention.” She’d said that her job was not to put her seal of approval on pleasant, popular, inoffensive books, the kind read on airplanes and forgotten by the time the passenger collected his or her luggage. Her job was to seek out and to celebrate those rare works that advanced the cause of literature, that did something new with language or something innovative with form. “The gee-whiz books! The game changers!” she said. “Those are the ones the paper must cover.”
The Swedes disagreed. First, Ebba pulled up a PowerPoint slide, showing the click-through rate of Laurel’s reviews, which was not, Laurel could see, entirely robust. Ebba’s next slide showed the declining number of ads the Book Review attracted. “You see the problem. If you’re not reviewing the books readers care about, they won’t read your section.” Laurel made some conciliatory noises. She promised to solicit a review from a popular horror writer, a man now published regularly in the New Yorker. She noted that, as usual, the Valentine’s Day–proximate issue of the Book Review would include a few romance novels, and did not mention that the reviews were being written by an elderly male professor of the classics who thought the last good love story had been written by Ovid.
“One more thing,” Ebba said. Laurel watched as a flush rose up the Swede’s chest, reddening the V-shaped patch of flesh her blouse revealed and the tips of her elfin ears. “We think it might be time for a new, ah, portrait to go with your reviews.”
The angry squawk flew out of Laurel’s mouth before she could stop it. She pressed her lips together, breathed, and said, “I don’t see a problem with the illustration that we have.” She stared down the Swede, daring Ebba to tell her why she couldn’t keep using her beloved cartoon. It was true that these days, lipstick kept her lips flushed, dye kept her bob black, her eyes had slightly sunk and were surrounded by a net of fine lines and wrinkles, and her sharp little chin had mostly dissolved into a soft, fleshy pouch that wobbled when she turned her head. And she’d put on a few pounds. Maybe more than a few. At her most recent public appearance at the 92nd Street Y, she’d heard whispers, and had noticed more than one audience member staring in puzzlement from the cartoon, reprinted in the program, to her actual face, up onstage. But she should be allowed to project whatever image she chose. She’d earned it.
The paper’s management scheduled a photo session. Laurel skipped it. They rescheduled. Laurel skipped the second appointment, too. When they dispatched the paper’s photographer to her home, she ignored the woman’s knocks and telephone calls and texts. Finally, they sent Gregory Plontz to her house with an ultimatum: give them what they want, or find another job.
Instead, Laurel offered a compromise. Which is how she’s ended up at LaGuardia at this ungodly hour, waiting for her sheep to trickle into the waiting area. There are a few pairs of elderly husbands and wives, the husbands stooped and slow and deaf and, in one case, shaking with some sort of palsy; the wives small and wrinkly and fiercely upright in their orthopedic walking shoes, speaking at a volume just short of a scream into their spouses’ hearing aids. There’s a family of four, two snowplow parents probably trying to give their Ivy League–wannabe babies an Experience to write about in their college application essays, and a pair of middle-aged gays, one black, one white, both of them exquisitely groomed and turned out like peacocks, even at this hour, in pressed, fitted checked shirts and colorful perforated suede Hush Puppies. Five of the group’s members are retired ladies clearly desperate to fill the empty hours. Laurel sees gray hair, wrinkled cheeks, elastic waistbands; she sees one four-pronged cane and the kinds of suitcase-sized purses the ladies undoubtedly call pocketbooks. No pride, she thinks. She herself is attired in a black dress and knee-high suede boots, their modest heel her single concession to comfort. She stifles a sigh and forces a smile.
“Shall we introduce ourselves?” she asks. She feels like a camp counselor, charged with tending to a bunch of blundering twelve-year-olds, making sure that they don’t get poison ivy and that they learn how to swim before the summer ends.
The Fullers—Jack and Marie—are a couple in their fifties from Philadelphia. Jack had written his master’s thesis on Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants”—“a long, long time ago,” he says with a self-deprecating smile. The family of four are the Chamberlains, from a suburb of Cincinnati. Mom and Dad are both attorneys, and their kids have already been to London and Paris; they’ve seen the grandeur that is Greece and the glory that is Rome. They’re looking to “change it up,” Richard, the paterfamilias, says, as his two children—Cole and Jordan, a boy and a girl, although Laurel has no idea which name goes with which child—stare at her, projecting identical attitudes of disdain. The gays are Andrew Freeh (black) and Jason King (white), of New York City and Rhinebeck. They’ve taken the trip on a whim. “We don’t know much about the expats, but we’re excited to see one of our favorite cities from a different perspective,” Andrew says, as the rest of the group murmurs its approval. The elderly ladies all hail from the same over-fifty-five community in North Carolina. They had been planning on taking a cruise with the paper’s food critic, only that was sold out, and this was offered to them as a last-minute alternative. “We’ve already done three different cruises with Fran,” one of the women says in a challenging tone. Fran is a new addition to the staff, a round and chatty woman whose reviews include information about where to park for the restaurant in question, and whether they take Groupons. “Fran’s trips were wonderful.”
Laurel grits her teeth. “I’m sure this will be wonderful, too.”
The chicly uniformed Air France flight attendant behind the podium announces that boarding will begin in five minutes. The elderly women depart, en masse, to find the bathroom. The Chamberlain parents supervise the gathering of the Chamberlain belongings; the elderly wives scold their husbands; one reminding her spouse to take his pills, another asking her husband if he’s remembered the adapter for his CPAP machine. Laurel is deciding if she has time to buy a coffee or if she should just hang herself in the ladies’ room when a soft-bodied woman with blond hair comes jouncing to the gate. She peers at Laurel, glances down at the brochure in her hand, then fishes a pair of glasses from her capacious bra, pulls them on, and stares at Laurel some more.
“Laurel Spellman?” she finally asks.
Laurel forces a smile. Women who keep things in their bras are a special brand of revolting. “That’s me. And you must be—”
“Tess Kravitz,” the dumpling announces in a cheery voice, as if she expected to be congratulated. Her hair is shoulder-length and wavy, her face is round and dimpled, with an upturned mouth and an upturned nose and small, shiny white teeth. Underneath layers of cashmere, her body is as plump and chesty as a broody hen’s, and she has little, squinty eyes behind her bra-glasses. She wears leggings and white sneakers, the laces tied in neat bows. There are
pearls in her ears, and an inflatable purple travel pillow cradles her neck. “I’m so pleased to meet you,” she says, pushing her plump paw in Laurel’s direction. “I’m so excited for this trip. I’m actually a novelist myself!” The returning sheep coo congratulations; the gays ooh and aah. Laurel’s heart sinks. This was her worst fear, one she’d tried to get the Swedes to agree to prevent. No writers, aspiring or published. She did not want some wealthy wannabe spending five thousand dollars just to try to get close to her or, worse, feeling that she was owed a review because she’d paid for the trip. No one had listened. “You’re being paranoid,” Ebba had said.
“So my book was on BuzzFeed’s Ten Books to Read This Fall,” Tess is telling the gays when Laurel tunes back in. “Bustle and PopSugar both loved it,” she burbles. “And we’re crossing our fingers for Reese!” Laurel tries not to roll her eyes as the authoress dips her hand into the tote bag that’s slung over her shoulder. “Just in case any of you want something to read on the plane,” she says, giggling. “And YOU get a book, and YOU get a book, and YOU get a book!” Laurel can see the inevitable pastel-pink cover, with an illustration of a full-figured female chef’s body—possibly Tess’s own body—depicted from waist to chin, holding a whisk and a bowl. The title’s been rendered in gilt script: The Comfort Diet. Laurel’s heart sinks even lower.
“What’s it about?” asks an old lady whose name Laurel’s already forgotten.
Tess gives a dimply smile. “My elevator pitch! Okay, so, The Comfort Diet is about a soldier who comes back from Afghanistan with PTSD, and a chef who’s been through a bad divorce, and agrees to let him work for her.”
And let me guess, thinks Laurel. They fall in love.
“Together, they learn how they each can be the best versions of themselves. Oh, and there’s recipes, too!” The old ladies cluck approvingly; the gay of color actually clasps his hands to his chest, sighing in delight. Tess makes a little curtsy as she hands Laurel a copy. Laurel manages a smile.
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