Ozick, Cynthia. "Literary Entrails." Harper's Magazine April 2007, 67-75.

Here's famed writer Cynthia Ozick's response to Ben Marcus's 2005 response to Jonathan Franzen's 1996 essay about the state of the novel and the readers of novels in America. Guess whose literary legacy is most likely to last?

I adored this essay, mostly because of its inarguably true tone from start to finish; the way you know from the first paragraph—where Ozick cites L. Strachey's asking V. Woolfe's sister if the stain on her skirt is from semen—that Ozick is smarter than you'll ever be and that she means business. I adored also the way she's earned the right to dismiss Marcus's silly whining. By reducing the "debate" between these young writers to "a fight rather than an argument [. . .], a fight that mostly mimics a gang war, which is not so much a vigorous instance of many bloodletting as a dust-up over prestige" (69-70), she's I think rolling her eyes at Marcus, whose essay spends altogether too much time trying to convince its reader why Franzen is a pox on American letters, whereas the latter's essay simply tries to understand why people should even bother to write novels in an age of nationwide television addicts.

Ozick's answer to the fight over how to attract readers (or, rather: whether attracting readers is even the point of writing "serious" fiction) is elegant and simple: cultivate more serious critics. And by critics she doesn't meant reviewers. Here she is, here:

The professional reviewer [. . .] must jump in and jump out again: an introductory paragraph, sometimes thematic though often not, a smattering of plot, a lick at idea (if there is one), and then the verdict, the definitive cut—yes or no. A sonnet, with worse constraints, or a haiku's even tinier confines, can conjure philosophies and worlds. A review, whose nature is prose, is not permitted such magickings. Nor is criticism. Yet what separates reviewing from criticism—pragmatically—are the reductive limits of space; the end is always near. What separates criticism from reviewing—intrinsically—is that the critic must summon what the reviewer cannot: horizonless freedoms, multiple histories, multiple libraries, multiple metaphysics and intutions. Reviewers are not merely critics of lesser degree, on the farther end of a spectrum. Critics belong to a wholly distinct phylum.

It occurred to me on reading this passage that I wasn't doing enough criticism here and that I should do more. I promise to try.