Naturally, Scott Sherman’s well-done article in The Nation on the parlous state of the university press grabbed my attention. Sherman writes about the roughly 100 university presses in the United States but concentrates especially on the vast majority of them that don’t rest on “the feathery cushion of an endowment” but rather face the hurly-burly of the commercial publishing world. These presses (and even their more well-endowed brethren) are increasingly squeezed in the twin vises of escalating production costs and the brutal egalitarianism of the Internet, and the article caught my interest because I can scarcely imagine my own literary landscape without books published by academic presses. By ironic coincidence, I opened that issue of The Nation immediately after closing the latest catalogues from both Yale University Press and Harvard University Press, and while I was paging through them, I was struck, as I always am, by how many of the titles in those catalogues cannot possibly expect anything even remotely resembling a general readership.

Such books are important. As Sherman points out, the bibliographies of the runaway bestselling works of history and biography that appear every winter are full of the listings of such books, but it’s more than that: quite often (and who would know better than I? Who reads more of these books than I do? Indeed, in the last seven years, who’s reviewed more of them than I have?) they’re good, stimulating, mind-expanding reading in their own right. They’re the fruits of long study done for inquiry’s sake rather than for hope of gain the marketplace – and since the marketplace can be quite dumb, the existence of an entire separate venue, where books can be researched, written, and even sometimes sold without the kind of market-metrics that now rule the deliberations of the big Manhattan publishing houses, is an unquestionable good for our collective intellectual life.

It’s troubling to read that this alternate venue is feeling endangered, and, thanks to Sherman’s diligence, it’s also fascinating to read about one of the inequalities at the heart of the system – something I hadn’t thought of before:

A crucial question faces university presses and the universities themselves: Who will pay for the dissemination of scholarship? University presses provide a number of vital functions for the academy as a whole – starting with the fact that, by and large, young professors achieve promotion and tenure based on monographs they publish. But the funding for the entire system is lopsided. If the University of Colorado Press publishes a monograph by a young professor at Dartmouth that enables that scholar to obtain tenure, then the University of Colorado Press, with its very modest budget, is in effect subsidizing Dartmouth, which has an endowment of $3.7 billion as well as its own small press. In his New Media & Society essay, [Phil] Pochoda noted that approximately 100 university presses are subsidizing “at least 1,000 other universities and colleges who are free riders on a system that they rely on but do not support.”

And as is my typical pattern when delving into the Penny Press, I moved straight from feeling troubled to feeling outraged – this time by turning to the latest Harper’s, which has a long review by James Lasdun of Joshua Ferris’s new novel To Rise Again at a Decent Hour. At first I thought the pairing seemed somewhat natural, if gimmicky: a big part of Ferris’s novel deals with online stalking and identity theft, and last year Lasdun wrote an excellent account of being stalked online by a former student. Ideally, you always want to get advice about a new car from a car expert, but lacking that, I suppose it makes a gimmicky kind of sense to turn to somebody who’s been run over by the same make and model number.

The piece quickly started to disappoint. Lasdun lavishes lots of hifalutin praise on Ferris’s first novel, which was a tiresomely derivative one-trick performance – but overpraising that work is a useful tactic if you’re going to go on to paint a portrait of Art in Decline, which is the main hallmark of hatchet jobs like this one: it can’t be that an author’s latest book didn’t suit you, no – it’s got to be that the author’s latest work is the last piece of evidence we need that the author has degenerated to the point where a public execution would be a mercy to all concerned. This kind of Wagnerian overreaction runs strong in some critics – especially the ones who are also academics. One imagines it compensates a bit for all those weekday evenings of falling asleep at 9 while grading papers.

It isn’t anywhere near true. Ferris’s second novel was enormously good – complicated thought-provoking, and despite what Lasdun says, extremely well-controlled throughout. But it hardly maters: the second book had to be criticized because it wasn’t the first book – and if that was its sin, how much worse must the third book be? Long before he actually started talking about it, I knew Lasdun was working his phlegmatic way up to calling To Rise Again at a Decent Hour the worst book ever written. It’s a complex work with a lot of moving parts – by an author who very clearly intends to march to the beat of his own drummer for the whole of his career – so I haven’t been expecting it to receive the unmixed praise usually poured out on equally intelligent but easier books.

But even so, I wasn’t prepared for one part of Lasdun’s takedown. He starts this part fairly innocuously, with some plot summary:

It [the book] tells the story of a dentist named Paul O’Rourke, who becomes the target of a campaign of online stalking and identity theft that seems, as it progresses, to be motivated by a general fixation on Judaism, and a particular obsession with the connections between anti-Semitism and the behavior of Jews toward their enemies, from biblical times to the present.

Then came this:

I was recently the target of an uncannily similar campaign, with similar menacing emails, similarly embarrassing online postings in my name, and a similar underlying obsession with Jews, particularly in their hoary double role as the world’s victims and oppressors. “No more about the 6 million,” writes O’Rourke’s stalker, “until OUR losses and OUR suffering and OUR history have finally been acknowledged.” Mine wrote: “jews in america need to shut up, the crazy shit that comes out of your mouths spreads far and wide in a city filled with blacks, muslims and asians who’ve had it.” O’Rourke goes to Israel in an attempt to make sense of his strange ordeal. I did the same.

Followed immediately by this:

In the end there isn’t much to be said about these coincidences except that they confirm a feeling of mine that Judaism and Israel are no longer cultural or geographic phenomena so much as regions of the human brain, like Wernicke’s area or the hippocampus, where some pervasive psychoses get processed.

Even on my fifth re-reading, I honestly don’t know which irritates me more, the cheapness of the accusation or the weaseling way Lasdun immediately tries to distance himself from it. “There isn’t much to be said about these coincidences except” followed by two lines of quasi-conceptual mumbling – when Lasdun knows full well that in the previous paragraph he wasn’t intending to point out “coincidences” – he was intending to call Joshua Ferris a plagiarist. Wernicke’s area – ye gods.

I’m hoping somebody writes a letter to Harper’s in defense of To Rise Again at a Decent Hour, and I’m hoping that somebody doesn’t have to be the abashed and embarrassed author himself.

And in the meantime, I’m hoping readers ignore the review and buy the novel; it’s really, really good.