No Brownies From Birmingham

Alec Niedenthal, a 17-year-old from Birmingham, Alabama, took it to the NYT Book Reviewers in a letter to the editor that the Times published last weekend.  Responding to Dwight Garners review of Joseph O'Neill's Netherland in which Garner clamors for "“the bracing, wide-screen, many-angled novel that will leave a larger, more definitive intellectual and moral footprint on the new age of terror", Niedenthal responds:

Don’t worry; we’re working on it. You’ve heard it straight from the tropical mouth of a teenager who is entirely conscientious of the metamorphoses in ideas, principles (or lack thereof) and influences being undergone by your Youth right under your collective noses: the next Great American Novel will come not from Pynchon, Wallace, DeLillo (he’s already had his turn anyway) or any other of your literary heroes.

It will spring from the iMac-fettered keyboards of the young, challenging, Facebook-and-MySpace-addled minds that you have so hastily jettisoned as literary jetsam, from those who see and comprehend, still to the delirious ignorance of the villainous Powers That Be, incalculable brands of grade-A terror being perpetrated unabashedly both by those whom we trust and those whom we loathe.

His letter got the attention from publishers and even an interview with the New York Observer's Media Mob:

And do you think the editors of the Times Book Review just aren’t paying attention?

They’re not paying attention. ... I think it’s really hard for them to look outside of their own purview of the literary world. Not that I’m an expert or anything at all, but that’s what I’ve gotten from reading it a good while, that it’s very incestuous. I really enjoy reading it, but they could stand to step outside themselves a little. I’m sorry if that sounds elitist. They’re all of a single mind-set, I guess. I don’t know. I don’t think I have enough experience to really comment because I’m so new to this kind of thing. But the old literary generation is going to die off eventually, and it’s quite obvious that this new generation is going to be a lot more adventurous and experimental.  {emphasis mine}

At least he makes you, even if for a second, smile.

Comments

[Cynthia Closkey]

Ah, the Youth of today. I hear they've invented sex too.

But of course he's also correct, which is kind of sweet as well.

[Richard]

Sweet, smart kid - even if he doesn't quite know how to use words correctly. When I first read the letter, I assumed "conscientious" was a typo for "conscious." Why is his mouth "tropical"? (Now if he was in South Florida, it could be semi-tropical, but if that's a metaphor, it's not obvious.) Why capitalize "Youth"? (His answer should be that it's so the reader doesn't think it refers to her own younger years.)

I hope he gets a good first-year comp teacher before he gets a book contract. Failing that, I hope he gets a decent editor at Random House.

[Jeff]

"Tropical" is an interesting choice of words. Maybe we're just too old to get it. We have desert mouths.

[Richard]

And wasn't "How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got A Life" a Great American Novel?