Now it turns out Carr has also inspired a whole new feature in Readability. If you’re not familiar with it, Readability is a browser extension that displays a given web page in an altered format — stripping out all the … well, the stuff that helps web publishers stay in business, and admittedly spitting out very spare, readable pages. Following on Carr’s thesis, Readability now offers the option to have links automatically converted to footnotes. I’m neither a fan nor foe of Readability, but I do find it hilariously counterintuitive that they explain how the content provider can add title tags to their links for the recontextualizing benefit of anyone who might be using Readability to avoid seeing that content in its native state or form. I’m not expecting wide adoption of that practice.

* See how I just dumped that link in there with no explanation, leaving it to you to ferret out the context and backstory for yourself? Perfectly standard web practice. It could be argued that’s lazy and inconsiderate, or that it’s efficient and also assumes you’re clever enough to know exactly what I was talking about, or interested enough to go find out. Which way do you see it?

I don’t know if it is truly possible to recall moments of cognitive growth from 25 years ago. But the memory of this episode is very strong: the creak and crunch of my brain as it struggled to absorb the idea that this was not just a coincidence or similarity, but an intentional melding of two otherwise unrelated stories. Although this moment of revelation lodged deep and hard in my brain, the Christian message of the Narnia books was ultimately unimportant to me. I was in it for the fauns. Narnia remained for me a place into which I could disappear, like so many of the other fantasy and adventure books I began to seek out.

For Laura Miller, my colleague and a co-founder of Salon, Narnia kicked off a rockier and more intense journey, one that neatly mirrors aspects of children’s literature and fantasy arcs. After a teacher set Miller on her path by introducing her to Lewis’ books, a world far beyond the wardrobe — within the walls of a library and the covers of the books she gobbled — opened for her. The teenage revelation that the founding text of her passion for reading had secretly contained a religious pill left Miller badly disillusioned, but her continuing education, and eventual career as a literary critic, both rooted in the thrill she had found in Lewis’ stories, finally led her back to Narnia and her own conflicted feelings about the books.

Miller has recorded this journey in “The Magician’s Book: A Skeptic’s Adventures in Narnia,” a lucid and vibrant tale that traces the evolution of her feelings about Narnia, Lewis and reading itself, all the while elegantly reflecting the very kinds of children’s adventures — and experiences of faith — that so churned her up throughout her life.

Through her research about Lewis, discussions with other readers and writers about their experiences in his imagined land, and observation of young children and how they engage with the stories they’re told, Miller discovered that she has lots to say about how we read and how we think about what we read.

How did you first encounter Narnia?

I was given “The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe” by my second-grade teacher, Wilanne Belden, who was someone I kind of worshiped. She is someone I’m still in touch with, and someone I interviewed for the book. When I marveled to her that she had given me this book, which, when I read it, became the whole center of my inner world, she said she gave it to me because, “You were just a kid who needed to read this book.” What astonished me was that she had had the book for quite a while, probably around 10 years, before she actually gave it to one of her students to read. I was the first one she tried it on. And it was a huge success. She knew that I had been strongly affected by it, but she couldn’t get me to talk about it.

Why wouldn’t you talk to her about it?

I wish I could tell you that. One of the strangest experiences [of writing this book] is learning to think of my child self as a completely other person. People say, “You did this,” and I don’t have any idea why. When Mrs. Belden told me I wouldn’t talk about Narnia, well, I don’t remember that at all. I remember that my strong feelings about the book were so caught up in my admiration for her. She was the most amazing grown-up I had ever met, and this was something that we shared. What I remember is feeling that she must already know.

The point for me was that it was private. I was building my own self that was independent of other people, which is so important when you’re that age. Everyone thinks about forming your identity as a teenager, but that is a much more outward transformation. When you’re younger, you develop your own imaginative inner world that you don’t have to share with adults or other kids around you. Not every child has a need to do that, but certainly everyone I’ve met who was a bookish child had that stage.

And you had a teacher who understood not only to give you the book, but to not try to talk to you about it?

What she said to me [as an adult] was, “Maybe if you talked about it, someone could take it away from you.” And that was right. We were in a three-bedroom house and we were a family of seven. That was a normal suburban thing back then, not some horrible hardship. But I didn’t have any privacy, and she understood that on some level. I needed this to be private, and she didn’t push me on it.

That kind of understanding between student and teacher is very typical of children’s literature. There’s always someone, a teacher or an uncle — Dumbledore, or Uncle Merry, or Professor Kirke — who gives you a key to another world, or indicates that he or she understands your travels there.

Yes. When Susan and Peter go to Professor Kirke [in "The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe"] and tell him Lucy’s story about finding this secret land through the wardrobe, they expect him to respond the way other adults would — that she’s just being fanciful. Instead, he says, “How do you know it’s not true?” He is one of those adults who have that special understanding, even though he’s not the kind of grown-up that is conventionally good with kids. So he tells them that it’s OK for them to go to a secret other world, and that is what my teacher did for me.

Often children have an adult who’s not a parent who plays that role, often aunts or uncles or teachers, who give them a nudge to pursue whatever is special to them. That’s why they keep coming up in children’s literature. Some children need an adult to come in and give them a nudge in the right direction, and a blessing to go on with their own adventure.

Your obsession with the Chronicles did not stop at one reading?

I became so obsessed with these books and read them so many times that I practically have them memorized. Except for “The Last Battle,” because like many people, that is my least favorite one. It’s just kind of a bummer. But I saved up my money to buy my own copies. My mother gave me a paperback set, but I wanted the hardcovers. And I’m not a collector; this was the only thing I’ve ever said, “I have to have it.”

Then, when I was in my teens, in the process of trying to track down other books that would give me the same kind of thrill, I discovered [in a book of literary criticism] that there was all this Christian symbolism in the Chronicles, which completely shocked me. I had to have been 13. I was so horrified, because I had been raised as a Catholic — not a super-strict or super-guilt-heavy Catholic, but nevertheless Catholic — and I wasn’t really a believer. I wasn’t into church or religion in any way. For me, Narnia was everything I would want life to be, and none of the things I disliked. And one of the things I disliked was church and religion and the Bible. The idea that this thing I was trying to get away from was secretly lurking in the place I went away to, that was my most private cherished thing — I remember feeling physically nauseated by this thought in my teens, and deceived, and betrayed. I avoided even thinking of them.

Were you upset by the religious content, or more by the fact that you hadn’t realized the religion was there?

I was upset that I could be deceived, that I would be betrayed, by someone I trusted. It made me feel that I was a fool, that I could be tricked into doing something I didn’t want to do. I was invested in my independence. A real sore spot was adults trying to trick and control me.

So I didn’t think of Narnia for years. I went on to be an English major and all that. Then in the early Salon days, we did these features called “Personal Best,” where you wrote about a movie or a record album or a book that had changed your life. It wasn’t supposed to be like “Moby-Dick,” it was really personal. So I said, “If I’m going to be really honest about it, it was only after I read ‘The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe’ that I became an obsessive reader.” I decided I needed to go back and look at the book and figure out what I responded to so much. Was there anything that was still there? I began looking at it, and reading up on Lewis, and thinking: You know, there are Christian messages in here, but there are a lot of other things in here. And I still respond to it and think it is, in many places, really beautifully written, and that the imaginative power of it is really strong, and that is what I was responding to as child, and still as an adult.

When you read what scholars have written about it, you realize that unlike with Lewis Carroll or J.M. Barrie, the people who write about the Chronicles are only interested in the Christian aspect of it. I wanted to read a whole book that treated the Chronicles less as message delivery system than as a work of art. That book really didn’t exist.

Which is funny to me, because I think lots of the kids who read Narnia couldn’t care less about the Christianity.

Or they don’t see it. And is that because children are dumb, or because children see different things than adults see? Because theoretically, if all there was to the Chronicles was the message of Christianity, how could I have loved them so much yet not been converted by them? Why do I still like them now?

For a lot of people, especially if they only read the books as adults, they just say, “Those books are a bunch of Christian propaganda,” and stop there. They think of it as an allegory in the way that “Animal Farm” is allegory. “Animal Farm” is only about the Russian Revolution and the failure of Soviet politics. It’s not really about animals; it’s not really about farms. All it does is point to something else; it doesn’t have a lot of layers to it.

But as someone who had the Christianity pointed out to me as a child, I wonder if any kid cares about the Christian message. I knew it, I didn’t care. Is it possible for kids to be converted, or to have their faith affirmed, by a story about lions and talking mice?

It’s hard for me to say. I tend to think that people who are religious believe because they want to believe. It’s hard for me to imagine a conversion experience, but it’s not a major part of my personality to need to believe.

But you did believe in Narnia.

Yes, it’s like Neil Gaiman told me: He had no doubt that this was true and that these things had happened. I was really into the creatures of classical mythology — I thought the centaurs were so cool! And the trees that were people. These are things that have nothing to do with Christianity, but everything to do with Lewis’ background as a literary scholar who had read everything, and who knew this material backward and forward, and had been strongly influenced by “The Faerie Queene” and much more obscure narratives. But a lot of that material, it’s older than Christianity, it’s pervasive in Western culture. A lot of what we were responding to when we’re responding to Narnia is the idea of Arcadia, from classical mythology. Those are the other things that I wanted to pull out from the background because they were overwhelmed by everyone’s perception of the Christian message. This was Lewis trying to integrate all those things in his imagination.

Some of his critics, especially Tolkien, would complain that it was all these random crazy patchworks — Santa Claus is there, and Norse mythology — and Tolkien felt it wasn’t consistent. But the thing that was consistent was that it was everything really meaningful to the author. And that tends to hit child readers. What I said to my teacher was, “I didn’t realize anyone else had an imagination like mine.” That has come up again and again: It’s as if the author of this book had reached into my head and found the things I wanted most, and made them into a story.

Your path — of ardent belief in Narnia, and then a rejection and repudiation of your childhood devotion, and then your return and reckoning — actually mimics what many people consider a religious journey.

Yes, and very consciously so. The story of the naive faith, and then the loss of faith, and the recuperation of something that is not faith, because it’s not unquestioning … It’s what Philip Pullman, who is a guiding light in some ways for this project, would call “experience,” and not just as a loss of corruption of innocence, but as a different path to grace. It’s like a religious narrative: my belief in the power of books as embodied in these particular books, and their ability to have an infinite number of meanings, to have meanings that the author didn’t intend, or that the author put in there without being aware of it. My feeling of being cut off from that wellspring of my imagination during the adolescence of my reading life, which is the middle of the book, is like a loss of faith. Then there is the later process of working through how and why I loved these books as a child and continued to love them as an adult, that is so much bigger than my early belief in them.

Can you talk a bit about Philip Pullman’s influence on that final stage of your journey?

Yes. In Pullman’s trilogy His Dark Materials, he has a character make a very open statement about innocence and experience. Lyra, the young heroine, has been able to read a special instrument without ever really trying, thanks to the grace of being unself-conscious; when she reaches puberty, she becomes self-conscious and loses the unconscious grace she had as a child, and can no longer read this device. This character comes to her and explains what’s happened but says that there is another kind of grace you can find through experience. If you devote yourself and your time and energy to learning how to do this, you will again reach a point where you can read it even better than you did before.

When you’re writing children’s books, or writing about children’s books, there is this feeling that the loss of innocence is just a loss. Lots of the great children’s books’ writers were obsessed with childhood and their desire to go back to childhood. But Pullman’s idea is that there’s something adolescent about just being disillusioned. Many people, in any situation — it could be a love relationship, or how you feel about Barack Obama — get stuck at the stage of disillusionment. But Pullman is saying that you have to persevere, and then put effort into something, and if you do that, you can come to an enlarged understanding, and that is, in its own way, a kind of grace.

And you pursued that enlarged understanding, in part, by pursuing Lewis himself?

One of the things I did was discover his literary criticism. He wrote two major works of literary criticism, “The Allegory of Love,” and his volume of “The Oxford History of English Literature,” which is mostly about Spenser. Those were kind of amazing, because they showed his enthusiasm and appetite for the literary experience that you rarely see in any academic, and in not that many literary critics. They enabled me to reengage with him as a writer.

I tried to track down everything in his biographies, in his letters, a few diaries and other types of writing that would tell me other things that contributed to Narnia. I came to see how my own relationship with the Chronicles continued, even though I didn’t realize it. I was an English major and read a lot of the books that Lewis loved and inspired him, and that I also loved — Dante, Milton, Spenser, Austen. When I thought about it, I realized I have always been coming back to this experience, because he put all of those things into Narnia. These books made a reader out of me not just in wanting to read more books but in preparing my mind for an imaginative experience that would last for the rest of my life.

When I was in college there was this very strict realism that was the only thing to do in American literature, and it would be hard to explain why you would want to read a book that had magic in it. In “The Allegory of Love,” one of the things Lewis explains is that a story that’s not strictly realistic can nevertheless be profoundly truthful. [When an author uses] magicians or witches or unicorns in order to tell a story about a human experience that transcends realism, that is universal in a certain way that human experience can’t ever be.

But isn’t telling the story of Christ through the use of magical, pagan figures a kind of heresy?

It depends. It’s hard to say that strictly speaking it’s heretical, but definitely one of the most common tenets of Christianity is that creation is good, and that it is sufficient, and therefore you would necessarily not need to make another creation, because that is to imply that God’s creation is not sufficient. The case can easily be made that pagan elements don’t belong in a story that’s Christian, but only if you’re a kind of really narrow-minded Christian. Christian writers have been doing that from the beginning, because Christianity itself is made up of myths from other cultures, in my opinion.

There’s also something religious in your desire to move beyond your naive faith in Narnia to a world in which you could pick apart books. Your experience of reading “Animal Farm,” alongside learning of Lewis’ Christian message, are tantamount to biting the apple and getting thrown out of Eden.

I wanted to know more, I wanted to understand more, I wanted to read more, I wanted to be a grown-up, to have the knowledge and power and responsibility that comes with that. Part of that knowledge was having to admit to myself that there was no Narnia, that it had been invented by this man. I had been like Neil Gaiman, thinking, This has to be true; this is too good not to be true, which is actually how Lewis felt about God. He wanted God too much for God not to be real.

Then I discovered the whole idea that a story has a secret meaning and an alternative meaning, that it doesn’t just describe things that happen. When you read as a child, these are things that happened and people who were, and that’s all you need to know. But when you come to see a story as created by a person who has intentions, a story can have intentions, like the intention to teach you something. Basically, that’s the form of criticism that you learn as a beginning student: What does this symbolize? That is the most rudimentary form of literary criticism: These pigs stand for these revolutionaries and Boxer the horse stands for the proletariat. There is powerful disillusionment as soon as you see these stories as having some purpose. They cease to just exist in all their wonderfulness.

Sometimes you indict books for their bad values, bad themes, which there certainly were in the Chronicles, presenting unsuspecting readers with lots of racism and sexism and weird kinds of snobby, clubby attitude.

Besides the religion, what are some of the troubling things in Narnia that you saw as an adult reader?

There is the class thing with Lewis. He was a middle-class person in an extremely class-conscious society. I’ve read all of his letters and his criticism, and as much as he tried to be humble, he was not a humble man. And he had a lot of prejudices, he was not that open-minded, and that is reflected in parts of the Chronicles that have to do with things he didn’t really understand, like coed education. Anyone who has to do with onion and garlic is a dirty foreigner. Most of the people who write about Lewis waffle around these issues, and you just want to say: Grow up, it’s racist. That doesn’t mean there’s nothing else of value in the books, but it is a problem if you’re so invested in this that you can’t recognize it and you make excuses for it.

What I love is that those who want to idolize Lewis have trouble on both sides. You might be angry about him being Christian, or racist, or socially exclusive, and then Christians don’t want to accept the fact that he had these unconventional — and un-Christian! — relationships with women.

His romantic life was very unconventional and mysterious. We’ll never really know what exactly went on between him and Mrs. Moore, who was 20 years older than him, and with whom he lived for 30 years — this was before he met Joy Davidman, with whom he had a very famous marriage — but he lived with Mrs. Moore for 30 years without being married to her. In later years he referred to her as his mother, but he also almost certainly slept with her in the early stages of their relationship. People prefer to see what they would like to see, and part of my reason for putting some of that in this book is that he had a lot of difficult attitudes toward women, and then he had relationships with women, and then he wrote about women. So it’s difficult to nail him down on this.

But then he has this great female character in Lucy …

But Lucy is him. Lucy is the ideal version of himself. I personally feel that a writer who does that has major aspects of himself that he does not want to acknowledge, and one of the ways you create distance is by making the character another gender. Now that’s a psychoanalytic way of looking at literature that Lewis would have hated. But when I sat down and really thought about it — why is his most appealing protagonist a little girl? — the more I realized that when I read about Lewis, and read things he had written, I don’t think I could have stood to be in this guy’s company. But that little girl is in there somewhere. She wouldn’t be so real if she wasn’t in him.

It’s so weird that I can not like someone who wrote Chronicles of Narnia, which is at the total center of my heart. You can be upset about it or you can wonder at what a miracle of sympathy it is to be able to be a soul mate with this person who maybe I wouldn’t have been able to have lunch with without losing my temper.

But isn’t that condition — of hating the writers you love — true of many of the word’s most beloved writers? They’re unlikable!

Yes, I know it’s true because some of them are living writers, and I’ve met them. People don’t actually become writers because they’re socially adept. There have been charming and sociable writers but it’s not a career that those people tend to go into.

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“The Lady Elizabeth” by Alison Weir

Elizabeth Tudor is a puzzle by any conventional standard of femininity, a woman who declared that if she had her druthers, she’d be “a beggar-woman and single, far rather than queen and married.” If she had a great love, or even a great passion, she never got carried away by it, or at least not far enough to let it interfere with the more important (to her) affairs of state. Did her public success hide a private tragedy — was she, in short, the prototype for Miranda Priestly (from “The Devil Wears Prada”) and every other emotionally unfulfilled career woman in popular culture? Or did she, as she proclaimed to her troops at Tilbury, truly harbor “the heart and stomach of a king” within “the body of a weak and feeble woman”?

Alison Weir’s novel of Elizabeth’s youth, “The Lady Elizabeth,” takes the queen at her word. In what appears to be the first installment in a series of historical novels, she depicts the proto-monarch as a girl who learns from a disastrous infatuation at age 14 (with her trifling fool of a stepfather, Thomas Seymour) that love is a treacherous diversion. Furthermore, “her father had desired her mother, and her mother [Anne Boleyn] had met a bloody end.” Is it any wonder, then, that the princess greets every suggestion of marriage with “a kind of horror”? Since “The Lady Elizabeth” ends with the queen’s coronation, and Weir’s last sentence lingers over the “warm and twinkling” eyes of Robert Dudley — regarded by some as the first serious test of Elizabeth’s resolve in this department — perhaps more romance awaits in future volumes.

So, instead of the usual Tudor soap opera of adultery, beheadings and martyred females — the kind of yarn that has kept Philipa Gregory, author of “The Other Boleyn Girl,” in Jaguars for the past few years — “The Lady Elizabeth” is a relatively sober work detailing the coming of age of a prudent, if brilliant woman. Initially a willful child, Elizabeth goes in and out of favor with her father, half-brother (Edward VI) and half-sister (Mary I), dodging scandals, treasonous conspiracies, religious persecution and efforts to marry her off to assorted inbred Hapsburg hunchbacks and weaklings. By the age of 20, she is cannily explaining to her elders why an unmarried British queen should stay that way: “If she marries a foreign prince, he might interfere too much in the affairs of the realm. Yet if she marries an Englishman, his rule might raise jealousies and factions.”

This is, in short, historical fiction not as romance novel but as speculative biography. Still, there are plenty of velvet gowns, jewels and palaces to feed a reader’s appetite for vicarious pomp, and where Weir has chosen to embellish on the established facts of Elizabeth’s life, she does so for reasons carefully explained in her author’s note. She has a firm grasp of the history, though a less certain hand with her dialogue — I’m pretty sure no 16th century Englishman ever told anyone to “tone it down”; As a result, on the occasions when Weir has a character quote directly from source materials, the sudden shift in tone can be startling. Nevertheless, that she makes a point of using those sources indicates how conscientious she is with her subject. Weir is more historian than novelist (this is only her second work of fiction, the first being the best-selling “Innocent Traitor,” about the life of Lady Jane Grey), and “The Lady Elizabeth” is best enjoyed as that: a dramatic, dishy alternative to a traditional biography, as well as the latest attempt to plumb one of history’s best-known, yet most enigmatic figures.

— Laura Miller

“The Dark Lantern” by Gerri Brightwell

Chamber pots: That’s what’s missing from the usual Merchant-Ivory depictions of the late Victorian era. However, Jane Wilbred, the heroine of Gerri Brightwell’s “The Dark Lantern,” set in 1893, can’t afford to ignore the unpleasant realities of life before flush toilets. She’s a maid in an upper middle-class London house, and emptying the chamber pots is one of her regular tasks. So is carrying heavy trays of tea things up and down narrow stairways in cumbersome skirts (any broken crockery will be docked from her meager pay). Jane feels lucky to have the job; as an orphan and the illegitimate child of an executed murderess, she thought she’d never escape the stingy, sanctimonious country vicar’s wife who deigned to hire her despite the “stain” in her blood. Unfortunately, to get this new position, she’s had to change her name and forge a letter of reference.

It turns out that Jane isn’t the only resident of 32 Cursitor Road with a secret. The mistress of the house, Mina Bentley, keeps wheedling her husband to move back to Paris, where they met, and tries not to go outside any more than is absolutely necessary. She fired the previous maid because she spotted the girl talking to a suspicious-looking man on the street; what is she so afraid of? On Jane’s second day, a mysterious stranger manages to bluster his way into the house by pretending to be Mina’s husband, Robert, then rifles through the study, apparently taking nothing. The cook is skimming off the top of the household accounts, and the senior housemaid manipulates a complex and inescapable web of favors and obligations that has all the rest of the servants at her mercy.

Brightwell has delivered a delectably sinister picture of the snake pit seething behind the facade of respectable Victorian affluence. Only Robert Bentley himself can afford not to lie, and that’s because he’s at the top of the heap. Then his brother dies in a shipwreck while returning from India and a young woman who claims to be his widow is rescued from the disaster. She is the only surviving witness to their shipboard marriage; if she’s telling the truth, she inherits the house.

A proponent of anthropometry — a method of comparing very precise measurements of the various features of an individual’s body — Robert is locked in a professional rivalry with the champions of fingerprinting. Each side is trying to persuade law enforcement officials that they have the key to setting up a new system for “the complex process of identification.” Since half the people in Robert’s own house may or may not be who they say they are, the irony of his situation is rich indeed.

The multiple deceptions and misperceptions of the residents of Cursitor Road mesh like the gears of a Swiss clock, each ticking the next one a turn closer to disaster. Eventually, even the reader is drawn into the machinery, wondering which stories — and which hearts — are false. The surprises that wait at the end are more a matter of emotion than plot, and that makes them all the more satisfying.

— Laura Miller

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“Mistress of the Sun” by Sandra Gulland

Seventeenth century France may have revolved around that most kingly of monarchs, Louis XIV (aka the Sun King), but Sandra Gulland’s entertaining novel “Mistress of the Sun” finds its center in a less exalted figure — that of Petite, a pixieish horse-crazy girl of minor nobility who would grow up to become Louis’ first mistress. Gulland seems to specialize in conveying a woman’s-eye view of great men: Her previous trilogy of novels retraced the life of Josephine Bonaparte, whose tale is unraveled via imaginary diaries.

“Mistress of the Sun” opens when Petite (aka Louise de la Valliere) is 6 years old, living with her family in the famine-ravaged French countryside, a place where old pagan superstitions comingle with religious belief. Tomboyish and precocious, Petite has already taught herself to read well enough to peruse the mystic writings of Saint Teresa. When a band of local gypsies blows into town with a pack of wild stallions, Petite is transfixed by the most ferocious one — a white creature named Diablo — and begs her adoring father to buy him.

When the white horse turns out to be untamable, Petite fears her father will slaughter the beast and desperately turns to a chapter in her ancient horse-training manual on “Bone Magic.” The enchantment she performs works, but it also sets off a series of unfortunate events and darkens her soul forever — or so she is convinced.

Like most girls of the era, Petite has no control over her fate. With no dowry or title, she gets passed around and handed off like a pretty object, first sent to be “waiting maid” to Marguerite, a raucous and misshapen young royal who has high hopes of marrying the teenage Louis. The girls follow the king’s activities as if he were a boy-band heartthrob: “It was reported that he was comely, that he refused to wear a wig, that he loved hunting, music and theater and danced the lead parts in ballets.”

Eventually, Petite comes into close contact with the regal one himself when she is sent to live at court as a lady in waiting to Henriette, a lively English princess who is married to Louis’ brother. The palace is a hothouse of gossip and trysts, and Petite spends her days fulfilling the whims of bored royals, whether dancing or singing or accompanying her cohorts on hunts.

Our heroine is far more interested in riding horses than she is in flirting, or in anything else, really. She observes the pomp and ceremony around her (and boy is there a lot of pomp) with a distant curiosity. Gulland delights in the details of her surroundings, and squeezes great amusement out of minor characters, like Petite’s horrible bore of a stepfather, a self-important marquis. He marks their first meeting by oversharing — blathering on about “the state of his bowels (unforthcoming), the enema and purge he took once a week to balance his humors, his hippo-tusk false teeth,” the latter of which he brags work far better than plain old elephant ivory.

It is not Petite’s beauty or purity but her spectacular riding skills that eventually excite the admiration of the (by now married) king. At which point “Mistress of the Sun” morphs from an engaging, intricately described girl’s-eye view of history into a bodice-ripper. (His breath? “Fragrant with wine.” Hers? “Coming now in gasps.”) Or at least it does for a few chapters.

But the known facts of Louise de la Valliere’s and Louis XIV’s life — recently detailed nonfictionally in Antonia Fraser’s “Love and Louis XIV” — lend themselves all too well to torrid treatment. The rest of the story is laced with all kinds of political and sexual intrigue, as well as religious guilt and public suffering. Gulland’s gothic touches sometimes seem overripe but not inappropriate in this easily devoured historical romp about a girl, a king, her horse and their nation.

— Joy Press

“The World Before Her” by Deborah Weisgall

Not all of Deborah Weisgall’s historical novel takes place in Venice, but that ancient, sinking city, so full of beauty and ugliness and decay, is the appropriate launchpad for her tale of two women who visit the city, a century apart. Each journeys there in an airless, stagnant marriage — one 10 years old, one new. And Venice for each of them evokes memories of earlier and more vibrant loves.

In 1880, 60-year-old Marian Evans, by then a celebrated novelist under the pen name George Eliot, is trying to bring herself, and her writing, back to life after the death of her partner, philosopher and “Life of Goethe” author George Henry Lewes. Evans lived with Lewes (whose wife had left him but not divorced him) out of wedlock for 25 years. After his death, Evans finally married the financier John Cross, 20 years her junior. “The World Before Her” begins with the Crosses honeymoon arrival in Venice.

In 1980, a Rumpelstilskin-obsessed sculptor, aptly named Caroline Spingold, is visiting the city with her husband of 10 years, a financier 20 years her senior. Malcolm Spingold has brought his wife wealth and some happiness, but their decade together has sapped her of something essential — her spirit and perhaps her artistic self. Now he has brought Caroline to Venice, where she spent a childhood summer before her father left her mother, because he is scheming a way to bring Venice back from the economic death that seems inevitable.

Much of “The World Before Her” is about the dream of reviving things that are dead — cities and memories and relationships and ambitions — through art. “Art doesn’t fool,” says Caroline. “It transforms. It makes the mess bearable.” Both Marian and Caroline have woven art from their messes; they create sculpture and stories, making endings happy when life does not promise them the same good fortune. They make pieces of art that should be immune to the passage of time and to decay, and yet are utterly shaped — in both creation and reception — by the currents of life and love around them.

Marian fears she cannot write without her late lover; and when she looks at paintings in the Academia with her new husband — so cowed by her ardor that he literally cannot rise to meet her — she feels numb. “Fifteen years ago, when she saw them with George, these paintings had affected her like music. All her senses had been receptive; she had been in love, she had been open to the world. Love gave her clarity. It had been a kind of ecstasy.”

Weisgall, who has written about music, ballet and painting, jams her book with not only Eliot and Lewes, but James McNeill Whistler, Franz Liszt and Clara Schumann. Marian and Caroline both search for texture and meaning. They want to spin life into art, to laugh and breathe and soak in beauty, while the men they’re with seem wan and lifeless, emotionally and artistically impermeable.

In some regards, Weisgall is taking a page from A.S. Byatt’s century-spanning intellectual romance “Possession.” It jumps back and forth in time, forming intricate patterns with the life of the mind and the life of the body, worrying about morality both past and present, sending small clues from one woman’s story shuttling a hundred years back into the other’s. But for all the academic heft of a book that makes a meal of literature, painting and sculpture, and that takes as its setting a heavy, slightly rotted city, “The World Before Her” does not seem as heavy or plodding as might be feared. Weisgall’s style is diverting and compelling; the book zips by, even as its meditations on art and time, god and marriage, get full-bodied treatment, and even as she skillfully dips readers in and out of memory and flashback, introducing dozens of characters, some real and some imagined, in two centuries and on two continents.

The novel tells a brief and beautiful story of how we get over love, and how we have changed in our struggles to name and contain it by marriage. “The World Before Her” is not the lightest book you’ll pick up this summer, but it might be one of the smartest, and most vibrant.

— Rebecca Traister

This week’s focus is thrillers: a suburban family is menaced by shady secrets and unexpected dangers; an art forger gets sucked into a bizarre conspiracy; a Stalin-era communist apparatchik seeks to redeem himself by uncovering a crime; an enigmatic college professor asks his class to unravel a hypothetical (or is it?) murder; and a divorcee becomes a mother-avenger as she searches for her missing teenage daughter.

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“Hold Tight”
By Harlan Coben

Like the hit men he portrays with such relish, Harlan Coben collects his contract and goes about his business with a minimum of fuss — and he gets the job done every time. Not that he earns much love from the critical intelligentsia, but for his millions of acolytes, the effect of reading a Coben book is to resent anything that stops you from completing it. Had a rough day, honey? Tough shit. You want me to eat dinner? I’m on a diet. Kids killing each other? Call me when someone’s bleeding.

And indeed, someone is always bleeding in Harlan Coben land, a white upper-middle-class suburban enclave menaced by the World Without. Coben’s particular suspense turf is the imperiled family, and the clan that lies at the center of “Hold Tight” has more than its share of trouble — though the full extent of it doesn’t become clear until Mike and Tia Baye install spy software on their son’s computer. Adam is a 16-year-old goth with the expected attitude and some unexpected secrets, as his parents learn when they find an instant message advising him to “just stay quiet and all safe.”

“What would Adam need to stay quiet about in order to be safe?” his mother wonders, but Adam doesn’t stick around long enough to answer, and in the course of tracking him down, his parents learn that he’s mixed up in the suicide of his best friend, Spencer, and in the shady doings of a teen-oriented club in the Bronx that may be offering a bit more than alcohol-free entertainment. And the Bayes aren’t the only ones having a bad week. Their next-door neighbor has just learned that her dying son was fathered by someone other than her husband, and a psychopathic killer named Nash is, for mysterious reasons, dragging suburban moms into his van and pulverizing them.

Kidnapping, rape, Internet cabals, kids with drugs, kids with guns: Coben’s work might be accused of playing too ardently on the fears of the soccer-mom demographic, but he gives his families enough gumption to fight through their various terrors and enough layers to make you care about whether or not they end up in someone’s nasty white van with tinted windows. And if “Hold Tight” is forced to fall back on coincidence to tie up its loose threads, it nevertheless gives readers all the assets we’ve come to expect from Coben: killer pace, stripped-down prose that never overreaches itself, and a conservative and abiding belief in the family structure, even — make that especially — at its most fragile. Formula this may be, but nobody cooks up the ingredients better. — Louis Bayard

“The Forgery of Venus”
By Michael Gruber”

Absorbing suspense, well garnished with history and a dollop of high culture — so many “literary thrillers” promise just that, setting their contemporary characters hot on the trail of an antique mystery, name-checking the geniuses of the past as they go. Most of these books, however, seem to be written by people who know as much about, say, Leonardo da Vinci as can be skimmed from a dog-eared copy of “Fodor’s Guide to Italy.” Then there’s Michael Gruber, the master of the game, a pop Nabokov whose sterling prose, unreliable narrators and Möbius Strip plot devices bump the genre into previously unexplored territory. His 2007 bestseller, “The Book of Air and Shadows,” followed a lubricious attorney’s search for a long-lost Shakespeare play. His latest novel, “The Forgery of Venus,” is narrated by a conflicted painter who fabricates (or perhaps re-creates) one of several now-lost nudes that the Spanish painter Velásquez is believed to have produced in Rome in 1650.

Gruber’s choice is astute; though not as familiar to the masses as Rembrandt or Michelangelo, Velásquez is generally considered by other painters to be the greatest of the old masters. Gruber has a real understanding of painting, that witchery of chemistry and technique that conjures the luster of flesh, fur and satin out of calcite and iron oxide; at moments, the novel is almost fragrant with turpentine and linseed oil.

His narrator, Chaz Wilmot, the embittered son of a successful but hopelessly compromised Norman Rockwell type, dithers away his own talent until he comes to the attention of some rich, powerful and shadowy individuals. They have noted his uncanny ability to imitate the great painters of the past with a keen and mercenary interest. Chaz’s knack for artistic mimicry is further honed when he participates in a bizarre study on the effects of a drug called salvinorin A on creativity. The drug, known for stimulating hyper-vivid memories in those who take it, causes Chaz to relive not only his own past, but someone else’s, too. And that someone else appears to be Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velásquez.

Chaz is a mess, a cynical wisecracker and a screw-up who has allowed his disillusionment with the contemporary art world to corrode his soul. “Our icons are blank,” he complains to a friend, “and the only religion we see in the galleries is irony. I can do irony fine, but it makes me sick.” He’s not likable in any conventional sense, certainly not idealized in the usual fashion of pop-fictional heroes, but he’s completely believable. His struggle to find an honorable use for his own gifts becomes as gripping as the bizarre, possibly delusional conspiracy he gets caught up in.

Pervading the novel, as luminous, complex and elusive as Velásquez’s rendering of the pope’s white lace robes (“white is never white, only fools paint it so with actual white paint”), is the dream of art itself. It is, as one of the characters assures Chaz (paraphrasing Marcel Duchamp), “that which cannot be explained,” a mystery it takes a lifetime to solve. — Laura Miller

“Child 44″
By Tom Rob Smith

The heroes of most thrillers are damaged men with tragic pasts; they tend to feel guilty about a dead wife or estranged child, or they chew themselves up inside over some doomed innocent they failed to protect. These aren’t bad guys, however — quite the opposite. They are knights in slightly tarnished armor, over-committed to the job and way too hard on themselves, but ultimately on the side of right and good — yadda, yadda, yadda.

Leo Demidov, the protagonist of Tom Rob Smith’s flinty, Stalin-era detective thriller, “Child 44,” starts out guilty, really guilty. A war hero and loyal Communist Party apparatchik, he is an officer of the MGB (precursor to the KGB), and in the first few chapters of the novel, we learn that he has been complicit in more crimes against humanity than the best detectives ever get the chance to solve. All the machinery of the paranoid, dehumanizing totalitarian state — arrests, interrogations, denunciations, executions — is in full gear at the beginning of “Child 44″ (although things stutter a bit when Stalin dies midway through the novel) and Leo’s job is to provide people to be ground up by it. His victims are “ideological criminals”; as for actual crime, that’s supposed to be extinct in the perfected communist state. Anyone who suggests otherwise qualifies as an ideological criminal.

Thanks to his role in the persecution of a man who even he comes to see must be innocent, Leo has an inkling of his own culpability before the system inevitably turns on him and his wife, Raisa. The couple survives, barely, and Leo gets reassigned to an obscure rural police force where one of his past misdeeds catches up with him. The gruesome murder of a local girl reminds him of rumors about the death of a child back in Moscow — rumors that Leo was ordered to shut down, since a child-targeting serial killer is the sort of monster who can only be produced by the decadent West.

Although the conclusion of “Child 44″ is a bit outlandish, Smith otherwise handles this story (based on a notorious real-life case) with a grounded, muscular realism and some truly riveting action scenes. Unlike Martin Cruz Smith’s Arkady Renko, who solves crime in a Soviet Union that is already beginning to crumble from within, Leo must pursue his investigation near the peak of “1984″-style oppression and double-think. Unsympathetic superiors are a convention of the genre, but Leo has it exponentially worse than Dirty Harry, et al.: His bosses will destroy him for even suggesting that this crime is possible. His illusions pulverized, his wife finally free to announce that she married him out of fear instead of love, Leo sees catching the murderer as his last shot at redemption — literally. He knows he won’t survive the solving of it, and that the authorities can’t be trusted to dispense justice. Bleak as it is, the help Leo receives from an unexpected quarter provides a morsel of balm in what’s otherwise an almost unbearably relentless thriller. — L.M.

“Obedience”
By Will Lavender

Two signs that Winchester University is bit stranger than the average Midwestern college: At least one student is perpetually reading “City of Glass,” Paul Auster’s exercise in metaphysical noir, and the campus sports a statue of Stanley Milgram, who conducted that famous experiment demonstrating the average individual’s willingness to subject others to painful electric shocks if ordered to do so by an authority figure. Like every college, Winchester has its share of creepily intense student-professor dynamics, whether played out as illicit affairs, harassment complaints or the formation of fanatical cliques of intellectual followers. But at this school, the fervor is ratcheted up a few more notches.

In “Obedience,” Will Lavender’s suspense novel set at the fictional Winchester University, the professor in question is charismatic, mysterious and rather scary. His name is Leonard Williams (or is it?) and he teaches a course called Logic and Reasoning 204, in which the sole assignment is to solve a mystery. “There’s been a murder,” he announces on the first day of class, or rather “a murder that may happen in the future.” A teenage girl is missing. Who took her, and why? He gives his class a few shreds of evidence. That night, the students receive cryptic e-mails containing possibly staged photographs. Attempts to track down more information about the pictures result in reprimands from shadowy campus officials. Three of the students — a big man on campus, the studious girlfriend he dumped the year before and an emotionally fragile boy mourning his brother’s suicide — begin to wonder just how “hypothetical” professor Williams’ little thought experiment really is.

It must be said that “Obedience” is not one of those intricate, Swiss-clock thrillers in which every piece of the plot clicks smoothly into place and it all adds up perfectly in the end. While it may not be as enigmatic as Auster’s novels or David Lynch’s films, it shares their preference for atmospheric menace over strict logic. Halfway through, you may find yourself wondering how Lavender can possibly account for every twist in this metastasizing collection of ominous developments; he can’t … or at least, not entirely. But all of the elements are so striking — especially the recurring figure of a disturbing girl who keeps turning her head away, hiding her face — that you’re tempted to just go with it, and you should succumb to that temptation.

This is the sort of story in which a character, while retrieving her sweater from a cloakroom, is slipped a note reading, “None of this is real. I AM NOT HIS WIFE.” A library’s copy of a true crime book is revealed to contain nothing but blank pages. A roadside lounge, replete with weather-beaten poker players and a chatty bartender on one afternoon, is, when visited the next day, completely emptied of people and furniture. Plausible? Perhaps not. But “Obedience” is nevertheless a full course-load of sinister fun. — LM

“Losing You”
By Nicci French

I admit it. The whole time I was reading “Losing You,” the thriller by husband-and-wife writing team Nicci Gerrard and Sean French, I was busy casting the movie version. I have no idea if the film rights have even been sold, but if they have, the producers had better choose an actress ballsy enough to play the book’s heroine. If they don’t, they’ll have to answer to me and a goodly number of Gerrard fans, and I’m here to say it won’t be pretty.

Not that there’s anything exceptional about Nina Landry at first glance. She’s a divorcee, just turned 40, still struggling to stay civil with her ex and living for the time being on a remote island 60 miles east of London. (It was her ex’s idea to move there.) Christmas is less than a week away, and she’s about to take her two kids on a vacation to Florida with her new boyfriend. The tension is high, the packing isn’t finished, the car won’t work and Nina’s 15-year-old daughter, Charlie, has had the bad timing to throw her mother a surprise birthday party — a party Charlie hasn’t even bothered to attend. Now there’s only a few hours before the flight, and Charlie still hasn’t shown up and wait till I get my hands on that girl! Only it seems someone else may have had the same idea, because Charlie never comes home. And as disquiet gives way to blazing panic, Nina becomes a mother-avenger, chasing down every clue, shaking every tree, disdaining and finally ignoring the dim-bulb local constables who’ve been assigned to the case. There’s nobody she won’t piss off and nothing, finally, she won’t do to find out what’s happened.

“Losing You” plays out over what feels like real time — from roughly 10 in the morning to 6 in the evening — and although it builds slowly, it never once slackens. At the same time, it never forsakes the need for texture. The complex particulars of Nina’s and Charlie’s relationship are convincingly evoked, and the authors make shrewd use of their locale: the fictional Sandling Island, a place like “the edge of the world” — all foghorns and moaning winds and shrieking gulls — where Nina can “scarcely bear the sense of solitude that engulfed me” and where people can live and die without a trace.

What gives “Losing You” its chief distinction, though, is its unusually emotive color and its flinty protagonist, who, like any mother, understands that no one can possibly care as much about her child as she does. Nina is the parent we’d all like to be under duress, and I find I’ve become nearly as protective of her as she is of her daughter. A friendly warning, then, to any producer thinking of committing her story to film: Kate Winslet or nobody. — L.B.

What are your reading recommendations for this summer? Discuss them here!

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Louis Bayard: The signs are ominous, Laura. Book reviews are closing shop or drastically scaling back inventory. Film critics at newspapers all over America are getting tossed on their ears. TV reviewers are heard no more in the land. All the indicators suggest that America’s critics are becoming an increasingly endangered species.

Or maybe something a little more than endangered, judging from the title that’s just come across our desks: “The Death of the Critic.” Ronan McDonald, the author, is a lecturer in English and American studies at Britain’s University of Reading, and he’s particularly exercised by what he sees as the loss of the “public critic,” someone with “the authority to shape public taste.” It’s only in the final chapter that the mystery behind the critic’s disappearance is solved. The culprit is none other than … cultural studies! (With a healthy assist from poststructuralism.) By treating literature as an impersonal text from which any manner of political meaning can be wrung, cultural studies professors have robbed criticism of its proper evaluative function — the right to say this is good, this isn’t, and here’s why.

So, Laura, it seems that, if we aren’t quite dead, we critics are on something like life support.

Laura Miller: I suppose it’s only natural that McDonald, being an academic himself, would blame the academy. He believes that substantive scholarly criticism acts as a foundation for serious non-scholarly criticism — such as reviews and essays in newspapers and magazines — lending credibility to the idea that criticism (specifically, literary criticism) is a job for trained experts. When academia falls down on the job of, as you put it, saying what’s good and what’s not, then all criticism starts to look arbitrary and dispensable. We don’t have celebrated “public critics” now because critics don’t care about the public, not because the public doesn’t care about critics. What do you think: Is criticism responsible for its own demise?

Bayard: I think critics are just the canary in this particular coal mine. It’s no accident that McDonald locates the “Golden Age” of criticism at the midpoint of the 20th century, which was also the apogee of the modern novel, particularly the American novel. Novels — and novelists — mattered then in a way they simply don’t today. (William Styron’s posthumous essay collection is a potent reminder. The man got invited to the Kennedy White House on the strength of one novel!) Even if you think critics are parasites, you have to acknowledge they can only survive when their host organisms thrive. In this regard, I think McDonald is right: If we want to bring the critic back to life, we first have to resuscitate the novelist.

Miller: I agree that it’s hard to argue for the centrality of literary criticism when literature itself has become marginal. Most people in publishing chalk this up to the availability of too many other entertainment options. What brings people back to books tends to be the belief that they offer something especially meaningful, and it’s true that academic criticism has busied itself with undermining that belief for the past 50 years. However, even the criticism that McDonald admires for its reach — the New Criticism of the 1950s — may have contributed to the public’s lack of interest. Thanks to McDonald’s really excellent historical overview, I was reminded of how crucial critics were to modernism — all those difficult, even gnomic poems and novels needed to be explained to readers who were used to conventional narrative, meter and rhyme. The idea that to be worthy of serious attention, a literary work has to tear down or revolutionize the forms of the past — well, that makes literature exciting and criticism galvanizing and oh so Important for a while, but at a certain point there’s nothing left to dismantle. And meanwhile, the readers wandered off to read Stephen King or watch TV. Having gotten the “fuck you” message loud and clear they just stop listening to intellectuals.

Bayard: I think McDonald argues convincingly that the complete trashing of the traditional canon — of the very idea of a canon — has created a kind of inverse reaction: People are now hungering to be told what’s good. So maybe there’s hope for criticism after all? And as for the “fuck you” aspect of modernism, I agree with you as far as poetry goes. But when you think back to the great novelists of the mid-to-late 20th century, they were working largely in the naturalist vein. Even Philip Roth, for all his postmodern games, grounds much of his work in the closely observed realm of Jewish Newark. And James Wood, who most nearly approximates McDonald’s ideal of “the public critic,” is a standard-bearer for classical realism, as conservative in his way as Matthew Arnold.

Miller: Despite what the critics who championed modernism claimed about the obsolescence of the traditional novel, that’s more or less still what people want to write and read; fiction didn’t, for the most part, follow the example of “Ulysses.” And poststructuralism doesn’t have much to say about this one way or the other; the radicalism it promoted is political rather than artistic, a matter of whose voice gets heard and whose story gets told. In cultural studies, whether or not a work by a member of a previously silenced group is “good” or not is the wrong question: “Good” is understood to be a suspect term based on the self-interested values of those in power.

So the only critics left to evaluate most contemporary fiction are journalists, ranging in seriousness from someone like Wood to your average newspaper freelancer who mostly delivers plot summary. There are no critical movements evident today. James Wood has a well-formed, if rather austere aesthetic but he seems to be the only one who actually adheres in it. Of all the people I’ve met who admire Wood’s criticism I’ve yet to encounter anyone who actually subscribes to his fairly restrictive standards or taste. They like his writing and seem to feel braced by his rigor, but at the end of the day, they go home with Jonathan Franzen or Zadie Smith instead.

Bayard: I like that phrase “go home with” because, when I think about the critics I love the most, they’re not necessarily the ones I agree with, they’re the ones I’d like to date. I argue with them, but when they’re gone, their music is still bopping around in my brain. Many years ago, Susan Sontag, in “Against Interpretation,” argued for “an erotics of art.” Is it time now for an erotics of criticism? Instead of bemoaning the decline of literature, should we be doing a better job of showing people what they’re missing: the excitement of unexpected insights, the thrill of new voices, the sex of ideas? That sounds like a lot more fun than figuring out which fiefdom we’re going to defend in the Theory Wars. (I’ve a hunch Ronan McDonald would be on our side.)

Miller: You’re right! Why pillory theory, when even the people who used to espouse it are saying it’s dead? Let’s talk about what makes for a good critic. I often think that there are two kinds: the ones whose taste I find simpatico — the ones I come to for recommendations on what to read — and the ones who are themselves terrific writers, irrespective of what they recommend. Sometimes there’s an overlap, but not often.

There are critics, like Wood, that I go out of my way to read, although I have no intention of ever opening the books they tout. That’s indicative of an additional aspect to criticism besides evaluation (which McDonald wants to bring back to academic criticism) and interpretation (that is, elucidating the work and its many meanings, which we could use more of in journalistic criticism). It’s the literary worth of the criticism in and of itself, and the chance to see a sophisticated reader at work. McDonald was enthusiastic enough about William Hazlitt to make me pull an old collection of Hazlitt’s essays from my shelf and put it on my bedside table and get reacquainted with that beautiful mind. What’s your notion of a great critic, Louis?

Bayard: I find I’m drawn to critics for the same reason I’m drawn to any writer: the quality of their prose. They can misinterpret and misevaluate to their heart’s delight as long as they make the words dance. Helen Vendler and Harold Bloom may be preeminent in their respective fields, but I read their prose only under duress. Whereas, no matter how wrongheaded she is, I’ll read anything by Pauline Kael. Or Anthony Lane or Clive James or, yes, James Wood.

And thanks to McDonald’s book, I now want to read more of Northrop Frye, who fired this sterling round of grapeshot at T.S. Eliot for fiddling with the canon of great writers: “…all the literary chit-chat which makes the reputations of poets boom and crash in an imaginary stock-exchange. The wealthy investor, Mr. Eliot, after dumping Milton on the market, is now buying him again; Donne has probably reached his peak and will begin to taper off; Tennyson may be in for a slight flutter but the Shelley stocks are still bearish. This sort of thing cannot be part of any systematic study, for a systematic study can only progress: whatever dithers or vacillates or reacts is merely leisure-class gossip.” Of course, I take Frye’s thematic point — the vagaries of taste are a fickle criterion for evaluation — but I’m more impressed by the dazzling execution of that stock-market metaphor and that ever-so-subtle colon in the last sentence. Anyone who wants to write about writing should be able to write.

Miller: Oddly enough, I read Frye’s “Anatomy of Criticism” just last year. Not all of it, alas, is quite so witty as the line you quote (underlined in my copy!), but I still found it illuminating, however unfashionable Frye may be these days. That man was well-read; one of the more lamentable casualties of the theory boom was that it produced thousands of English majors who can speak Lacan but who’ve never read, say, Philip Sidney.

Which brings to mind McDonald’s complaints about the “democratizing” of criticism, the idea that anyone can and should do it and that no one opinion has more weight than any other. The blogosphere, as he sees it, is only the most visible manifestation of this broader, anti-authoritarian trend. Because academic critics have abandoned evaluation, the popular critics charged with saying whether a book is good or not have gotten “slack,” in McDonald’s eyes — deficient in rigor and scholarship. If anyone can do it, then surely it’s a skill that requires no expertise or cultivation. It’s true that anyone can dispense quickie, depthless, thumb’s-up/down judgments, but that doesn’t really enrich your experience and understanding of literature as a whole. And of course, that might be contributing to the impression that literature doesn’t offer anything special.

Bayard: Yeah, the blogosphere is the elephant in the room that McDonald never really gets round to discussing, but to my mind, it’s a far more pressing issue for criticism than theory is. Why pay a professional critic to evaluate something when you have a gazillion volunteer evaluators ready to fire off at any given moment? As McDonald says, criticism “is the only mode of literary writing that you can be confident most people will have tried in their lives.” We’ve all written critical essays at school. We’re all critics, or at least we fancy ourselves to be.

The problem with arguing for cultural gatekeepers is that, if you’re a professional critic, you inevitably look self-serving — “Hey, that’s my job!” — and yes, elitist — “Don’t try this at home, guys.” I myself don’t have any particular training or qualifications to be a reviewer, other than my own experience as a reader and writer, so I feel silly arguing that someone else isn’t qualified to deliver an opinion. And believe it or not, I’ve learned things from Amazon reviews, from letters pages, from literary blogs, from all sorts of non-traditional outlets. The quality of writing is certainly variable, but then so is the quality of traditional journalism.

Miller: I don’t think there’s a real causal connection between the blogosphere and the withering away of newspaper criticism, actually. It has more to do with the economics of newspaper publishing and management and editors feeling that criticism is disposable because it’s not reporting, which they see as a newspaper’s core product.

I think of blogs not as alternatives to reviews or essays, but as a forum for short items, news and remarks, as well as links and responses to longer pieces posted on the sites that commission them. I could be wrong, though, as I’m not really a reader of blogs. I have a hard enough time keeping up with the book review sections of the New York and Los Angeles Times, the New Yorker, the New York Review of Books, Bookforum, the Atlantic, Harper’s, TLS, the New Republic, etc., as well as the British newspapers like the Guardian and Independent, which I read online. Yet even in those publications I often find that the pieces I’m excited to be reading are the exception rather than the rule. I’m all for cultural gatekeepers because there’s way more out there than I have time to read and it’s not always easy to find the best of it.

As for qualifications, what qualifies Doris Lessing to be a celebrated novelist? Only the novels she’s written. If you and I agree that it’s good writing that makes a good critic, rather than simply the delivery of information and an opinion, then really good critics are as common as really good novelists — that is, not very. Talent is neither equitably nor widely distributed.

Bayard: For sure, talent is inequitably distributed in all art forms. I actually believe great critics are even rarer than great novelists or poets, and I wonder if that’s because criticism itself is held in such low esteem. (Brendan Behan once compared critics to harem eunuchs, which is relatively nice as the analogies go.) McDonald mentions that one of academia’s last havens for evaluative criticism has been the creative-writing class, and he suggests that universities should offer more in the way of “creative criticism” classes, teaching the craft of interpreting other people’s works. All the same, I’m skeptical this would reverse the current state of affairs. People will only value literary criticism to the extent they value literature. Unless we can arrest the decline of reading — and even Harry Potter hasn’t managed that wizard’s trick — then criticism will be swept away in the same mud slide.

Maybe McDonald’s next book should be “The Death of the Reader”?

Miller: It may indeed be a vicious circle: The less critics are valued, the fewer talented and original people apply themselves to the profession and the more it starts to seem like a job that anyone can do. During this conversation, I’ve come around to McDonald’s point about the need for academia to lend what’s left of its credibility to criticism as a whole: “Creative criticism” is, after all, exactly what English professors were once chiefly known for.

One thing academics don’t seem to grasp, however, is the overall decline in reading that you’ve cited. It hardly matters whether or not an English professor actually likes to read novels and poetry, does it? Books are the salt mine, and the academics are the miners. If anything, literary enthusiasm can be a detriment if your job is to prosecute books for their ideological crimes. When even English professors won’t stand up for literature, is it any wonder it’s failing? I hate to end on the same note we began on — blaming cultural studies — but unfortunately, McDonald is a bit stronger on diagnosis than cure, isn’t he?

As far as the death of the reader goes, I hope that the critic (who is, after all, just as much a reader as a writer) really isn’t the canary in the coal mine on this one, but I fear that you may be right about that.

Bayard: Well, it’s been a while since I was in college, but I do remember professors who loved English literature every bit as much as I do, so I don’t want to tar the whole profession out of hand. And I don’t want to end on too sour a note. There are still — there will always be — people who love to read. Maybe we begin simply by celebrating and rewarding that wherever we find it, and then we do the same with good books. Life’s too short to dwell on the dross.