Last night’s Super Bowl, in which the the New York Giants defeated the New England Patriots by 21 to 17, was one of the most exciting of the XLVI games so far. From the improbable first score — a two-point safety ruled against the Patriots’ Tom Brady on a technical violation — to Ahmad Bradshaw’s turn-around-and-sit-down touchdown with 57 seconds remaining, the Giants’ four-point win was almost enough to blot out the image of 53-year-old Madonna strutting and fretting upon a stage that looked as if it had been left over from an Obama rally.

Three years ago, after the heart-pounding finish to an earlier Super Bowl, I wondered why there are not more American football novels. Not much is new or changed since then. Eli Manning, last night’s winning quarterback, collaborated with his brother Peyton Manning and their father Archie Manning — all three of them signal callers in the NFL — to produce a children’s book called Family Huddle (“Archie was in the front yard in New Orleans, playing with his three sons, Cooper, Peyton, and Eli. It was Peyton’s turn at their favorite game: Amazing catches.”) Ex-players like Tiki and Ronde Barber and Jason Elam also turned out disposable popular titles.

But novels that take the American game seriously are few and far between. Joiner (1971) is the most promising, and not because James Whitehead played football at Vanderbilt before an injury reduced him to literature. Eugene (Sonny) Joiner, narrator and protagonist, is an offensive lineman rather than a glamor player; he squints up at the game from an unusual position. Ultimately, though, the novel falls victim to post-1968 nonsense. Styling himself a “radical historian,” Joiner teaches calculus and spelling to underprivileged children at a progressive school after he quits pro football, and becomes the disciple of a fifteenth-century Hussite.

The late Peter Gent ran routes and caught passes for the Dallas Cowboys for five seasons in the sixties, then wrote North Dallas Forty (1973), a novel that was more distinguished for its rage at the professional sport than for its scenes of action on the field. Dan Jenkins’s Semi-Tough (1972) displayed a raw satiric talent, but was nearly as angry in tone as Gent’s novel, filled with gall. His 1984 novel Life Its Ownself, with the twin linebackers Orangejello and Limejello, is a great favorite of COMMENTARY editor John Podhoretz, who describes it as a work of comic genius. (I think it’s funnier if you don’t already know that Mark Lemongello was a righthanded pitcher for the Houston Astros in the late Seventies.) Don DeLillo’s End Zone (1972) has great fun with the language of the game (“Monsoon sweep, string-in-left, ready right, cradle out, drill-9 shiver, ends chuff”), but it is not about football as the game was played last night at Lucas Oil Stadium, but a wild, wacky football that is more metaphor than reality.

Much the same is true of Howard Nemerov’s far less ambitious novel The Homecoming Game (1957), which does not even try to describe what occurs on the field. Here a professor’s F, leaving the star ineligible for the big game, serves merely as a pretext for an exploration of moral ambiguity. Ivan Doig’s The Eleventh Man (2008), which follows the members of a state championship team after they enlist for the Second World War, is more attentive to life after football. John R. Tunis, perhaps the greatest sports novelist of all time, wrote only one book about football. All-American (1942) is the best of a bad harvest — understanding that it is a boys’ book and that, like all of Tunis’s books, it has more to do with a boy’s fumbling for values than handling a ball. No one is better at describing the action on the field, but many readers will find Tunis dated, and his moral concerns inartistic and unliterary. So too for the other boys’ novelist who wrote about football: the former basketball coach Clair Bee, whose series of “Chip Hilton” books were my passionate favorites as a kid.

Perhaps the problem is that football is understood (wrongly) as the least individual of sports, where ignorant coaching systems clash by night; or perhaps the problem is that The Great Gatsby’s Tom Buchanan cast the mold for football players in American literature, condemning them for all time to being represented as careless brutes. The truth is that it is the most masculine of sports, more so even than boxing, not merely because it requires manliness, which Harvey Mansfield defines as confidence in a situation of risk (boxing takes that too), but because it demands the masculine virtues— patience, patrimony, moral courage, physical strength, loyalty to friends, submission to legitimate authority, service to others.

Especially with the hyperventilating anxiety about concussions in football, the game is rich in moral complexity. You’d think it would attract America’s best literary talents. Not so, apparently. James Wright’s little poem “Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio” may be the best thing ever written about football. The best book-length stuff is history and reportage: John J. Miller’s The Big Scrum, Michael Lewis’s The Blind Slide, Lars Anderson’s Carlisle vs. Army: Jim Thorpe, Dwight Eisenhower, Pop Warner, and the Forgotten Story of Football’s Greatest Battle, H. G. Bissinger’s Friday Night Lights, David Fleming’s Breaker Boys: The NFL’s Greatest Team and the Stolen 1925 Championship. The definitive American football novel is yet to be written.

No one at all reads literary scholarship, and there is far too much poetry for any human being to read. Or, in other words, two of the three legs of literary culture’s three-legged stool are wobbling dangerously. And fiction, the remaining leg, has been sawed in half — “genre” fiction has been taken away for a different project, and only “literary” fiction remains.

The problem, as I’ve said before, is one of markets. Over the past three decades literary scholars, poets, and writers of “literary” fiction have responded rationally to economic opportunities and limitations. But those opportunities have been almost entirely opportunities for careers in university departments of English. The literary market has been reduced to academic committees — hiring committees, tenure committees, salary committees, promotion committees — none of which considers sales or readership (or, in the case of literary scholarship, citations by other scholars) in reaching its decisions.

As the poet Dana Gioia wrote two decades ago in the Atlantic:

The proliferation of literary journals and presses over the past 30 years has been a response less to an increased appetite for poetry among the public than to the desperate need of writing teachers for professional validation. Like subsidized farming that grows food no one wants, a poetry industry has been created to serve the interests of the producers and not the consumers. And in the process the integrity of the art has been betrayed.

Literature in America has become a fully subsidized market. Among literary scholars, in fact, the ideology of production is exactly the reverse of Dr. Johnson’s: no man but a blockhead writes for money. There is respect and honor in writing for specialized journals that no one reads, although every university library in the country subscribes to them. There is only compromise and superficiality in writing to be read. Scholars are judged on the bulk and prestige of their CV’s, not the originality and influence of their research and writing.

The literary scholar Mark Bauerlein is devastating on “The Research Bust” in the Chronicle of Higher Education:

[A]fter four decades of mountainous publication, literary studies has reached a saturation point, the cascade of research having exhausted most of the subfields and overwhelmed the capacity of individuals to absorb the annual output. Who can read all of the 80 items of scholarship that are published on George Eliot each year? After 5,000 studies of Melville since 1960, what can the 5,001st say that will have anything but a microscopic audience of interested readers?

When he must propose a solution to the problem, however, Bauerlein falls back upon fantasies of institutional reform: “The time has come . . . for [English] departments firmly to declare the counterpoint: ‘No! We ask for less because we judge on quality, not quantity. We are raising standards, not lowering them [by reducing the demand for publication].’ ”

If possible, the critic Robert Archambeau is even more cavalier in addressing American poetry’s “problem of the multitude.” There is so much to read that even those who are devoted to contemporary poetry “must tune out certain presses, journals, styles, schools, forms, or even generations,” he observes. There is simply “no way to keep track of the multitude of new books,” no way to sort good from mediocre. What to do? What to do? Archambeau shrugs:

The multitude is the condition of American poetry in our time. The problem of the multitude, though, exists only for poets ambitious for recognition, and readers who wish to feel they can read everything worth reading.

Abandon all literary ambition, in short, along with any practical means of literary evaluation. And what becomes of poetry under this new “condition,” then? It becomes pretty much the same as electronic gaming. It is an absorbing hobby with a lot of participants and no audience.

The real problem is not in the institutions with which writers and scholars affiliate themselves and make careers. The real problem is in the thinking behind academic affiliation and career advancement. Writers and scholars have severed their ties with ordinary readers and placed their fate in the hands of a bureaucratized elite. The class that rules the institutions of literary life in America establish and uphold the standards by which writing and scholarship are to be judged, and inevitably these are the standards that confirm and expand their own authority.

There is another conception of literary authority, however, in which authority derives from a literary tradition, which entails faithfulness to experience and responsibility to an audience. The tradition of the 19th-century novel, for example, is still rewarded in the marketplace. Who knows but that a return to the tradition of Robert Frost and Edwin Arlington Robinson might not do the same for American poetry, or a return to the tradition of Lionel Trilling and Yvor Winters might not do the same for literary scholarship? Poets and scholars will have to stop writing for committees and return to writing for readers — actual readers, ideal readers — if they have any hope of repairing their legs of the stool.

The year 2011 was another bad year for literature. Few distinguished books were published, book sales declined from month to month, booksellers shuttered their stores, and literary prizes (with a couple of exceptions) went to mediocrities. Before steeling ourselves for the inevitable disappointments of 2012, let’s review the top literary stories of the year:

#10. The Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature, an honor bestowed annually upon one of the world’s celebrated second-rate writers with agreeable politics.

#9. Little, Brown recalled 6,500 copies of the spy thriller Assassin of Secrets and turned them into pulp after revelations that Q. R. Markham had plagiarized much of the book. Protesting that he was suffering from an addiction, Markham advanced the Disease Theory of Plagiarism — his first original contribution to literature.

#8. “Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior,” an excerpt from Amy Chua’s memoir Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, provoked nearly 9,000 comments at the Wall Street Journal and set off an international debate about child-rearing methods.

#7. The American novelist Philip Roth was awarded the International Man Booker Prize, igniting a controversy when the feminist publisher Carmen Callil walked off the prize jury, sniffing that she did not “rate him as a writer at all.”

#6. Jennifer Egan won the Pulitzer Prize in fiction for A Visit from the Goon Squad — a rare example of the prize’s going to the best book of the year (or nearly the best). HBO promptly announced plans to adapt the novel into a TV series.

#5. Judge Denny Chin, a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, rejected the $125 million settlement negotiated between Google and the Authors Guild, concluding that it “would give Google a significant advantage over competitors, rewarding it for engaging in wholesale copying of copyrighted works without permission. . . .” By the end of the year, Google was seeking to kick the Authors Guild out of the copyright suit.

#4. Literary history was made at the National Book Awards, at least according to the Washington Post fiction critic Ron Charles, when Nikky Finney and Jesmyn Ward, “[t]wo spectacularly powerful African American women,” were awarded the prizes in poetry and fiction respectively.

#3. After filing for bankruptcy in February, Borders was forced to close its last remaining stores and liquidate its inventory in July after failing to receive a single offer to save the bookstore chain.

#2. Amazon.com announced that, for the first time, sales of Kindle-ready ebooks on its website surpassed sales of hardback and paperback books combined.

#1. The courageous and contrarian essayist Christopher Hitchens, who taught an entire generation of young writers the virtue of truth-seeking in literature, died after an 18-month battle with esophageal cancer.

Hitchens’s was not the only important literary voice to be silenced in 2011. Other deaths in the literary world included:

• Joe Gores, American mystery novelist (January 10).
• Wilfrid Sheed, Anglo-American novelist (January 19).
• Reynolds Price, American novelist (January 20).
• Édouard Glissant, Martinican poet and novelist (February 3).
• Bo Carpelan, Finnish poet and novelist (February 11).
• Arnošt Lustig, Czech writer of Holocaust novels (February 26) [h/t: Erika Dreifus].
• John Haines, American poet (March 2).
• L. J. Davis, American novelist (April 6).
• Stephen Watson, South African poet and critic (April 10).
• Patrick Cullinan, South African poet (April 14).
• Jeanne Leiby, editor of the Southern Review (April 19).
• Gonzalo Rojas, Chilean poet (April 25).
• Joanna Russ, American science fiction novelist and feminist (April 29).
• Yannis Varveris, Greek poet (May 25).
• Josephine Hart, British novelist (June 2).
• Robert Kroetsch, Canadian novelist and co-founder of the journal Boundary 2.
• Ágota Kristóf, Hungarian-Swiss novelist (July 27).
• Eliseo Alberto, anti-Castro Cuban novelist and essayist (July 31).
• Stan Barstow, British novelist (August 1).
• David Holbrook, British literary scholar (August 11).
• Samuel Menashe, American poet (August 22).
• Susan Fromberg Schaeffer, American novelist (August 26).
• Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg (September 6).
• Ida Fink, Polish writer of Holocaust fiction (September 27).
• Hella S. Haasse, Dutch novelist (September 29).
• Gerald Shapiro, American Jewish story writer and editor (October 15).
• John Morton Blum, American historian (October 17).
• Piri Thomas, American memoirist (October 17).
• Allen Mandelbaum, American translator of Virgil and Dante (October 27).
• Morris Phillipson, American novelist and director of the University of Chicago Press (November 3).
• Tomás Segovia, Spanish exile poet (November 7).
• F. Springer (pseudonym of Carel Jan Schneider), Dutch novelist (November 7).
• Peter Reading, British poet (November 17).
• Daniel Sada, Mexican poet (November 18).
• Ruth Stone, American poet (November 19).
• Christa Wolf, German novelist and critic (December 1).
• Christopher Logue, British poet (December 2).
• Russell Hoban, American novelist (December 13).
• Joe Simon, American comic-book writer (December 14).
• Paula Hyman, American Jewish historian (December 15).

In the Introduction to Listening to God (Toby Press, 500 pages), Rabbi Shlomo Riskin starts off by quoting the Kotzker Rebbe, a notoriously severe Hasidic thinker, then the Bible, followed by another Hasidic tzaddik and the great biblical commentators Rashi and Nahmanides. After this roster of unsurprising Jewish sources comes an entirely unanticipated reference:

I agree with Harry Potter’s Professor Dumbledore that it is the decisions we make, rather than the intellectual gifts with which we are endowed, that are ultimately the measure of the human being and the life that one lives.

Riskin is a name to conjure with in Modern Orthodoxy. Founder of the Lincoln Square Synagogue, he is famous for his outreach to lapsed Jews, winning back many souls for religious Judaism. Listening to God is a collection of inspirational stories very much in the ethos of outreach and “return.” The tone is consistently one of spiritual uplift. Whether Harry Potter belongs in the same category is a question that can only be answered by readers more knowledgeable than I about the books. The “elective affinity,” though, suggests something deeper than cultural fashion and influence.

The annual lists of the Year’s Best Books are a rite of literary journalism — a vacuous rite, if you ask me, by which critics make themselves the shills of the publishing trade. (Not that I don’t participate as eagerly as anyone else!)

’Tis the season, too, for shopping guides. COMMENTARY herewith offers a different kind of shopping guide. COMMENTARY writers and friends of the magazine were asked to recommend a novel for holiday buying or reading — their personal favorite, their personal secret. It’s an eclectic list (I’ve only read five of the titles myself), but every book on the list is something you will want to hunt down as quickly as possible. Supplies are going fast! Remember: there are only 17 shopping days left until Christmas! Here is a good place to start your wish list for that hard-to-please reader in your family or your bed!

The books are arranged alphabetically by author, with the recommender’s name in bold afterwards, followed by his or her comments.

Aravind Adiga, The White Tiger (2008). Matthew Ackerman, Middle East Analyst for The David Project and a contributor to COMMENTARY:

Enlightening take on modern India. Great anti-hero narrator with a superb voice. Man Booker prize winner.

Isaac Asimov, Foundation (1951). Omri Ceren, author of Mere Rhetoric and a contributor to COMMENTARY:

A briskly written but sweepingly comprehensive survey of the constitutive vagaries in the human condition: the ebb and flow of empire, the ever-present specter of civilizational decline, the indeterminacy of social progress, and — despite these fundamental challenges — the ability of carefully crafted institutions, designed with careful attention to human imperfection, to preserve knowledge and transcend history. Also the series has spaceships and eventually robots, and is one of the most entertaining reads in existence.

John Bellairs, The Face in the Frost (1969). Michael Weingrad, director of the Jewish Studies program at Portland State University and author of “Why There Is No Jewish Narnia”:

I have a soft spot for this gothic-comic tale of two not-terribly-powerful wizards and the lurking menace they must face. It’s no Lord of the Rings, but it is a confection of horror and whimsy perfect for a fireside evening.

Romain Gary, The Life Before Us (1975), trans. Ralph Manheim (1978). Erika Dreifus, author of Quiet Americans:

I can’t say anything about the translations into English, but this is quite likely the funniest sad novel I’ve read, in any language. At the novel’s core: the relationship between its first-person narrator — a young boy of Arab descent called Momo — and the elderly Jewish ex-prostitute (also an Auschwitz survivor) who is responsible for his care. I’d read nothing like it before it was assigned in a class 20-plus years ago, and I’ve read nothing like it since.

William Gay, Twilight (2006). William Giraldi, author of Busy Monsters:

Gay had the title before a Mormon housewife filched it for her prudish vampires. Owing much to Faulkner, O’Connor, and McCarthy at his bloodiest, Gay’s gorgeously wrought novel is a human-horror story so depraved it will remind you why you’re afraid of the dark.

Olga Grushin, The Dream Life of Sukhanov (2005). Seth Mandel, Assistant Editor of COMMENTARY:

As we mark the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Soviet Union while Russians are protesting in the streets of Moscow by the thousands to call for free and fair elections, Grushin’s first novel has a new relevance. Anatoly Pavlovich Sukhanov, the title character, gave up a life as a talented underground artist for the mindless comfort of an apparatchik’s career, the salary it comes with, and the stability of having a family with his beautiful wife. But the plot takes place as Gorbachev begins unintentionally deconstructing the rigid society Sukhanov gave up his dreams for, his family emotionally and physically abandons him, and he is haunted near to the point of madness by his past, as it comes rushing back in the form of vivid daydreams and the excruciating sense of nostalgia and regret that he can no longer hide from.

Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go (2005). Linda Chavez, author of Unlikely Conservative and a contributor to COMMENTARY:

Haunting and touching in equal measure. As in Remains of the Day, Ishiguro once again creates characters who live in a world not of their making, but who are forced by circumstance to make choices that reveal the complexity of the contemporary moral landscape. In this case, Ishiguro places his story in a not-too-distant future in which medical science has made it possible to prolong life indefinitely for some, but at the cost of devaluing it for the unfortunate others upon whom the scheme rests. The prose is sparing but packs an emotional wallop uncommon in today’s fiction.

Dave Kattenburg, Foxy Lady: Truth, Memory and the Death of Western Yachtsmen in Democratic Kampuchea (2011). Bethany Mandel, Social Media Associate for COMMENTARY:

It’s a book about nine Westerners who stumbled into Cambodia during the Khmer Rouge era, and who met an untimely death alongside thousands of Cambodians in the main torture prison. The story follows the author’s journey through four continents as he uncovers the story of the men who died and watches the trial of the man who ran the prison. There’s plenty of books out there that tell the story of Cambodians in the Khmer Rouge time, but this is a relatable story of people who accidentally became part of history in a tragic way.

James Kirkwood, There Must Be a Pony! (1960). John Steele Gordon, author of An Empire of Wealth and a contributor to COMMENTARY:

Kirkwood was the son of silent movie stars Lila Lee and James Kirkwood, Sr., and the novel is a more or less thinly veiled memoir. It is often very funny and sometimes achingly sad. It isn’t easy growing up the son of famous people, who always tend to be self-absorbed, especially if their careers are on the wane. Kirkwood wrote several other novels worth reading including Good Times/Bad Times and P.S. Your Cat Is Dead. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama as the co-author of the book of A Chorus Line.

A. M. Klein, The Second Scroll (1951). Ruth R. Wisse, author of The Modern Jewish Canon and Jews and Power:

In 1949 the Canadian poet A.M. Klein went on a fact-finding mission to see what was left of the Jews in Europe, Morocco, and Palestine. The Second Scroll, his only published novel, is a fictional account of such a journey, cast as a modernist epic in a high literary style to transmit the magnitude of the Jewish renewal. We were not present when Moses led the Children of Israel out of Egypt, but Klein feels he was there during an exodus and ingathering of no less consequence. This book is spiritual-intellectual red meat for readers who may have tired of their diets of minimalism, irony, and polymorphous perversity.

György Konrád, The Case Worker (1969), trans. Paul Aston (1974). Patrick Kurp, author of Anecdotal Evidence:

I still remember Irving Howe’s review in the Times. I reread Konrád every few years, including earlier this year. I don’t know a better novel about children, disability, madness, the animal in man. Gorgeously written, even in translation.

Janet Lewis, The Wife of Martin Guerre (1941). D. G. Myers, author of The Elephants Teach and LITERARY COMMENTARY:

In the 16th-century French Pyrenees, a husband returns after an eight-year absence much changed. His wife loves him with joyful passion until she begins to suspect that he is an imposter, and turns against him. A tragedy that could not end otherwise than it does, Lewis’s novel shows that there are some human desires that are stronger than erotic passion — and among them is the desire to remain faithful. (A fuller account is here.)

Candia McWilliam, What to Look For in Winter (2010). Sam Schulman, a contributor to COMMENTARY:

A 53-year-old Scottish novelist begins to lose her sight through blepharospasm — being unable to open one’s eyelids. With three children, all with different last names, of two fathers, and a handful of novels — her presiding genius is Sybille Bedford — she has lived through writing, and reading. Now she can only read books on tape, and she dictates this memoir:

I am six foot tall and afraid of small people.
I am a Scot.
I am an alcoholic.
There is nothing wrong with my eyes.
I am blind.
I cannot lose my temper though I am being helped to. . . .
I exude marriedness and I am alone.

Those are her compass bearings. Here is a typical sentence, describing the contents of her mother’s workbasket: “The pinking shears were so heavy and specific that they lived in a holster in the sewing chest with the button box, the cotton reels and the Kwik-unpik, a natty hook for the slashing open of stitches mainly to ‘let things down,’ or to ‘let things out,’ terms perhaps now unknown outwith the psychotherapeutic context.” One of the great books.

George R. R. Martin, A Dance with Dragons (2011). Jonathan S. Tobin, Senior Online Editor of COMMENTARY:

The latest installment in the brilliant fantasy series that inspired HBO’s Game of Thrones. But these novels are not what you’d expect from the genre since they’re beautifully written and filled with fascinating, complex characters.

Christopher Moore, Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal (2002). Michael Rubin, resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and a contributor to COMMENTARY:

A Catholic priest who shares my offbeat sense of humor recommended Lamb to me a few Christmases back when we were both lecturing at an army base around the holidays. With tongue-in-cheek, Lamb explores the childhood of Jesus Christ through the eyes of childhood pal Biff. The story is wickedly funny, but also respectful. After a run-in with the Romans in Galilee, Biff and Jesus (or Joshua as he was known) set out on an epic adventure to track down the Three Magi — all adherents of Eastern religions. Their journey takes them to Afghanistan, China, and India, where their interactions not only illuminate Judaism, Christianity, Buddhism, Taoism, and Hinduism — but also answer such age-old questions such as why Jews eat Chinese food on Christmas.

Alan Paton, Cry, The Beloved Country (1948). Peter Wehner, senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and a contributor to COMMENTARY:

Because it’s a book of unusual power, deeply moving and at times lyrical, with vivid characters. Because a great novel emerged out of a great (and real) tragedy and injustice, apartheid in South Africa. And because it reminds us that there is enough hating already in our lands and that the dawn will come, as it has come for a thousand centuries.

Jack Pendarvis, Awesome (2008). Mark Athitakis, author of American Fiction Notes:

A book of more recent vintage, which didn’t get a fair shake since its publisher essentially collapsed when it came out. It’s a riff on tall tales that satirizes modern-day narcissism.

Steven Pressfield, Gates of Fire (1998). Joseph Epstein, author of Gossip and Fabulous Small Jews:

An historical novel about the Spartans at Thermopylae that is brilliantly written, richly detailed, and, friends who are classical scholars tell me, has historical accuracy.

Robert Silverberg, Dying Inside (1972). Andrew Fox, author of The Good Humor Man:

Silverberg offers telepathy as a metaphor for any tremendous gift or personal ability which distorts all the other aspects of a person’s selfhood, or causes his full personhood to atrophy. David Selig, Silverberg’s protagonist, who is slowly losing his ability to read other people’s minds, an ability he has relied upon his entire life to the virtual exclusion of any other talent, is a science fictional Bobby Fischer, a prodigy whose extraordinary ability in one narrow realm has benighted the lives of those closest to him and helped twist David into a despicable human being. David’s slow, painful coming to terms with the approaching death of the only thing which has ever made him special stands, along with Daniel Keyes’ Flowers for Algernon, as one of science fiction’s finest achievements in the portrayal of loss and bereavement.

Honor Tracy, The Straight and Narrow Path (1956). Terry Teachout, author of Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong and a contributor to COMMENTARY:

A cruelly, wildly funny tale of Irish village life told from the point of view of an innocent visitor who wants to be charmed by the comprehensive inefficiencies of the insular, alien culture into which he has thrust himself, but finally ends up longing to exterminate all the brutes. Though she is now remembered (if at all) as a “humorist,” Tracy’s wit was far sharper and more penetrating than that bland word would suggest, and The Straight and Narrow Path, her second and best novel, is one of the smartest portrayals of cross-cultural confusion ever to see print.

David Foster Wallace, The Pale King (2011). Rick Richman, author of Jewish Current Issues and a contributor to COMMENTARY:

A book about an IRS Regional Examination Center and its trainee, “David Foster Wallace,” who goes through boredom-survival training to cope with the endlessly tedious work. The Pale King is a meditation on overcoming the apparent pointlessness of life, by a person tragically unable to survive it even at the pinnacle of his success as the most extraordinary writer of his generation. (A fuller account is here.)

COMMENTARY readers are encouraged to add their own quirky and idiosyncratic recommendations by means of the comment thingamajig below.

The Association of Jewish Studies has announced the two winners of the Jordan Schnitzer Book Awards.

Marina Rustow of the Johns Hopkins University was honored in the category of ancient and medieval Jewish history for Heresy and the Politics of Community: The Jews of the Fatimid Caliphate (Cornell University Press). A history of Karaism, Rustow’s book sets out to challenge the received scholarly notions of “heresy” and “mainstream.” Rustow is more interested in the social conditions that give rise to accusations of heresy than in defining the slippery concept.

Shachar M. Pinsker of the University of Michigan was honored in the category of Jewish literature and linguistics for Literary Passports: The Making of Modernist Hebrew Fiction in Europe (Stanford University Press). Two more runners-up were recognized: Gabriella Safran of Stanford University for Wandering Soul: The Dybbuk’s Creator, S. An-Sky (Harvard University Press), a book that I described on Jewish Ideas Daily as one of last year’s best, and Maeera Y. Shreiber of the University of Utah for Singing in a Strange Land: A Jewish American Poetics (Stanford University Press).

The great Jewish historian Lucy M. Dawidowicz once said that Jewish scholarship was a route to Jewish identity, and one of the richest. Scholars like Rustow, Pinsker, Safran, and Shreiber demonstrate just how right she was. They will be honored in ten days at the annual AJS convention, which is being held in Washington this year.

Yesterday’s New York Times carried a story on “invitation-only” book clubs among “young and attractive” New Yorkers with “impressive degrees” and the “angst that comes with being young and unmoored,” who, unable to find work in publishing or academe, “huddle” together in book-filled apartments to “trade heady banter” on great (or merely fashionable) writers and hoot at ideas their high-priced educations have taught them to hoot at. I defy anyone to read the story and not to conclude that the collapse of the high-end literary market is a very good thing, and not a moment too soon.

The Times reports the plight of the young literary enthusiast as if her discontent were new. Two and a half centuries ago, in “The Vanity of Human Wishes,” Samuel Johnson gave someone in her position some good advice: if you are able to keep your virtue while pursuing truth; if you are able to sustain your passion while studying long and hard to gain a full and comprehensive knowledge; if you are able to follow reason without wandering off even once into “tempting novelty”; if you are able to resist praise and overcome difficulty; if you do not fall prey to laziness, gloom, or disease; then and only then you should “pause awhile from letters” to consider this:

There mark what ills the scholar’s life assail,
Toil, envy, want, the patron, and the jail.

The literary market, with a publishing trade as a source of employment for laboring writers, is only about as old as Johnson’s satire. Before the mid-18th century, the poet and the scholar (the term writer was not yet common) depended upon patronage or inherited wealth. These and the debtors’ prison were gradually replaced by publishers and bankruptcy. Toil, envy, and want remained untouched.

For two hundred years writers wrote for money, and the institutions of the literary life — cash-paying publications and publishing houses — shaped their literary ambitions and achievements. The living (and the literature) were precarious. After the Second World War, the literary market began to dwindle (television is the usual suspect, although the expansion of university education under first the G.I. Bill and then the guaranteed student loan program is a more likely cause). A new form of patronage arose to shield writers from market forces: namely, the national system of creative writing — the Writers’ Workshops — that spread from coast to coast.

What is happening now is the revenge of the market. A high literary culture, utterly divorced from economic realities, was artificially propped up for fifty years. In rather more technical terms, American literary culture is an inefficient market; its products are overpriced, and there aren’t many buyers for them at any rate. As the air goes out of the higher education bubble, the literary life as fantasized by the New York Times’s attractive young literary cubs is deflating along with it.

Which is not to say that literature will disappear. Young writers’ expectations of a good-paying job (with benefits) fiddling all day on overwritten and unsaleable manuscripts — that will disappear. Most everything else will remain the same. Toil, envy, and want will still be the writer’s lot in life. The old economic conditions will be new again. And writers (and maybe even critics) will have to pay attention to them. That’s the only real change. Deal with it, clubbers.

Now that his plagiarized spy thriller Assassin of Secrets has been yanked from the bookstores and turned into pulp, Quentin Rowan has gone public with his “confession” in 2,500 words at The Fix. As befits someone known for plagiarism, Rowan apes Rousseau’s Confessions in dwelling on incidents of humiliation and shame.

Rowan also takes a thoroughly unoriginal approach to ducking responsibility. He equates his literary offenses with alcoholism. Call it the Disease Theory of Plagiarism:

Why did I do it? I think the truth goes back to the late ’90s, when I was newly sober (counting days, actually) in a small, mid-western liberal arts college with an astonishing library. That’s where I became a word thief: skimming through collected issues of old magazines like the Transatlantic Review and New World Writing and Eugene Jolas’ Transition, bound in crimson hardcover. I was 20 years old, and trying to write a short story for the first or second time when I came upon a paragraph I liked from a short story by B. S. Johnson called “What did you say the Name of the Place was?” It was so easy to do, as easy as picking up a drink, if you think about it. The lifted paragraph perfectly fit my narrative. And it temporarily assuaged the awful feeling I had in my head that I was no good as a writer. In retrospect, maybe that’s when I transferred my obsession from drinking and drugs to plagiarism. My addiction didn’t disappear; it simply morphed into something else.

The trouble with this theory is that alcoholism is a choice, and so is plagiarism. Long ago Rowan chose not to be an author, but a plagiarist — not to discover his own exact words, but to kidnap others’. This is pretty much how Martial used the word when he introduced it to the literate world in the first century of the Common Era:

Commendo tibi, Quintiane, nostros —
nostros dicere si tamen libellos
possum, quos recitat tuus poeta:
si de seruitio graui queruntur,
adsertor uenias satisque praestes,
et, cum se dominum uocabit ille,
dicas esse meos manuque missos.
Hoc si terque quaterque clamitaris,
inpones plagiario pudorem.

In my own meager translation of epigram 1.52:

To you, sir, I commend my books —
If they’re still mine now that you took
My phrases out of slavery,
Under your guidance, to roam free.
Their author, though? In the book lists,
Sir, you’re down as their plagiarist.

Rowan sighs that he “probably deserved” to be called all the names he was called — meaning, of course, that he did not deserve the names at all — before ending with a plea for understanding. He is not “morally weak,” you understand. He is simply powerless over his compulsion to plagiarize. That is, he is eager to blame his “disease,” a hobgoblin that exists only to absorb run-off responsibility. In his next essay for The Fix, Rowan will announce the formation of a 12-step program for recovering plagiarists. He will call it Literary Apes Anonymous.

His confession will not be enough to resurrect Rowan’s literary career, though. Plagiarists don’t have literary careers. Perhaps it will be enough to launch one.