I wasn't going to blog any more about the Salon review, except I have to comment on one of the letters. This from a gentleman named Hilesh Patel:

"It seems, along with recent comments by A.S. Byatt about Harry Potter, that we are talking just as much about class as we are about what Yagoda calls 'literary values.' Beyond the simple opposition of commercial success vs. true literature, there lies an undercurrent of smugness.

"Maybe if Mr. Yagoda wasn't wearing his New Yorker sweater so visibly, his words would be easier to swallow. To add to his running sports metaphor, I'm not sure I would even be allowed to play ball in his sports complex."

I think Mr. Patel has hit this particular nail slam on the head. Any time the argument is about "high" vs. "popular" art, it's about class. Remember how dismayed Jonathan Franzen was that THE CORRECTIONS was going to be an Oprah Book Club pick? There's an assumption often made that most people's sensibilities are not well enough developed to appreciate great art. So if a work is popular, it can't be great art: if it were, not nearly so many people would enjoy it. Whole genres, crime fiction among them, are dissed and dismissed in this way.

Interestingly, one of the first writers -- and one of the writers most savage about it -- to place his books squarely with the people who wouldn't be allowed in the upper class sports complex was Raymond Chandler. In content, his hero is a lower-class knight, a guy who was fired from law enforcement for insubordination and who dropped out of college. This is often read as shorthand for: he refused a proffered position among the powerful, because, unlike them, he had honor. Chandler's books are replete with bad guys but the worst are always the most powerful, best educated -- many are doctors -- and most refined.

That's content. In form, he wrote detective novels. Chandler knew how good a prose stylist he was, and was bitter because he wasn't recognized for it by the literary establishment, just shrugged off as a crime writer -- but he never wrote anything else. That was a choice, ladies and gentlemen. And you do have to wonder how many of his present-day champions would have leapt to his defense fifty years ago, when he was alive, and writing detective novels.