SIX of us were dining at a fashionably dingy restaurant near Union Square in Manhattan, having just come from a reading of new fiction held at the massive Barnes & Noble that had just opened on the Square. The conversation came round to the bookstore itself, and someone said hesitantly, shyly, almost under his breath, “All things considered, Barnes & Noble isn’t half bad.” There was an embarrassed silence. Then someone else spoke up and admitted that she too rather liked the store. And before you knew it, all of us had begrudgingly admitted that we positively liked Barnes & Noble.
It was not that we did not know better, that we did not appreciate that nice people just didn’t say such things: in certain circles, after all, this admission would have been a conversation stopper akin to, “You know, George Wallace really made a lot of sense . . .” We fully understood why we were supposed to hate Barnes & Noble: it’s a corporate juggernaut driving out the smaller mom-and-pop bookstores; its interest in literature is middle-brow and thus suspect; it imposes Stalinist uniformity on the book world where previously there had been variety. And yet, having just visited the expansive and brightly lit structure on Union Square, we were compelled to admit that it had helped to transform what had been one of Manhattan’s sleazier sections into a surprisingly glamorous area.
Comments