why does Laura Miller have a book-reviewing job?

From Salon:

Munro writes what many people refer to (scornfully) as classic New-Yorker-style short stories. They’re naturalistic fiction about the domestic and personal relationships of very ordinary people, usually women, most of them born and raised in provincial Canadian towns. I freely admit that this sounds fantastically boring, and even when a writer friend I respected deeply gave me a copy of “Friend of My Youth” many years ago, I neglected to give Munro a try. The short story form (in prospect, at least) has never appealed to me, and after a dire childhood encounter with “Little Women” — foisted on me by female relatives — I developed a lifelong resistance to fiction in which, as my teenage self once put it, “people just sit around thinking about how they feel about their relatives.”


.....wow, that's not what Little Women is about, for one thing (Home Front war stories? American history? One of the few Bildungsromans about a young female author we have, period? Need I go on?). And a novel written by a female author in the mid-nineteenth century is totally just the same as short stories written by a female author in the late twentieth century! Women writers, all the same, engrossed in their little pieces of ivory and lace-making and visiting cards, right? Massachusetts is practically Canada anyway!

If I felt like it I could sum up, say, Thomas Mann's Buddenbrooks, speaking of getting Germanic, as "people just sitting around thinking about how they feel about their relatives," but I won't.

(Hot damn, this could be a new genre of literary criticism. Ulysses: "A man just sits around thinking about how he feels about his wife." Lolita: "A man just sits around thinking about how he feels about a young girl." Portnoy's Complaint: "A man just sits around thinking about how he feels about women. Lots of women." And so on.)

I would say something about a highly-ranked female literary critic feeling the need to somehow entice us into reading a female Nobel Prize winner (like the Nobel Prize won't do that all by its lonesome?) by bashing another female author using some of the most sexist cliches about female writers ("boring," "provincial," "ordinary," "domestic," "feelings," "relatives") but it's too depressing. And enraging. And predictable. Really, this piece isn't saying much more than "So you might have thought Alice Munro was boring, hunh? I did too. But then I wised up! And look, Salon is on record as publishing me over a decade ago being wise about Alice Munro. So read her! Like me." Because really, what we need to know about Alice Munro winning the Nobel is....that Laura Miller thought she was worth reading before that.

(Did....anyone think Alice Munro was like Louisa May Alcott? No, no, not Laura Miller, smartasses. Besides her.)

So instead of actually writing anything about Munro this piece is....Nobel-Prize-propelled clickbait for a review from 2001. Why are so many magazines doing this right now? Is it really that hard to generate new content nowadays? Shit, give me a Salon.com byline and I'll produce a whole new piece about Munro for nothing but love! I won't mention my former reviews or my respected writer friends or my adolescent tastes even once!


.....then again, if "people just sitting around thinking about how they feel about their relatives" is a sample of Miller's critical thinking skills, or lack thereof, maybe we're lucky she's not writing new reviews.  Dodged a bullet there, Alice.