Book Review: Digital Barbarism by Mark Helprin

It's rare that when finishing one book I immediately turn back to that same author for more, but I'm doing it in this case: my next book is Helprin's A Soldier of the Great War. I want to get more of Helprin's prose in my head. But the reason I'm breaking my own rule and getting more of the same author is that I found Digital Barbarism to be unsatisfying on a few levels. Helprin's argument for copyright extension works beautifully for the type of work he does: literature to last the ages. He makes a compelling and fascinating argument on those grounds. However, he's so busy fulminating that he only occasionally sets his argument in the context that it comes from. This is no doubt by design, because he's writing literature to last the ages, right? But the context it comes from is a society that has lost the distinction between software and literature, and between background music and Wagnerian opera. Helprin's arguments about the rights of the sole creator fall apart when, as with software or a movie, there is no sole creator. Much of the friction between him and his online adversaries can be attributed to this category mistake. The problem is that the people he's arguing with would never read one of his books in the first place, so the argument is destined to fester. Argument aside, like everything Helprin writes, this is a jewel box of words, and so it's worth it just to hold them up to the light and admire them. Just make sure you pay for them. Unless you got this from a library, like, uh, I did.