One often hears writers lamenting the state of book reviewing. “Not since the death of Edmund Wilson,” they say, “has there been a consistently intelligent reviewer.” (I’ve heard that countless times, as if Wilson’s work were a kind of lost Arcadia in the cultural universe. In reality, he did not especially devote himself to reviewing.) Nonetheless, book reviewing is at a low ebb, although the issue is rarely discussed in anything like a rational or systematic fashion. As a result, many questions hover unanswered: What constitutes a good or bad book review? Who are the reviewers, and are they so different today? What is the relationship between book reviewing and academic literary criticism?
Most important, why are book reviews not better, and, indeed, more respected as a form of writing?
That book reviewers once had more status in the intellectual world seems obvious. In his influential book, The Last Intellectuals, Russell Jacoby talks about that marvelous cluster of public intellectuals who once wrote in newspapers and magazines for a reasonably wide and general audience. He discusses the careers of such critics as Wilson, Dwight Macdonald, Alfred Kazin, and Malcolm Cowley. The intellectual landscape of the ‘20s and ‘30s that he describes was dotted with people who could make a living by writing reviews and essays in places like The Nation or The New Republic.
Those critics did not belong to the Modern Language Association, they rarely had jobs in universities, and they did not write criticism for specialized academic journals. As Jacoby points out, the universities eventually absorbed such writers, transforming their intellectual children into academic critics who concentrate most of their effort not on writing for the general public, but on producing highly technical (often unreadable) articles for a wide range of journals limited to a small clique of readers schooled in one particular theory or another.
Today, only a handful of professional writers, of wildly varying quality, are employed as reviewers by major newspapers or magazines. Most reviewers are now academics. Paradoxically, however, book reviewing has little status in the academy. One cannot, for example, get tenure at a respected national institution by reviewing books. The number of reviews on a candidate’s bibliography interests most tenure committees about as much as the number of his or her children.
That means that most reviewers see themselves as intellectual odd-jobbers, occasionally taking a break from their more serious pursuits (scholarly books, articles for learned journals) to write for the likes of The Nation or The New Republic, or The New York Review of Books. If one scans the bylines attached to reviews, one rarely finds anyone not attached to some educational institution, but academic affiliation by no means guarantees the quality of the work.
Most contemporary literary critics have no interest in ranking poems, novels, or plays. Critics of an earlier era, such as F.R. Leavis, were keen to evaluate -- as well as interpret -- texts, but today’s academics are more concerned with other things, such as the internal dynamics of the text itself, its ideological strata, its rhetorical effects, or how it relates to, or comments upon, some wider cultural issue.
What concerns me here is the fate of reviewing. The convergence of historical trends has created a situation where evaluating books has fallen to ordinary, usually obscure, reviewers; readers rarely recognize, or even pause over, their names. I once, for example, got a clipping from The Times Literary Supplement in my mailbox at the English department where I teach; a colleague had scribbled over the review: “This sounds like the sort of book that might interest you, Jay.” It was thoughtful of him, but -- alas -- I had written the review myself.
For the most part, reviews are rarely more than competent, and the genre itself appears (though I don’t believe it really is) intellectually undemanding. Too often, the apparent slightness of the review leads inexperienced reviewers into swamps of self-indulgence from which they rarely emerge with glory; they will pursue their own particular obsessions, interests, or dislikes, for example, with little or no regard for the book under review.
I say all this with considerable anguish, having devoted considerable energy over nearly three decades to reviewing. My first publication (in 1972) was a review in a little-known journal in Scotland, where I was a graduate student. Through persistence, I was soon reviewing novels, volumes of poetry, biographies, and critical studies for a range of British publications. The exhilaration of being paid to offer opinions on books that I would have read anyway was irresistible. Taking the art of reviewing seriously, I studied other reviews, gradually learning the conventions that applied. Decades later, I am still trying to manipulate those conventions in honest, interesting ways, but it isn’t easy: The deck is stacked against the serious reviewer.
For a start, reviews in most periodicals today are usually short, which means one rarely has enough space to develop an idea or back up opinions with substantial argumentation. As a result, reviews are commonly shallow, full of unformed or ill-formulated thoughts, crude opinions, and unacknowledged prejudices. Time constraints on the reviewer only add to the problem: One gets a galley in the mail, and the review is due “as soon as possible.” (Anthony Burgess, the prolific English novelist and reviewer, once told me that he always tried to turn a review around in one day. Such astonishing speed meant, of course, that he rarely read the book at hand -- something of a tradition with British reviewers -- but his powers of invention were such that his pieces were usually more entertaining to read than the book under review.)
Knowing what I know from the reviewer’s point of view, I dread the whole process of being reviewed myself. One is endlessly subjected to ill-considered opinion, ludicrously off-the-mark praise, and blame that foists wild misimpressions of one’s book on an unsuspecting public. If you’re a novelist, you’re lucky if the reviewer gets the plot right or has read your other books for points of comparison. (Even a writer’s 10th or 20th novel is usually reviewed as though it were his or her first.)
With biographies, reviewers will generally just recount the life of the subject at hand, taking their information (without acknowledgment) from the book itself: The reviewer merely asserts that the work at hand is suitably well-informed or not. Poetry reviewing is a shameful matter: Reviews (if any appear at all) tend to be written by the poet’s lovers or ex-lovers, skewing the arguments one way or another. As for scholarly monographs, they are blithely ignored by the mainstream press for the most part, which is probably just as well.
One might easily write off the whole enterprise of reviewing, but I think that would be unfortunate. The review pages of magazines and newspapers remain one of the few places in contemporary life where conversation about cultural matters occurs. Here and there, brilliant essay-reviews appear. I’m always eager to read, for example, James Wood in The New Republic or Garry Wills in The New York Review of Books, just to name two of perhaps a dozen or so reviewers whose work consistently repays careful reading.
Instead of dismissing reviews out of hand or not taking them seriously, I would urge all concerned -- readers and writers, editors of review pages, as well as serious literary critics -- to commit themselves to revitalizing the art of reviewing.
Reviewing is a form of journalism, and journalism has been called the rough draft of history. Reviewers have a frightening job before them: to describe fairly, and categorize justly, books that have not been much discussed before. I have frequently found myself awed by the task. Once, in a fit of nerves in the face of a particularly complex novel, I called an older friend whose reviewing I deeply respected. He gave me the best advice I’ve ever gotten on the subject, and I often recall his words: “Describe the book before you accurately, and, when possible, with empathy for the writer. Your opinions will be evident if you describe the book well.” If the book is ill-conceived or fraudulent in some way, that will emerge in the course of describing it.
One time I wrote a particularly savage review of a book by a well-known writer, and the same friend scolded me: “Never write a review that is entirely negative. There is no book so bad that something good can’t be said of it.” Quite sensibly, given the paucity of space for reviews in most publications, he urged me to accept mainly those offers to review books that I thought especially worth reading. (Now and then, of course, it is refreshing to see overblown reputations put sharply into perspective, but that is nasty work, and I would rather it were left to the literary equivalent of Roto-Rooters who enjoy plunging into the muck.)
When I review a book, I make sure to have read as many other books by the author as I can manage. Otherwise, the review is bound to suffer from a kind of myopia. I also try to review the book itself, not the reputation of the author, which is usually based on hearsay. A good reviewer will attempt to treat the book on its own terms, but always in the context of the author’s previous work.
Fairness is hard to calculate, but I know when I’m being fair or unfair. It is an easy thing to make any book seem poorly written or intellectually suspect: I make an effort to avoid cheap shots. (Thank goodness for the delete button on my word processor, which has saved me from myself on countless occasions.) Indeed, I’m always careful to police my reviews for unfounded wisecracks resulting from a character flaw on my part.
Fairness in reviewing inevitably also involves the little matter of reviewing (or not reviewing) people you know. In Great Britain, which is a tiny world, book-review editors take it for granted that everyone in the writing business knows everyone else in the writing business. As a result, the pages of the Sunday review sections of the major newspapers are full of malicious gossip and wildly untrustworthy opinions. (On the other hand, the British have a penchant for the apt phrase and witty riposte that makes their reviews highly entertaining for the casual reader.) But objectivity is usually desirable in a reviewer, and I, myself, would never review a book by somebody against whom I had a grudge -- unless, of course, I were planning to praise the book, thus demonstrating my unusual capacity for Christian charity.
I prefer not to know the author at all, although the literary world is so small that it is difficult to avoid reviewing people whom one has met in passing. That is obviously true for scholarly reviewers, who tend to know other specialists in their field. So I have a rule of thumb, given to me by a friend who used to edit the book pages of a magazine: If I know the names of an author’s children, I probably know the author too well to review his or her book.
I say “probably” because here, as elsewhere, the exceptions prove the rule. A reviewer who has followed the unfolding career of a particular author over many years, who has even come to know the world of that author outside of the texts, may bring a special sympathy and knowledge to the book at hand that could prove illuminating. I recall a review of Graham Greene, by his friend Evelyn Waugh, that was pierced through with unforgettable insights relating to Greene’s idiosyncratic, but passionate, Catholicism -- a passion that Waugh and Greene shared. I’m also fond of Gore Vidal’s reviews of Italo Calvino and Dawn Powell in The New York Review of Books: astonishing pieces of critical writing in the form of reviews. Vidal was friends with both writers, and combined personal anecdotes with literary criticism in his own sui generis style.
In the final analysis, various things will have to happen to insure that reviews, and reviewers, move up in the world. Newspapers and magazines will have to devote more space to reviewing. Once there were dozens of newspapers in New York City alone, and all of them conferred considerable energy and space on reviewing. Now there are fewer newspapers, and only The New York Times, with its lamentably small cast of daily reviewers, pays attention to books. Time and Newsweek have severely cut back on the number of books they review. Even weeklies like The Nation and The New Republic are hardly what they used to be. One could wish for more.
Writers and scholars will also have to make reviewing books an important part of their yearly work, and to put a good deal of effort into making their reviews both readable and shrewd. And, for that to happen, colleges and universities will have to give more weight to reviewing. One might even hope that they -- or, the very least, their graduate programs in literature or creative writing -- would consider the topic worthy of academic focus. We need to scrutinize reviews in our classes: analyze them (I hesitate to say theorize), discuss them as a form of textuality, as a genre with rules and boundaries, with a tradition that needs to be perpetually modified and extended.
Who knows, the next Edmund Wilson (or someone who does take reviewing seriously) might yet appear.
Jay Parini, a poet and novelist, is a professor of English at Middlebury College. He reviews books regularly for The New York Times Book Review, The Times Literary Supplement, and other publications.
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