Each year in midsummer, I head to North Carolina to spend time with family and friends in a rented beach house. Many things during this period set life apart from other times. I spend lots more time than usual lolling in the ocean and eating shrimp. And I read more book reviews. In fact, aside from online reports about China and whodunits, reviews are about all I read.
This is because a friend who joins us at the beach subscribes to the Times Literary Supplement (TLS) and is good enough to haul stacks of old issues down with him. A typical North Carolina day finds me alternating among swimming, eating, reading a mystery by Rendell or Rankin, and happily devouring TLS reviews.
Most years I haven’t thought much about this summertime narrowing of my normally far more varied literary diet. I know that I enjoy stylish reviews of the TLS sort, just as I enjoy well-crafted mysteries. And I leave it at that.
This year was different because of two online essays I read not long before heading to the beach. One was Elizabeth Gumport’s “Against Reviews” (n + 1, June 23), a witty call for a moratorium on book reviews, which the author derides as a form whose shelf life has expired. The other was a response by Tom Lutz, editor of the newly launched Los Angeles Review of Books. That piece, which appeared online on June 25 and was titled “Odious and Unpleasant” but could just as well have been called “For Reviews,” made the case, in prose as witty as Gumport’s, for the enduring value of the form.
Thinking back on this exchange while in North Carolina, I was struck by two things. First, I’m on Lutz’s side in the debate. How could I not be when I’m fond of reading and writing reviews, and I’m a contributor to and Asia editor of his Los Angeles Review? Second, my feelings about reviews, which I admit may be idiosyncratic, differ from Lutz’s in many ways.
For example, he writes as though the typical review focuses on a novel. Yet most of the ones I write aren’t about works of fiction. And most of those I read are about nonfiction books.
Lutz also assumes that people gravitate toward reviews of the kinds of books they read, just as they are most likely to seek out assessments of restaurants that serve cuisines they enjoy. And yet, though I’m addicted to noir novels, I generally give reviews of them a wide berth, partly because of a superstitious fear that reviewers will give away twists.
Another way my thinking diverges from Lutz’s relates to his emphasis on positive reviews’ influencing sales. Of course they can, especially if someone as influential as, say, Michiko Kakutani (whose New York Times reviews I often enjoy) or Margaret Atwood (whose New York Review of Books essays I never skip) is the one singing a book’s praises. When I write reviews, though, I often assume that most people reading me will not even consider buying the book I’m discussing, even if I enthuse. And as a reader, I gravitate toward reviews of books I don’t expect to buy, no matter how warmly they are praised.
Consider the most recent batch of TLS issues. As usual, I skipped the reviews of mysteries, even though these are precisely the works of fiction I tend to buy. And I read reviews of nonfiction books that I wasn’t contemplating purchasing. For instance, I relished a long essay by Toby Lichtig (whose TLS contributions I’d enjoyed in the past) that dealt with new books on vampires. Some people might have read the essay to help them decide which Dracula-related book to buy. Not me. I read it because I was curious to know what’s been written lately about vampires—but not curious enough to tackle any book on the topic.
What’s true regarding vampires is—I should perhaps be ashamed to say—true of some big fields of inquiry. Ancient Greece and Rome, for example. I like to know what’s being written about them but rarely read books about them. Instead, I just read Mary Beard’s lively TLS reviews of publications in her field.
Reviews do influence my book buying—just in a roundabout way. I’m sometimes inspired to buy books by authors whose reviews impress me. I don’t think Lichtig has a book out yet, but when he does, I’ll buy it. The last book on ancient Greece I purchased wasn’t one Mary Beard reviewed but one she wrote.
Finally, there’s the issue of length. Lutz, while taking issue with many of Gumport’s claims, accepted her dissing of very short reviews. I’m prepared to defend them. Yes, short reviews are often unsatisfying, especially if they’re the thumbs-up/thumbs-down type. I’m no more ready to banish them from the universe of reviews, however, than to say that sonnets are necessarily better than haiku. (Or, since I’m enough of a philistine to prefer poetry that can be sung, to accept that long songs are always better than short ones—at least until I hear a lengthy ballad of heartbreak that’s more moving than J.D. Souther’s minimalist “Faithless Love.”)
Don’t get me wrong: I love reading, and writing, long reviews. But I also enjoy reading short reviews, and writing them, too. Some of the most fun I’ve had as a reviewer was doing several “snap judgment” pieces (around 100 words) for Newsweek. It was an intriguing challenge to try to get something meaningful into this format—and I didn’t have to worry (as I often do even with longer pieces) about leaving key things out.
I’ve even been musing lately about the potential for tweet-length reviews. I don’t want those to displace other kinds, especially because they can too easily seem like glorified blurbs. But the best nuggets of some reviews could work pretty well within Twitter’s haiku-like constraints. Take my assessment of Kissinger’s On China. When I reviewed it for the June 13 edition of Time‘s Asian edition, I was happy that the editors gave me a full-page spread. Still, a pretty nifty Twitter-friendly version could have been built around the best line from the Time piece: “Skip bloated sections on Chinese culture, focus on parts about author’s time in China—a fat book w/ a better skinnier one trying to get out.”
One short review—admittedly of a film rather than a book—that made a big impression on me recently was Anthony Lane’s skewering of Transformers: Dark of the Moon, which ran in The New Yorker and reappeared in the “Listings” section of later issues in a slimmer form (roughly “snap judgment” length). The review was so good in its economical use of words that I’ve decided that if Lane ever takes up haiku, I may have to start reading more poems that can’t be sung. The review ends as follows: “The cast is filled out by, in descending order of expressiveness, Frances McDormand, John Malkovich, John Turturro, several enormous lumps of metal, and Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, who plays the hero’s girlfriend. Running time: immeasurable.”
I’d love to close with that line. It’s a step too far to end even an idiosyncratic survey of book reviews with discussion of a movie, however, so I need to add another sentence. With that review, Anthony Lane became the latest writer whose next book I’ll buy—just to see if it’s as good as his reviews lead me to think it will be.
Jeffrey Wasserstrom is chairman of the history department at the University of California at Irvine, author of China in the 21st Century: What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford University Press, 2010), and co-editor of the anthology Chinese Characters: Fast-Changing Lives in a Fast-Changing Land, due out next year from the University of California Press.
