Book Reviewing in America
In her book Faint Praise: The Plight of Book Reviewing in America (University of Missouri Press), former Boston Review editor Gail Pool writes:
Readers dismayed by the lack of criticism in reviews won't find more of it in other coverage, most of which is promotion, sometimes in disguise. Newspaper book features--profiles and interviews--are promotional. Readings are promotional. "Reviews" written by booksellers, even independent booksellers, are promotional. Book clubs are promotional. Even readers' guides are promotional: produced by the publishers to enhance the books' value for—and sales to—reading groups, they may be designed to encourage more thoughtful reading, but they don't encourage a critical approach. None of the guides seem to ask readers to question the quality of a book's prose, its cliched characterization, or the problems in its story line. They start from the premise that the books are good, and it's their purpose to help readers "understand" why they're good, not discover they aren't.
Nor will readers frustrated by the quality of criticism in traditional reviewing find it improved by its nontraditional counterparts. On the contrary, in self-published reviews on the Web--the main nontraditional alternative--critical failings are bound to be exacerbated. It may be that editors too often fail to do their job in ensuring that reviews are unbiased, informed, well written, or critically astute, but I don't see how it can possibly be an improvement to eliminate the role of editor, the readers' only chance for quality control. Unscreened, anonymous, and unedited, self-published reviews can be—and often are—as biased, uninformed, ungrammatical, and critically illiterate as they like. (122)
Pool, as she does throughout her book, shares the belief common among "professional" book reviewers that "criticism" and " book review" are synonymous terms—or at least that at their best newspaper and magazine reviews do embody what "criticism" is all about. Pool offers plenty of legitimate objections to the standards of book reviewing as currently practiced, but she never relinquishes the notion that reviewing, when done right, is an act of literary criticism, sine qua non.
For Pool, the defining feature of criticism is the more specific act of passing judgment. "Critical" in Pool's lexicon comes close to its overly literal and reductive meaning as "finding fault" (or looking for faults but happily not finding many). A novel has "problems in its story line" or fails to meet some predetermined measure of "quality" with which the critic is inspecting the text and pronouncing it fit or flawed. Discovering that a book might not be good becomes an urgent and noble endeavor that only the "critic," properly detached and unbiased, can venture to undertake.
Critical judgment can never be avoided entirely; it always lies behind discussions of aesthetic merit. But in my opinion, judgment is only the precursor to criticism, its necessary spark but not at all its fulfillment, which is only to be found in the further elucidation of the way the work constitutes itself as a work of fiction or poetry, of the specific nature of the experience of reading the work attentively. The work may present itself in a way that is completely familiar or utterly alien, or somewhere in between. The critic at the least must give a plausible enough account of the text's perceptible qualities to make the critical judgment credible, but just as often judgment might be simply assumed, taken for granted, even neglected altogether. Criticism that is able to "encourage more thoughtful reading" is valuable criticism indeed, and if in many cases the critic discusses works he/she implicitly values highly in order to "help readers 'understand' why they're good," this is probably in the long run a much more worthwhile expenditure of critical energy than the effort to demonstrate that some works aren't. (This use of critical intelligence to illuminate the aesthetic accomplishments of literary works amounts to the "promotion" of literature in the very best sense the term can bear.)
Pool is especially determined to preserve the prerogatives of editors in providing criticism through book reviewing. But true criticism is an unavoidably personal, very individualized activity. It's my encounter with the text, your encounter with the text, not this encounter as mediated by a third party presuming to act as gatekeeper. When Pool invokes "quality control" as the editor's job description, she's identifying this as a function within the hierarchy of a newspaper or magazine. Bias-, fact-, and grammar-checking are imperatives of journalism, not of literary criticism, which can be (in some cases should be) thoroughly biased, indifferent to "facts" except the facts of the text at hand, and resistant to hidebound rules of grammar when they interfere with the expression of difficult ideas or impede critical insight.
Even if we accept that newspaper or magazine book sections often benefit from inspired editing, Pool's own book often reveals that this sort of inspiration is sorely lacking in most book review pages. The "plight" of book reviewing is mostly a plight of editing, which fails to provide much in the way of "quality control" in the first place and has made book reviewing in America an activity without great relevance and characterized by a stale conformity of approach. At the top of Pool's list of needed reforms is "a better means of choosing books for review" (125). "Our current system," she writes, "inevitably leads to overlooking good books, overpraising bad ones, and undermining the book page." Well, who exactly is to blame for this "current system" in which the wrong books are reviewed, bad books are praised, and the book page trivialized if not the editors of the book pages? Don't they determine what gets reviewed and who does the reviewing? Aren't they responsible for publishing bland and vacuous reviews? Why in the world would we want to revive book reviewing by reinvesting in the very process that has caused the problem to begin with?
Faint Praise at the same time both pinpoints the reasons why book reviewing in the usual print publications has gone seriously wrong and argues that book reviewing can be saved only if the current "system" and the current mode of publication remain the same, with a little tweaking. It demonstrates why book reviewing as a form of literary journalism is probably doomed: Its author can see the flaws in the "system" in which she works, but can't imagine a solution outside of that system, even when such a solution is probably the only kind available.
Going Negative
It might indeed be the case that many "negative" reviews of fiction are glib and opportunistic exercises in what has come to be called snark. Such reviews make little real effort to adequately describe the ambitions and strategies of the book under review, or to assess the book's success or relative failure to fulfill these ambitions with any degree of specificity. If this sort of review were to disappear, neither literature nor literary criticism would register the loss.
But to dismiss all critical evaluation that reaches unfavorable conclusions as illegitimate, somehow an affront to the "community" of writers and readers who value books at a time when reading seems endangered, is not just irrational but in fact a greater danger to sustaining a serious literary culture than indiscriminate snark would ever be. That some reviews elevate shallow and superficial pronouncements over considered judgment does not mean negative reviews that are carefully considered should be equally rejected. Moreover, writers themselves should welcome the latter sort of review, since it signifies the work has been taken seriously and given close attention. This seems to me an infinitely preferable response than empty praise, which, in the absence of the more rigorous standards implied by the possibility of a negative judgment, is all that reflexive approval is destined to become.
I wouldn't necessarily use the word "smarm" to identify this kind of praise, although anyone who writes book reviews simply to uncritically celebrate otherwise mediocre writers because all writers need "support" is hard to take seriously. Especially when the reviewer is him/herself also primarily a fiction writer, readers are well-justified to think that such reviews are a form of self-protection at the least, but even when they are sincerely intended, more often than not the lack of real critical engagement with the book under review undermines credibility. Synopsis substitutes for analysis, and judgment is replaced with rhetorical flash and vacuous accolades. Indeed, this sort of rah-rah reviewing is so common, so much dominates the discourse of book reviewing at the moment, that it's always surprising to me when someone suggests there are too many negative reviews around.
The advice often given to reviewers and critics who might have something actually critical to say about a book or a writer is to just say nothing instead, to let one's silence stand as sufficient commentary. In long-form criticism, this makes some sense; extended consideration of the flaws in a particular work or a writer's body of work is not usually as worthwhile a use of critical space as the explication of the most accomplished works and admired writers. (Although dissenting evaluations of established writers that question their critical standing certainly have their place.) However, contemporaneous book reviews serve a different purpose. The best reviews do not facilitate "consumer choice" or "cultural discussion" (although some reviews might inadvertently do these things) but take on the responsibility of providing an initial critical reaction to books that presumably seek an audience not just among those who happen to read this week's newspaper, and not just among readers this month or this year, but also future readers for whom the book's literary merit has become the most important consideration, not its purely occasional interest as a "new book" or as an artifact arising from its circumstances of its publication (the review's circumstances of publication as well). In some cases, those reviews provide the only available critical guidance to such readers, but even if additional, more extended criticism has subsequently appeared, often the presuppositions at work were introduced by the initial responses to the book or writer found in reviews.
This was certainly my experience as a fledgling scholar of contemporary literature, when I was trying to round up the critical responses to writers in whose work I had an interest. Of course, most contemporary fiction has yet to accumulate the kind of formal criticism associated with more canonical literature, but I would always look first at the reviews, and usually found they had in one way or another (in rendering both positive and negative judgments) established the context in which the writer's work continued to be discussed, the most thoughtful and conscientious reviews often enough still providing valuable insights into that work. Had I been surveying reviews motivated by the perceived need to reinforce a literary "community" against attack rather than to reinforce literature itself through honest and detailed literary criticism, even in the modest form of the book review, I would most likely have found little of value and concluded that such a "literary" culture doesn't really take literature very seriously.
Of course no writer welcomes an unfavorable evaluation of his/her work. It's another thing altogether, however, to extend one's dissatisfaction with this sort of critical scrutiny to a general proscription of negative criticism in the name of fellow-feeling for one's putative colleagues. Not only does this reduce the creation of literary art to an exercise in group solidarity, but it's practically an invitation to writers encouraging them to do shoddy work. Since whatever I might write is going to be praised simply because I wrote it (lest I get discouraged), there's no particular reason for me to artistically challenge either myself or my potential readers.
The impatience with which many writers (and some critics) regard "negative" reviews is in part a natural enough response, reflecting the tense relationship between artists and their critics that has probably always existed. On the other hand, it seems to me that such tension has become particularly acute in our time because of two simultaneous and seemingly contradictory phenomena: There are more published and aspiring-to-be published writers than ever before, and the audience for serious fiction (and poetry) continues to diminish. In these circumstances, negative reviews threaten to undermine the "community" that has come to substitute for the cultural recognition poets and novelists have lost and might deprive writers of whatever small chance they have of gaining readers among what remains of a general reading audience.
Defenders of negative reviews often justify them as providing a service to readers, who will be cautioned against spending their time with an inferior book. Even those who don't think reviews are primarily a form of consumer guidance (and thus a function of capitalism more than literature) nevertheless generally contend that the evaluative role of criticism should take precedence, helping readers come to a conclusion about a given work's merit. If this is done by offering evidence and cogent analysis, it is a perfectly valid exercise, although it would seem that the occasions for performing it should be limited: What's the point of subjecting a book by an early-career writer to harsh critical treatment when it's not likely to attract much of an audience anyway and can safely be left to its fated lack of attention as an ultimate verdict? Why take up too much review space and critical effort with bad books when what's really needed is for the good but neglected books to be discovered?
After all, in the long run lengthier critical commentary isn't going to be afforded to truly inferior work. Literary criticism of a more extended sort almost always centers on books that have continued to resonate, whose success is no longer at issue. Few serious critics—and not just academic critics—are going to devote these opportunities for more thorough critical reading to largely superfluous evaluation. Despite the widespread impression of critics as prescriptive taskmasters, literary hanging judges, evaluation is not the most essential task taken up by the literary critic. At their best, critics are not judges, but more like witnesses offering an account of the reading experience that has a tentative authority that comes from close and conscientious reading allied with a grasp of context—literary, cultural, historical. A critic of this kind describes, makes connections, explicates, albeit as the means to the discovery of value, a discovery the critic hopes the reader will share.
If criticism is not the act of rendering a critical verdict on a literary work, neither is it any kind of evaluation of the author of the work, a divining of the author's character or moral standing from his/her "presence" in the text. Thus a negative review is not an attempt to find fault with the writer but to point out flaws in the work through identifiable standards. (If the standards can't be identified then the review itself is fatally flawed and can't be taken seriously, anyway.) Likewise, a positive review is not an affirmation of the writer, but the qualities of the book at hand that make it artistically successful. Quite likely most writers would not take such offense at negative reviews if they didn't implicitly believe that a positive review is not just an expression of approval of a particular book they've written but also approval of their decision to be a writer, an acknowledgment of their inherent talent.
In my view, most of the debate about positive and negative reviews is misguided not only because it oversimplifies but because it proceeds according to mistaken assumptions about the objective of reviews, and of criticism in general. Reviews should not be written as a kindness to either readers or writers but as a contribution to the continued relevance and vitality of literature. While many reviews may be no more than a transitory register of unreflective opinion or superficial pronouncement (at times no more than perfunctory plot summary), others offer genuine insight into the immediate context and the aesthetic effect of the book under review, and the very best also help maintain the continuity of literature by declining to write about a new book as if it has arrived shorn of all connection to the writer's other work and to important literary history.
A reviewer can't be sure, of course, that the work being reviewed will have lasting importance. The presumption arguably should be that it won't. However, the reviewer should also presume that a book presenting itself as a serious literary work deserves to be regarded as such, but also needs to be honestly assessed when it falls short of its ambition. Ultimately both readers and writers can only benefit from this kind of effort when carried out in good faith, even if it is not directly made on behalf of the well-being or convenience of either.
Staying Positive
A reviewer of Joanna Rucco's Dan tells us that
Reading Dan is like having a bot worm medically expelled from your body. You suspected there was something wrong, something in you that wasn’t right, and by mysterious ways of medical linguistics Ruocco has not only identified the parasite, but found it in the deep recesses of your soul and pulled it out through your tear ducts for you to see and examine. Or perhaps reading Dan is more like the act of having your ears cleaned. With each page a tube is stuck deeper within your drum and Dan mounts, pushing warm alien water into your skull, pulling out chunks of orange gunk so big you end up questioning your true size. I conceived my ear canal to be X size. But, my god, my ear canal is triple X. And dear lord can I hear better. After reading Dan you’ll hear things in the way you speak, in the way others speak, that you simply did not hear before.
It is admirable that the reviewer wishes to convey a sense of what reading this novel is like. That is, in my opinion, the most important task a conscientious reviewer undertakes. Too often reviewers take this task to require plot summary--indeed, many reviews are presented as nothing but plot summary, with perhaps a spicing of judgment to give the review some suitable critical flavor. Description, however, goes deeper than plot summary, attending instead to the author's way of telling the story, to the effects of point of view, the particularities of style, to not just the narrative but the way the narrative has been shaped through a larger conception of form.
Unfortunately, this description of Dan, carried out through two rather bizarre extended similes, actually takes attention away from the novel itself and places it on the reviewer: Hey, look at the colorful comparisons I can make, one after the other and stretched out to outrageous length! Perhaps if these similes actually worked, actually captured some important feature of the novel under review, the device would be justified, but these similes are so labored, so opaque, it's difficult to know exactly what they're supposed to illuminate. Why a bot worm, exactly? (I'll confess I had to Google the thing to even know what a bot worm is.) Surely the medical linguistics can't be so "mysterious"—linguistics is a science, isn't it?—that whatever the reviewer means by this term can't be identified more specifically, and how can this process be first of all expelling the worm from the reader's body, then turning to "the deep recesses of your soul" only to wind up more corporeally pulling the worm through the tear ducts? The second simile, about pages sprouting tubes and sticking them in the reader's ear, is so thoroughly confused I don't know what it's trying to suggest at all.
This sort of out-of-control figurative description is not the norm, of course. It is distressingly indicative, however, of an apparent belief that subjective impressions expressed in sufficiently "vivid" language can substitute for actual analysis in book reviews. Probably this assumption arises from the further belief that book reviews of fiction function precisely as the register of subjective impression, balanced by the "objectivity" of plot summary. But where does criticism enter into the agenda of book reviewing? If we believe the review has a critical function, if it is not simply an auxiliary of publishing and publicity, it can't just be a "personal response" more often than not meant to celebrate the book under review. At some point there must be some closer reading that attempts to account for the work's success or failure, not to record the reviewer's feelings in ostentatious and overheated prose.
The notion that the primary purpose of a book review is to be "lively," that it should itself be a "fine piece of writing," might seem unobjectionable, especially if you regard reviewing as journalism more than criticism. Perhaps this admonition does discourage reviewers from becoming too pedantic, but at its core, I believe, is an implicit assumption that all criticism is pedantry, so that liveliness and attitude (the former manifesting the latter) takes the place of any real critical scrutiny. At its worst, such an assumption is reflected most acutely in reviews like the one I have quoted, in which the groping after verbal cleverness overwhelms even coherent communication. But even when kept under better control, the attempt to produce "a fine piece of writing" in the guise of a book review still draws more attention to the reviewer endeavoring to produce it than the book the review presumably should explicate. This is not criticism by any definition, just self-indulgence.
Although this is a "positive" review, if I were the author of the book I wouldn't be very happy with it, since it doesn't give the reader a very clear account of it at all. Real critical engagement with a book, engagement that is reflected in the seriousness with which the reviewer attempts to translate it into a suitably critical language, is preferable to hazily-expressed, if superficially “lively” approval.
In a riposte to Jessa Crispin's complaint that a besieged literary culture has been too quick to "close ranks," leading some review editors to prefer only positive reviews, Bethanne Patrick wants to remind us that "Positive reviews, well-written and carefully thought out, certainly are part of criticism" (Literary Hub, May 13, 2016). This is, of course, correct, and Patrick does not suggest that, conversely, negative reviews are somehow not part of criticism. Indeed, she confesses to engaging in excessive "boosterism" in her own efforts as editor and book reviewer, but ultimately declines the role of "book cheerleader," an inclination to which does indeed characterize a great deal of what is called "literary journalism," and the performance of which too often substitutes for actual literary criticism in both print and online publications.
A positive review does not have to be merely an instance of book cheerleading, however. I would argue that a genuinely "carefully thought out" positive review can be harder to do well than a negative review, since writing a review of a book one finds disappointing, or even actively dislikes, focuses a critic's attention in a way that can be more difficult when trying to account for what one likes in a good book. Those qualities that contribute to a work's failure of interest are likely to make themselves felt distinctly over the duration of the reading experience, leaving the critic with a fairly acute perception of what went wrong in the work. A successful book, a book that consistently engages attention and fulfills its aesthetic ambitions, can challenge the critic to go beyond generic praise and empty accolades, to summon a critical language that doesn't simply repeat, in different variations, "This is a good book."
The most common type of positive review, to be found across the spectrum of available critical opinion, from personal blogs to front page reviews in the New York Times Book Review, employs the rhetoric of extravagant, hyperbolic acclamation, usually leaning heavily on a few all-purpose terms of fulsome praise: "astonishing;" "incandescent;" "rapturous;" "stunning." Most of these terms are more or less interchangeable, and are used so frequently in so many different contexts that they have essentially become meaningless. Unfortunately, most reviews that use such language rely on it as their primary mode of appraisal, at most adding further plot summary, as if reminding us of the story or summing up characters will suffice as illustration of the pertinence of these hopelessly nebulous adjectives as applied to the book at hand.
This sort of review implicitly accepts the conception of reviews as consumer guides, advice to the reader about whether a book is worth his/her time and money. It affirms the evaluative function of criticism (as, of course, does the negative review as well) at the expense of the descriptive function, at least if "description" means more than highlighting and recapitulating narrative content. If newspaper book reviews—to the extent they survive—are not likely to ever abandon this model, reviews in cultural magazines, literary journals, and online generally have no particular reason to embrace it, and thus we could expect reviews from these sources to more often incorporate the descriptive function of criticism, to more fully convey to the reader an impression of the critic's own experience of reading. In this context, a positive review doesn't just commend a book to its potential readers or offer praise and approval to the author (although it could do both of these things), but tries to make manifest the "imaginative qualities" the critic has fathomed in that actual thing—the literary work—readers now and in the future might more fruitfully appreciate
This means the most valuable skill the critic can bring to the consideration of books, specifically poetry or fiction, is the ability to pay close but also receptive attention—receptive especially to goals and strategies that might seem unfamiliar or unorthodox. Simply calling such a strategy "incandescent" without explaining how it works (or why it prompts a metaphor that invokes giving off light rather than, say, an auditory metaphor) doesn't really help us assimilate its intention or effect. Similarly, a negative review that dismisses an unfamiliar strategy simply because it is unfamiliar does no service either to the book in question or to the efficacy of literary criticism. This sort of reflexively dismissive negative review is arguably even more useless as criticism than the cheerleading panegyric. An enthusiastic but opaque positive review can be correct in its judgment if inadequate in its justification; an uncomprehending negative review provides no reason to take it seriously to begin with.
A well-executed positive review performs an entirely legitimate function of literary criticism. It offers a sort of baseline affirmative analysis that other reviews or critical essays might need to challenge, although not necessarily in an explicit way. To the extent that an intelligent contemporaneous review of a novel that continues to attract readers and critical attention into the future forms a part of the lasting critical discourse about that novel, criticism later readers might consider, a "carefully thought out" positive review would play its part in the study, formal or informal, of the work. Less tangibly, a convincing positive review partly determines the tenor of the conversation about a new book, in some cases no doubt directly affecting the consensus of opinion about it. Negative reviews do this as well, of course, but this is most likely with a prominent "takedown" kind of review. Since positive reviews of fiction usually outnumber negative reviews, a good one needs to be especially good to stand out.
In Practice
John Domini’s The Sea-God’s Herb is first of all a collection of lively book reviews (supplemented with a few longer essays) covering almost forty years of Domini’s work as a literary critic in such venues as The New Republic, the Boston Globe, and Bookforum, as well as numerous literary magazines and online book reviews. It is consistently engaging, featuring both an appealing, non-technical prose style and a concern for the particulars of the work at hand. The analysis is careful but never heavy-handed, the style of expression clear and vivid. Certainly readers can disagree with Domini’s assessment of any of the writers or books he discusses, but surely few will conclude that he fails to support his judgments.
But such a book also prompts questions beyond the quality of writing or the level of discernment on display. Indeed, since The Sea-God’s Herb exhibits both style and intelligence in abundance, these questions are only more pertinent: When does a book review achieve the status of “literary criticism”? Can book reviews have long-term value transcending their origins in the immediacy of initial response? Can the best reviews help shape the critical reputation of important writers and their work, or help identify deserving writers and books destined to receive serious critical attention? In short, can reviews contribute to literary discussion something more lasting than a fleeing judgment based on “taste” or inherently subjective standards?
These are particularly pressing questions at a time when literary criticism other than the book review is effectively non-existent. The conception of “criticism” as the rigorous analysis of literary works was long ago ceded to academic critics as their rightful domain, but equally long ago academic criticism ceased to be primarily concerned with the analysis of literary works—or, more precisely, became preoccupied with analyzing everything but the work itself, preferring the historical, the political, and the cultural to the literary. (In the latest iteration of the “new” in academic criticism, so-called “digital humanities,” text-mining scholars using computer analysis to provide “data” about literary works have essentially made the individual text disappear via “distant reading,” an approach that provides us with quantitative knowledge of an entity called “literature” that makes reading it in any particular manifestation almost superfluous.) If criticism as the assessment of “literary” value is to remain a visible practice, book reviewing may be the only form it can now plausibly take.
Perhaps it is not necessary that literary criticism remain a visible presence. There are those who contend that criticism is an impediment to creating a vibrant “literary community,” especially when it results in too many negative reviews. It is hard to imagine that such a community would continue to be vibrant for very long, however, without the more disinterested perspective provided by honest criticism, which of course does not have to be relentlessly negative to be rigorous. Domini’s reviews demonstrate what would be lost if conscientious criticism disappeared.
A few of them are indeed negative, but they provide sound reasons for the unfavorable judgments reached. Just as importantly, the favorable reviews support their evaluations with the same kind of care. Ultimately The Sea-God’s Herb is an implicit defense of contemporary innovative fiction (of the sort usually labeled “postmodern”), so Domini’s fundamental critical stance is one of advocacy on behalf of the work he reviews, but the occasional less admiring assessments only strengthen the credibility of his judgments overall, reassuring us that his praise isn’t empty and that his objections aren’t mere carping. One would think this kind of scrupulous appraisal would only strengthen literary culture, not introduce unwelcome scrutiny.
If bringing careful attention to those qualities of a work of fiction that make it successful or not according to discernible standards is a primary feature of literary criticism, surely the reviews collected in The Sea-God’s Herb qualify as genuine criticism, while still finally providing the more general and cogent sort of assessment we expect in book reviews. And, as these reviews have been gathered to make a larger point about (mostly) American postmodern fiction, they also prove relevant beyond their retrospective interest as the registers of contemporaneous response to books now, in some cases, still widely known, in other cases in danger of being forgotten. Some revising and refocusing of the reviews in their original form has been necessary to make the argument more apparent and to integrate the reviews with each other more effectively. They have also been arranged for structural effect, but the reviews show enough consistency of purpose already that it seems likely most of them were written with this larger purpose—to highlight unconventional fiction and clear up common misconceptions about it—in mind to begin with.
Domini frames his argument by beginning with an essay from 2010, “Against the ‘Impossible to Explain,’” that makes a more general case that literary criticism “just hasn’t been doing its job” in grappling with adventurous fiction, either largely ignoring it or repeating the canard that it is too far removed from readers’ common experience. The latter complaint seems especially objectionable to Domini, who uses the bulk of the essay to look at the work of three writers who exemplify his contention that postmodern fiction does have “a relationship to the rough and tumble in which we live,” that it can be “socially relevant.” While The Sea-God’s Herb does not extend this thesis in an explicit, systematic way, the emphasis in most of Domini’s considerations of fiction manifesting “an unconventional approach” (not all of which could be called, strictly speaking, “postmodern”) is on showing that unconventional does not mean detached from social realities. Introducing and maintaining this focus allows Domini to avoid producing a book that would otherwise be, as he puts in his preface, “a mere miscellany.”
Domini organizes the contents chronologically, beginning with a group of reviews dedicated to what could be called the first generation of American postmodernists such as John Barth, Robert Coover, and Thomas Pynchon (“Early Tide”), then proceeding to their immediate successors such as Stephen Dixon and Gilbert Sorrentino (“Second Tide”) and their more recent inheritors of the postmodern spirit (“Fresh Tide,” “Coming Tide”). There is also a section devoted to non-American writers (“Distant Moons”) as well as a handful of essays on other genres and a concluding analysis of Dante’s Divine Comedy, which Domini believes shares with postmodern fiction the motif of “transformation” and from which the book gets its title (the sea-god’s herb being the agent of such transformation). The organization allows the book to be both a form of theme and variation, illustrating the points made in the introductory essay, and a kind of anatomy of innovative fiction as practiced in the last 40 years.
The early postmodernists are probably still the writers most associated with the term “postmodern” and those most notorious for authoring the kind of “experimental” fiction that proved so difficult for convention-centered literary critics and reviewers to assimilate, leading to charges that their work was inaccessible or contrived or even frivolous (“playing games” is a common accusation against these writers’ approach). Domini’s review of John Barth’s Letters not only considers a quintessential postmodernist but also one of Barth’s novels most often dismissed as excessive in its metafictional antics. But Domini maintains that this outrageously metafictional novel (featuring letters written to “John Barth” by characters from his own previous fiction) is also very much engaged with “real-world” concerns, its ultimate seriousness of purpose indicated in the subtitle Domini gives the review, “The Moral Fiction of John Barth.” This is probably a riposte to John Gardner’s On Moral Fiction, in which Barth is one of the prominent writers Gardner attacks for lacking sufficient moral seriousness. Domini’s analysis of Letters attempts to show that it is in fact suffused with serious social relevance and, pace Gardner, addresses fundamental moral questions, engaging with “the world of social conscience and physical pain.” Domini also believes this to be true of Thomas Pynchon’s novels, but his review of Vineland is considerably less receptive to this book than to Letters, and he compares it unfavorably to Pynchon’s previous work, finding it “ordinary in its conception and sentimental in its conclusions,” the latter judgment even in its disapproval, however, giving credit to Pynchon for more emotional resonance than some of his early critics often did.
The subsequent sections of the collection offer similarly alert analyses of both the strengths and weaknesses of the works under review. The negative reviews usually express disappointment at unfulfilled potential, not lack of sympathy with the author’s project. In one instance, Domini does seem to take issue with the writer’s methods but allows us subsequently to see how he came to change his mind. In a review of Stephen Dixon’s 1984 story collection Time to Go, Domini seems to associate Dixon with the “understatement” typical of minimalism, charging it with “a lack of imagination and a near absence of passion.” Ten years later, in a review of Dixon’s novel Interstate, Domini reverses himself, calling the novel “a work of rare imagination.” Like the previous book, Interstate is “an exercise in style” (but also one of “raw emotionality”), except now Domini sees that the style “may harmonize now and again with Raymond Carver’s minimalism. . .but. . .also groans more openly and rambles more furiously.” This characterization of Dixon’s style is quite aptly put, but by now most readers of Stephen Dixon would probably also maintain that Dixon’s style in Interstate is pretty consistent with the style of the earlier book. These two reviews show us, first of all, that something like minimalism, with its “repression of rhetoric and an emphasis on the trivial,” is the antithesis of the kind of writing Domini wants to celebrate, but also that judgment is fallible, subject to revision and reconsideration.
If in assembling his reviews for effect Domini is commendably willing to reveal his own potential misjudgment, he also courts the possibility that his evaluation of lesser-known and more recent writers will not hold up to time and the shifting fortunes of literary reputation. The reviews of Jay Cantor, Jaimy Gordon, and Lance Olsen help to identify a later cohort of postmodern-leaning writers who may be destined to remain in the shadow of their formidable predecessors, but perhaps they also make some readers aware how far that shadow extends. It surely extends as far as the most recent writers Domini discusses, such as Brian Evenson, Matt Bell, and Blake Butler, although Domini also points out resemblances with Robbe-Grillet and Beckett. In his assessment of the stories of Dawn Raffel, Domini seems to adjust his perception of minimalism—probably the most significant “ism” in postwar American fiction following on postmodernism—as a regressive practice, freely calling Raffel a minimalist but one whose style “depends on subtle verbal manipulations like that of poetry. . .more about the development of an image than increments in narrative movement.” In this way, Raffel’s stories succeed in “clearing new ground,” the attempt to do which is the animating impulse in all of the fiction Domini most admires.
“Clearing new ground,” of course, recalls the modernist imperative to “make it new,” and the invocations throughout the book of Joyce, Beckett, Robbe-Grillet, and Kafka remind us that postmodernism in American fiction was the revival of modernism, its continuation, not its replacement or repudiation. This was the argument made explicitly by John Barth in attempting to situate his own work and that of his experimental colleagues, insisting they were all concerned with extending the adventurous aesthetics of modernism. Domini stresses the salience of the modern in the postmodern in his essay on Donald Barthelme, which maintains that despite the preoccupation in Barthelme’s fiction with contemporary mass culture, it is rooted in the influence of the modernists, arguing that “echoes from the past third of [the 20th] century inform the larger purposes of his work, and help define his place in contemporary fiction.” The inclusion of this essay in The Sea-God’s Herb can be taken both as additional commentary on an important American postmodernist and a reminder that the efforts of a writer like Barthelme are not an aberration in literary history but a renewal of similar efforts by previous writers discontented with conventional storytelling and decorous prose, a legacy of literary invention that presumably the younger writers Domini surveys have inherited.
The section of the book devoted to a group on non-American writers including W.G. Sebald and Italo Calvino serves to show that this legacy is not limited to English-language fiction, although the remaining sections, one loosely focused on the Italian/Italian-American artistic sensibility as reflected in various cultural forms (allowing Domini to apply his critical skills to works of popular culture) and the commentary on Dante, feel less integrated with the primary analysis of contemporary fiction. The former seems too much an interruption of Domino’s examination of literary questions, while the latter, despite Domini’s belief that the Divine Comedy bears important affinities with postmodern fiction, provides a weak, muffled conclusion to the book. Rather than reinforcing the main points about innovative fiction, or the critical approach Domini has taken, by turning his attention instead to a writer and text he reveres and obviously knows well, Domini leaves more the impression of his own personal enthusiasm for Dante, and of his breadth as a critic, than of a summary statement about properly appreciating unconventional fiction.
One might quibble with other limitations of The Sea-God’s Herb as well. Some of the reviews are so brief they don’t really manage either to say something substantial about the work at hand or contribute much to the book’s implicit argument. These reviews seem to have been included for the sake of a greater completeness in representing Domini’s career as a reviewer, less because they stand on their own as literary criticism. And while certainly Domini is often an eloquent writer and skilled phrasemaker, there are times when it seems to me he substitutes colorful figurations for more extended analysis and description. In a review of Robert Coover and John Hawkes, he concludes:
. . .Thus both these books make litter of the literal. Both put the match to time and space, and to ordinary morality as well, and then color the flame with pain and desire. America’s literary avant-garde. . .has rarely so goosed the mundane.
Making “litter of the literal” or “goosing” the mundane call more attention to the reviewer’s wordsmithing than the actual features of the books under review, and the metaphorical match is so bright it obscures the qualities it is supposed to be illuminating. Of course, book reviews are not exercises in academic criticism, but this book as a whole is rigorous enough in its dedication to explaining the real ambitions of unconventional writing that somewhat more rhetorical rigor in specific reviews would not really seem out of place.
Domini’s estimation of particular books or writers is not beyond challenge. I myself can’t agree with his assessment of Gilbert Sorrentino, about whom Domini includes two essays. Domini overrates Blue Pastoral, one of Sorrentino’s minor novels, while vastly underrating his magnum opus, Mulligan Stew, in my view one of the most important postmodern novels ever written. Domini does appropriately value Sorrentino’s final three short novels, Little Casino, Lunar Follies, and A Strange Commonplace, but in order to maintain his emphasis on the social and ethical qualities of postmodern fiction he underplays their radical formal strategies to stress their “reassertion of emotional content” compared to works such as Mulligan Stew. Gilbert Sorrentino is perhaps the experimental writer who poses the greatest challenge to Domini’s thesis that “emotional content” is as central to postmodern fiction as formal and stylistic audacity. Domini is right to say that Sorrentino’s depiction of human behavior is often grim and unforgiving, that he is in some ways “our poet of bitterness,” but what nevertheless makes his fiction a pleasure to read are the formal and stylistic escapades (Sorrentino’s work could probably with justice be called “game-playing”), usually employed to very broad comic effect. If rescuing Sorrentino for Domini’s larger argument requires dismissing his most representative work while accentuating the least typical elements of his work as a whole, one might be led to wonder whether Domini’s sympathy with experimental writing fully extends to perhaps the most resolutely experimental of postmodern writers.
Such a disagreement does not make John Domini a less reliable guide to the broader currents of unconventional writing over the past 40 or so years. Readers familiar with postmodern fiction will probably think about it differently after reading The Sea-God’s Herb, while readers less disposed toward it might reconsider their skepticism. More importantly, this book demonstrates that book reviews can have more than transitory value. Undeniably perceptive when they first appeared, these reviews continue to provide insight. The collection offers an informative introduction to an important strain of contemporary fiction, but also advances an interpretation of that fiction reflecting a coherent critical perspective. For those who think of the book review as a form of consumer advice or journalistic reportage, it should also make clear that, in the right hands, reviews can be serious literary criticism.
Collections of book reviews are inherently difficult to present as sufficiently unified to warrant republication as a book. Whatever unity of theme, style, or approach the reviews possess first of all reflect such unifying qualities as they manifest themselves in the reviews to begin with, which of course requires a critic who pursues particular themes or maintains a particular approach. Books like John Domini's The Sea-God's Herb and David Winters's Infinite Fictions illustrate how a well-chosen and well-arranged compilation of reviews can reinforce the insights provided by skilled and perceptive critics.
Often the critical perspective a reviewer offers is given its most characteristic expression when considering certain kinds of writers or a particular literary mode or genre (as is the case with both Domini and Winters). Jeff Bursey's Centring the Margins: Essays and Reviews exemplifies this tendency, which is signaled clearly in the book's title. Bursey generally examines works of fiction outside the mainstream (outside the U.S. mainstream, at least), including works of formally transgressive fiction, translated fiction, and lesser-known Canadian books, and certainly to the extent the book succeeds in calling attention to this work it is a worthwhile effort for that reason alone.
Bursey makes his purpose quite clear in the book's prefatory essay: "Where Margaret Atwood and other brand names are granted much leeway in sentiment and space in the press no matter if what comes out is average or bad, novels that don't adhere to some perceived notion of normal writing are received in a less friendly way. They are sometimes considered not art but an affront." Further:
I don't deny the mainstream authors their audience. However, others will seek to create new work in new forms, and if they're viewed as rude threats, that's not a bad thing. These reviews were often written with the explorers and the unruly in mind.
In collecting the reviews, Bursey expresses the hope that they might help in "bringing less popular works into the centre of the conversation" about books. However, I'm not sure that this is an altogether realistic, or desirable, goal if it means achieving an easy, automatic acceptance of such works in the "mainstream." Better that adventurous and iconoclastic works remain an "affront," as threats to established practice lest they become reflexively amalgamated into a bland and uncritical literary culture. Such works should remain unruly, even if that means some very good writers might not get the immediate recognition they deserve. Such a book as Centring the Margins is valuable because it provides access to readers who might be interested in exploring the margin, discovering it can be quite an interesting place.
If there is a drawback to emphasizing reviews that in effect seek to champion the writers and works surveyed, it would be that eventually the tone of consistent approbation can become somewhat wearing, and I would have to say that Centring the Margins doesn't always avoid this problem. Bursey is certainly willing to point out flaws and missteps in the books he considers, but in most cases it is in the context of coming to an ultimately appreciative conclusion. As well, I found myself occasionally looking for more detailed analysis of the writing strategies and their effects in the works considered, somewhat less reliance on longer quotation. (In the review of Gaddis's Agape Agape, for example, we are told at the end that the book is filled with "jagged rhythms and darting wit," and that Gaddis is a "superb stylist," but there isn't much critical commentary in the review that explicates these qualities.) On the other hand, the pieces on Blaise Cendrars and the Estonian writer Mati Unt introduce me to writers about whom I know little and definitely make me want to get better acquainted with their work.
I can't say I always agree with Bursey's estimations of the writers under review (I can't bring myself to admire either William Vollmann or Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn as much as he does), but of course this is an inevitable reaction to the views of any critic (especially when they are expressed in such a relatively large number of reviews). The breadth of his reading is impressive, however, lending credibility and authority to his reviews, both individual reviews of books he has clearly carefully considered (both text and context) and the assembled reviews as a whole, which collectively leave the impression that their author reads comprehensively across formal and linguistic boundaries, and against the grain of entrenched assumptions about what books are worthy of our attention. Certainly readers will conclude from these reviews that Jeff Bursey has given the books his engaged attention, and those who would like to expand their own reading horizons beyond the books reflexively covered in the high-profile book review sections would be making a good start by consulting Centring the Margins.
At times it becomes quite obvious when reviews written by novelists or poets have been taken as an opportunity to pass negative judgment on work whose assumptions about writing simply diverge from the reviewer’s own. A good example of this might be the New York Times review by Michael Cunningham of Rikki Ducornet's Netsuke. After faintly praising Ducornet's novel, Cunningham instructs us that
By delving into a character’s motives, a writer fulfills one of fiction’s most powerful potentials — the ability to draw the reader into a character, including the most repellent of them. Fiction can show readers what it’s like to be someone very different from themselves, even if that drawing-in is discomfiting.
Ducornet, unfortunately, "has erred too much on the side of discretion":
The pure malice of Ducornet’s [protagonist] is not alleviated by her reluctance to show us much by way of the injuries he’s inflicting on his patients. Ducornet treats the analyst’s patients as offhandedly as does the analyst himself. The book’s atmosphere of arid heartlessness begins to produce a parched feeling in the reader.
Cunningham's review betrays a lack of sympathy with the aesthetic goals of Ducornet's novel, goals that clearly clash with his own--"to draw the reader into a character"--and this unwillingness to accept a kind of fiction different from that which he writes is reinforced in the review by an unwillingness to understand what Ducornet's goals may be. He engages in no reflection on what Ducornet might be up to rather than psychological realism, and he considers Netsuke in total isolation from the rest of Ducornet''s by now rather ample body of work. If Cunningham has read any of Ducornet's previous fiction, his review seems rather determined to avoid any reference to it.
Readers familiar with Rikki Ducornet's fiction know that it does not attempt "to draw the reader into a character" in the manner—adopted, no doubt, from Virginia Woolf—that Michael Cunningham himself favors. This is not because she has no interest in character, but because in her fiction character is just one element that works to help give it its distinctive signature. Ducornet is not a realist, psychological or otherwise, but a fabulator, and were she to focus on drawing the reader inside the characters in the mode of Woolf or Faulkner she would either be undermining the very mode in which she has long worked, or be turning herself into a different kind of writer. Still, to say that Ducornet to some extent subordinates character to plot, setting, symbol and imagery, or, especially, style, is not to say that her fiction shows no concern for the "motives" of its characters. Indeed, long-time readers of Ducornet's work must be taken aback by Cunningham's suggestion that Netsuke exhibits insufficient attention to motive, since Ducornet's fiction so relentlessly chronicles what it represents as the motive force behind all human behavior: the unavoidable power of "desire."
In Ducornet's story, "The Word, 'Desire'", the protagonist, who is still experiencing the intense, intoxicating effects of new love, comes to appreciate this power when she notices her lover looking with obvious desire at another woman. She imagines herself into the perspective of both the lover, gazing, and the other woman, being gazed at, and finds herself concluding: "How far the word 'desire' goes! How it tugs us along! How it worries us, daggers us. How it lights our path." Ducornet's fables are fables of the manifestation and the consequences of desire, how it "tugs us along" and both "daggers us" and "lights our path." Her characters are driven by desire, experiencing both ecstasy and pain, come to a healthy acknowledgment of it, disastrously deny it. Desire in such works as The Stain, The Jade Cabinet, and Gazelle leads the characters to both become more human, and, in some cases, descend into the monstrous. Ducornet isn't really interested in showing readers "someone very different from themselves" because this fundamental human motivation is one to which we are all equally subject.
Thus the claim that a novel like Netsuke fails to explore "motives" arises both from a weak reading of the book and sheer ignorance, either literal or willed, of Rikki Ducornet's work as a whole. Cunningham asserts that the psychiatrist protagonist acts out of "pure malice" in seducing his patients, that he "systematically and without guilt soul—murders" them. While it is not necessarily surprising that a reader might cringe with horror at the actions of a character like this protagonist (readers have expressed similar distaste for some of the actions and events depicted in her other novels), one might expect Cunningham to examine his response, to more fully appraise the text and more carefully measure his response against what the novel actually conveys to us about the protagonist. Because this character as subject to the inescapable influence of desire as any of Ducornet's other characters. He is not motivated out of "pure malice"--he may be malicious, but the malice isn't pure, uninflected by deeper impulses that are themselves neither benevolent nor malevolent but simply are what they are.
"My clients are thwarted, famished, and lonely," the protagonist tells us. "Inevitably, sooner or later, I seize upon and penetrate the one who has wanted this from me from the first instant. Or has taken time but has come around to wanting it." The narrator both believes what he is doing is of benefit to his clients—it's what they want as an assuagement of their pain—and knows he is exploiting them. He knows also he is exploiting his wife, Akiko, an accomplished and compassionate woman he both loves and despises. In betraying his wife with his clients, the narrator is acting on desires his marriage can't fulfill—that he doesn't want it to fulfill. Cunningham is correct to say that Netsuke is "a story about a man trying to bring his own house down" (although this isn't all the story is about), but this very insight implies he isn't simply acing out of malice. His accomplishments as husband and professional are being overrun by elemental impulses for which those accomplishments are an inhibition and a nuisance. In Ducornet's fiction, carnal desires must and should be expressed, but that doesn't mean the consequences will aways be "healthy."
Ducornet admittedly makes it difficult for us to grant the psychotherapist his portion of a shared humanity by making him the narrator of his own story. Novels narrated in the first person by morally compromised characters, such as Lolita, Thomas Berger's Killing Time, John Hawkes's The Blood Oranges, or, more recently, Jonathan Littell's The Kindly Ones can charm us into a kind of moral complicity in which we come to regard our identification with the narrator with some horror, but can also lead us to recoil at too obvious violations of ethical norms and decorum. We can both lull ourselves into overemphasizing the narrator's "human" qualities, and allow our disgust to overlook them. Judging from Michael Cunningham's response, Netsuke can provoke the latter reaction. A first-person narrator is always unreliable to some degree, but some writers especially exploit the capacity for first-person narration to create ambiguity and instability. Rikki Ducornet is this kind of writer. Whenever she uses a first-person narrator, as readers we need to be prepared for, and willing to accept, the resulting ambiguities.
Netsuke, like many of Ducornet's novels, is relatively brief, which also no doubt adds to the possibility it will be misread in the manner exemplified by Michael Cunningham. We don't "get to know" the character as we do in longer works, especially those devoted to the kind of psychological realism in which "getting to know" is largely the point. Ducornet's kind of fabulation, which can draw on the elements of the fable or fairy tale without incorporating the movement toward narrative closure ("the moral of the story"), works best both through brevity and a deliberate avoidance of psychological "depth," at least through explicit strategies of point of view or style. Anything longer could mar the delicacy of what she is after, and "delving into a character's motives" would only undermine its subtlety.
Writers who know that another writer’s book is likely to be antithetical to their own artistic assumptions might still be able to comment insightfully on that book, but they ought to at least acknowledge that bias before agreeing to review it.
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