The Reading Experience

Thunder and Illumination

Grievances against critics often stir up debate about the proper role of arts criticism, and, indeed, a recent complaint by an American actor prompted the British critic and editor Lola Seaton to contemplate this question, focusing mostly on book reviewing. In her New Statesman article, Seaton frames the issue as an inquiry into the relationship between critic and author, but her real subject is the critic's own underlying conception of reviewing itself as a literary form.

Seaton offers the critic Adam Mars-Jones as an especially rigorous exponent of the review as a  self-sufficient composition. The goal of a review, according to Mars-Jones, is to address a "potential reader" who is "being guided to pleasure or warned against disappointment" although "a reviewer isn’t paid to be right, just to make a case for or against, and to give pleasure either way." In Seaton's words, criticism "is not an unerring ranking system but a form of personal expression, and a good review is not right (or not only right) but convincing, fresh, entertaining, satisfying, perceptive." In my words: according to this view, a reviewer has autonomy in his/her judgment, separate from any consideration of the author of the work, but also can assert an autonomy separate from any ultimate consideration of the work under review, or any particular critical principles that should be applied to it. If the review is "satisfying" as a piece of writing, it has succeeded in the only requirement this notion of criticism imposes.

Seaton suggests that reserving some consideration for the author might temper the potential abuses of this approach to reviewing, but otherwise seems to accept the Mars-Jones position as an accurate accounting of the goals of criticism. She brings in other critics, such as Elizabeth Hardwick, who seem to agree with the Mars-Jones view (although Hardwick is really more concerned that the critic's autonomy result in “the communication of the delight and importance of books, ideas, culture itself”), and she quotes approvingly James Wolcott's characterization of reviews at their best as the source of "thunder and illumination." Ultimately Seaton does seem to side most with Hardwick, suggesting that the author and the critic should be a "mutually advantageous collaboration," the author and critic "reciprocally at work at shaping taste."

I am myself unsympathetic both to the idea that the critic's job is "shaping taste" and to the underlying assumption that the critic's overriding task is to "guide towards pleasure and to provide it," to act on the one hand as a judge and on the other as a performer. The latter two functions are in conflict with each other, the attempt to combine them often responsible for empty "snark" or overwrought, vacuous praise. But the alternative to a labored liveliness is not to assume the gatekeeper's role, to fancy oneself a high cultural influencer or a guardian of eternal verities. All of these roles are really an attempt to elevate the critic to a position of prominence equivalent to the writer, but I don't see why this is necessary. The writer and the critic have different jobs to do, although they certainly do converge around the literary work the writer has offered. But the writer has indeed offered us something with a claim to being a work of art, a compelling work of nonfiction, or a contribution to some intellectual discipline. At this point, the writer can't really expect to be able to control the responses to the book, and the critic provides (or ought to provide) an especially well-considered response, drawing on that critic's  presumed knowledge and experience.

In my view, the critic should be expected not to educate the reader's taste or to engage in rhetorical display but to bring to the literary work his/her fully engaged attention and be able to describe the salient features of the work that careful reading discloses. If the critic's appraisal is to have weight beyond facile judgments that treat works of literature as if they were just another consumer good (albeit of a culturally refined sort), evaluation is actually secondary, even subservient, to the depth of such description. The critic does not owe the author a positive judgment, but does owe both author and reader the application of whatever intelligence and insight that critic can summon in the attempt to more keenly discern the work's fundamental features. A particularly scrupulous exposition of the work's character can itself serve as an implicit assessment of its success or failure, without the addition of a conventional act of judgment at all. To perceive the literary work's formal and stylistic elements clearly is at the same time to recognize its achievement.

Some might regard the kind of critical approach I am advocating as too fussily "academic," but academic criticism has in fact long since abandoned interest in aesthetic evaluation as something that is  unavoidably subjective and irredeemably hierarchical. If book reviewing is to be the only remaining source of what was once known as literary criticism, and reviewing is to be regarded more as an exercise in self-expression than a focused contemplation of literature, then for me criticism has essentially ceased to exist. Of course there are critics who defy the current strictures in academic criticism against "formalism," as well as those among reviewers who resist the pressure to act as a judge or a consumer advocate, and offer astute, closely observed literary criticism. It is, however, discouraging that such critics stand out as exceptions to the general practice.

It won't be surprising if I say that I myself identify with these recalcitrant critics who persist in considering the aesthetic standing of the literary work itself to be the object of their attention, not its convenience as a cultural index or as a prompt for the critic's own discursive fancies. I have written the kind of criticism that attempts to explicate what it is like to read a work or an author while also as fully as possible approaching the work on the terms it sets up for itself. This does not entail insisting that all concerns "outside the text" are irrelevant, but it does presume that considering such concerns--cultural, historical, political, biographical--is not the immediate task the critic should perform, as has become the default assumption in most academic criticism, although they inevitably influence the "content" a work of fiction turns to its own purposes through form and style. Reducing a literary work to what it might "say," might "tell us" or "reveal" is not, in my view an act of criticism; no amount of "close reading" devised to arrive at such formulations can make this activity "critical" in any way that is adequate to the allusiveness and indirection inherent in both fiction and poetry that distinguish them from ordinary forms of expository discourse.

Admittedly I have adopted my particular critical strategy in part because I focus so much (not exclusively) on adventurous or experimental fiction, which especially requires, it seems to me, an approach emphasizing description and explication. Although in most cases I do make clear the extent to which I think an "experiment" has succeeded or not, such a judgment is really not very meaningful unless it is accompanied by evidence of careful reading. If I had more interest in covering the contemporary literary scene as a whole (which might possibly have gotten me a larger audience), perhaps I would have developed a style more agreeable to Adam Mars-Jones, but I don't think this would make me a better critic. I might have more book review assignments than I have right now, however.

 

Explain Yourself

Perhaps the most debilitating limitation of the book review, at least as practiced in American newspapers and most magazines, is that too often critical judgment is pronounced in the absence of articulated standards. Underlying assumptions about what makes for a "good novel," and thus assumptions about what makes fiction worthwhile in the first place, are left unstated, even when those assumptions are clearly implicated in the judgment rendered. This is first of all the consequence of the enforced conventions of the form itself, which appear to proscribe explicit discussion of assumed standards, presumably to give reviews a facade of objectivity (as if criteria of judgment are so well known it's only a bother to mention them) and ward off the possibility they might become too "academic." But reviewers also frequently seem all too ready to embrace these conventions and advance conclusions whose premises are allowed to go unexamined.

Two recent reviews illustrate the problem, although one relies on an unstated assumption in order to praise while the other does so to find fault. Ed Champion's Philadelphia Inquirer review of Donald Westlake's Memory wants to commend the novel as "pulp" but as pulp with something else, something identifiably literary. Critics of mystery fiction, Ed mantains, deny that it can deliver "thematic truths and behavioral insight." Westlake's book shows that this objection does not always hold up, since Memory displays "serious thematic concerns."

Of course, the assumption here is that "literary" fiction can properly be defined as that containing "thematic truths and behavioral insight." Granted, Ed is countering what he thinks is a critical dismissal itself bound to this assumption, but the phrasing really seems to be Ed's gloss on the criticisms made of a form of fiction otherwise focused on "plot-oriented puzzles." If it's too heavy on "plot" and "puzzles," it must be too light on "substance," which must mean "theme" or "insight." It's a common enough opposition, but rather than trying to break it down, by, say, making a case that "plot-oriented puzzles" have their own kind of substance, especially in pulp fiction, Ed unfortunately adopts it to his own purposes and in extolling the work of Donald Westlake reinforces the notion that "literature" is equivalent to "theme."

In a review of Jon McGregor's Even the Dogs, Floyd Skloot perpetuates some equally damaging stereotypes, in this case about experimental fiction. According to Skloot, in his dedication to his "experiments with the devices of fiction" McGregor sacrifices "emotional engagement with his characters and story." His devices call attention to themselves, become "showy." His characters lack "sufficient character and depth to distinguish them" and "scenes that should be unbearably emotional. . .fall flat, because we have no visceral connection with the characters." Ultimately the novel fails because the author does not "let us lose ourselves in it."

There is here a virtual taxonomy of the book McGregor should have written but, in the reviewer's opinion, unaccountably did not. This book is pretty clearly a conventional novel full of "emotional engagement" with fully-drawn characters that preserves narrative transparency and allows us to easily suspend our disbelief. These things are what real novels should be doing, and McGregor's novel can't possibly be judged successful simply because it tries to do something else.

The reviewer has every right to prefer his projected shadow-novel, but if he can't be expected to assess the novel he's actually been given to review according to the criteria appropriate to it, either he shouldn't have been assigned the novel to review in the first place or he should be obligated to acknowledge that his standards preclude considering Even the Dog a legitimate novel at all, preclude considering alternative standards for a novel that manifestly demands them, and that the flaws he delineates are really just the markers of his own projection. He might be given the opportunity to defend his standards, and to explain why McGregor's novel should still be subjected to them, but he can't do that if he can't, or won't, declare those standards directly.

Reviews such as these help sustain the illusion that the boundaries of the "literary" are well-known and that the principles of criticism are so well-settled they merely need to be applied consistently. These illusions need to be dispelled, not encouraged, but the protocols of "literary journalism" as it now exists probably aren't going to contribute much to that effort.

Afterthoughts

On February 7, Mark Athitakis published both a review of Don DeLillo's Point Omega and a blog post supplementing that review. The review (printed in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune) is a perfectly good review of its kind--the kind limited by the newspaper's imposed limitations of space and the need to address a perceived "general" audience--but what struck  me the most is how superior to the review, and ultimately more useful to readers, is the blog post.

The review does an effective job in its first paragraph of locating the new DeLillo novel in the context of his other recent work, and immediately lets the reader know it is a book worth his/her attention. What follows is three paragraphs (out of six total paragraphs) of plot summary, which succinctly enough encapsulate the "story" of Point Omega (succinct plot summaries not being something I normally anticipate in most newspaper reviews, it must be said) and a concluding paragraph that states the reviewer's judgment that the novel manifests an "elegance" and "an artfulness to the prose" that make it more satisfying than DeLillo's previous book.

In the blog post, Athitakis quotes the conclusion of his review, but then moves well beyond the kind of compressed commentary he is able to provide there. The first thing he does is to refer to other critical reaction to Point Omega, a move that is apparently forbidden in most print book reviews. The assumption seems to be that a review must be free-standing, shorn of the useful context consideration of existing commentary on a book might offer. This is a practice that only reinforces the impression of book reviewing as "lifestyle reporting" rather than actual literary criticism, and it's a shame reviewers like Athitakis are not able to engage in real critical dialogue in the reviews they write. In this case, the quotes from the other reviews he includes in his post allow him to express his dissent from prevailing views and to emphasize what he thinks is a misperception of Point Omega.

Athitakis then goes more deeply into what he considers the "timelessness" of DeLillo's concerns, contrary to the notion he's become preoccupied with "abstracted musings on geopolitics" since the events of 9/11/01. He suggests that "the novel’s central tension isn’t between war and peace or American empire and the rapidly approaching apocalypse (though DeLillo hasn’t neglected those concerns), but between differing notions of what it means to be patient. How soon do you perceive somebody’s disappearance as a loss? How long does it take to come around to somebody else’s way of thinking? How much time is required to shift from being concerned about humanity to being concerned about a single human being?" This analysis reflects a level of critical contemplation for which the editors of newspaper book reviews have little patience, but which this blog post presents very cogently.

It isn't that Athitakis's post is much longer than the review, but that it doesn't have to observe the numbing conventions of literary journalism as imposed on the book review. At first it seems like an afterthought to the main business represented by the review, but to me it finally comes to embody the critic's thoughts much more fully. Increasingly, blog-published reviews and criticism in general are more satisfying in this way than what can be found in print publications, especially newspapers.

Book Reporting

The "book review" as we now know it is more an artifact of professionalized journalism than it is a form of literary criticism. While critical consideration of "new" books is certainly a worthy task for literary criticism--a case could be made that it is in fact the imperative task of criticism--book reviews of fiction have for decades been primarily a sub-genre of reporting. As Matthew Davis puts it in a recent discussion of Martin Amis's early years as a reviewer, for newspaper editors the book review "could be taken as one of the functions of reporting on all aspects of current affairs." Indeed, the full-length review (1,000 words or more) of single titles is almost entirely a product of the modern newspaper and the few magazines that "covered" books on a regular basis.

Since few book reviews do little more than recount plot and pronounce summary judgment, those that either manage to do more than that, or that manage to expoit the conventions of the book review particularly well, are really the only ones worth considering as contributions to literary criticism. (That these conventions usually make book reviews into a slightly more elevated version of the book report accounts, in my view, for the fact that most of the books reviewed in print publications are conventional, plot-bound novels. Innovative, adventurous fiction often resists plot summary, and thus such fiction is either ignored or regarded with palpable disdain.) Although the insights provided by even the best newspaper book reviews are still filtered through the listless idiom of the book review "craft," sometimes they can actually employ that craft to provide intelligent commentary.

Recently Heller McAlpin reviewed John Updike's My Father's Tears for the Christian Science Monitor. Although restricted to 750 words, her review nevertheless manages to convey both her sense of the value of this posthumous volume and to locate its stories in the broader context of Updike's work in general and of his late work in particular. Although I ultimately think her focusing concept of Updike's fiction as providing an account of "what it is to be an educated, thinking, feeling – and, finally, aging – northeastern American male in the latter half of the 20th century and the first decade of the 21st" is much too narrow in capturing Updike's accomplishment as a writer--he's much less a conventional realist than many readers and critics seem to think he is--McAlpin's review nonetheless cogently organizes itself around the thesis that, as she puts it later in the review, the "overarching theme of Updike’s last stories is the family diaspora that is a natural but painful passage of man – a dispersal whose final stage is death but whose most effective antidote is memory."

While she may have partly been forced to do so by necessity, McAlpin is still wise to limit her discussion of the individual stories included in My Father's Tears to just four, using them to get at the thematic continuity of the book. Too many reviews of short story collections essentially just list the included stories and offer a synopsis or brief observation, substituting the naming of titles for analysis. McAlpin effectively uses the final story, the first story, the title story, and a fourth story that is representative of others to frame her discussion of the volume's merits and to give the reader an informed sense of how the stories work together. This emphasis on the broad commonalities among the stories potentially helps the reader to fruitfully approach the book far more than a series of plot summaries.

In this review, McAlpin manages to turn the limitations of the newspaper book review--its brevity and its appeal to "consumer service"--into a benefit. She succinctly indicates the nature of the stories to be found in My Father's Tears and just as succinctly links these stories to Updike's previous work. This has the effect of clearing away the detritus surrounding Updike's fiction as it has been received in the final years of his career and bringing readers back to the constant concerns--at least in terms of theme and subject--that have animated Updike's work for fifty years and that are duly updated in what turns out to be his final book.

Unfortunately, in her review of Colm Toibin's Brooklyn, McAlpin succumbs to the vices encouraged by most newspaper book reviews. The review begins by stating what appears to be a thesis--that the novel is "an enormously absorbing, nuanced read that steeps us in its character's world - and gradually surprises us with its moral resonance,"  but which turns out to be just an isolated evaluative statement the rest of the review does not illuminate. Instead, it sticks to straightforward plot summary that is meant, presumably, to certify that Brooklyn is "absorbing," etc. but that really just suggests, at least to me, that this is merely a conventional historical novel about "lost innocence." Brooklyn may indeed be "absorbing," "nuanced," and full of "moral resonance," but McAlpin's review does not show us how or why these things are true of the novel. 

That the Toibin review is of a novel while the Updike review considers a collection of stories may partly account for the greater reliance on plot summary in the former (as well might various editorial policies of which we as readers of the review cannot finally be aware), but the temptation to "review" mostly by condensing story and making a few unsupported critical remarks is apparently an inherent feature of journalism-based book reviewing. No one should expect newspaper reviews to evidence rigorous critical thinking, of course--although McAlpin shows in the Updike review she is certainly capable of applying critical insight--but its absence does make it difficult to take seriously the protestations of print reviewers that they are the guardians of literary culture and thus their trade ought not be allowed to disappear.

"Journalism-based reviewing" extends to a publication like the New York Review of Books, which is often cited as a book review that does offer more rigorous criticism. If one were to judge by Michael Dirda's recent review of The Complete Ripley Novels, however, plot summary also seems to be the primary critical method valued by both the reviewer and the editors of NYRB. Dirda makes some attempt to weave in the occasional critical observation ("The hallmark of Patricia Highsmith's work is a calm, hallucinatory intensity built on sentences of unemotional plainness and clarity"), but if anyone is looking to find in his review some critical discernment beyond the usual sort of thing said about Highsmith's fiction (it "probes the fluid nature of identity," is "bleak" and "upsetting"), such is not to be found here. Serial description of the plots of each novel, in chronological order, is.

In my view, this is partly, if not largely, the fault of the Review and its editors. When fiction is discussed in this publication at all--which is rarely more than once or twice an issue--it is often through biographies of writers or omnibus volumes such as The Complete Ripley Novels, and these reviews generally follow the same pattern: rehashing of biographical details combined with superficial observations about the writer's work. The emphasis remains on "reporting" the publication of the book in question, not on providing more penetrating literary criticism.

(When a new work of fiction is reviewed at NYRB, which is even rarer, usually it considers the work of an established writer, seldom is the review allotted as much space as one devoted to nonfiction, and scarcely ever does the review differ significantly from those in other newspaper and magazine book sections. Even Dirda's review is mostly five separate brief reviews piled on top of each other rather than an extended critque.)

Print journalism is fairly quickly being reduced to its core functions of news reporting and analysis, and much of the latter is being siphoned off onto blogs and other websites, especially commentary related to the arts and "culture." Whether the newspaper book review will simply replicate itself online does still remain to be seen, but if it instead fades into literary history, it will be a form of "literary journalism" that won't really be missed.

Literary Restructuring

I'm willing to go along with Lorin Stein's proposal that American book critics be given their share of government bail-out money, provided a few conditions are established and observed:

No money shall be given to print-based publications "that already review" unless the current slate of editors and most prominent reviewers agree to resign. These are, after all, the very people who have plunged print criticism into its current crisis through their decisions to write and publish vacuous reviews of no long-term merit, and should the publications they represent continue to print book reviews, these people should not profit from their past violations of the public trust.

If money is provided for "funding start-ups in the spirit of the New York Review," those entrusted with editorial decisions in these new entities cannot be the same old hacks who elsewhere have plunged print criticism, etc. They should not be allowed to convert these publications into forums for political and social commentary easily enough handled in other kinds of publications not called "book reviews" and to exclude fiction and poetry so thoroughly from consideration that eventually only the occasional nod to well-known writers or biographies of same are ever printed in these organs. They should hire reviewers who actually like fiction and poetry, and these should be "start-up" reviewers as well, not tied to the superannuated publishing and critical establishments whose depradations the bail-out money is meant to counteract.

All parties receiving bail-out money will pledge to resist the idea that criticism is part of the "commerce of culture." If the the purpose of literary criticism is, as Ms. Stein suggests, to separate "quality from hype" and to serve a "free press devoted to books," the notion that either literature or literary criticism has something to do with what's called "commerce" must be disregarded at all costs.

Finally, if literary criticism is conceived by either editors or reviewers as part of an effort to allow readers "to find out what's actually good, short of reading the books themselves," the entire bail-out program must be immediately terminated. No money should be expended on "criticism" as consumer guidance, criticism that actually discourages readers from "reading the books themselves" and making their own judgments. Only book reviews that accurately and fairly represent the books under review without rendering judgments appropriate to the courtroom but not to the "free" experience of literature will be allowed under this program.

Deserving Little Praise

In the New York Times recently, Joe Queenan acknowledges that "the vast majority of book reviews are favorable, even though the vast majority of books deserve little praise." Queenan proceeds as if this were a revelation of a carefully-guarded secret, but anyone who reads newspaper book review sections with any frequency knows that they are filled with reviews that are not just reflexively laudatory but are rhetorically empty in every way that might otherwise qualify them as "criticism." Plot summary substitutes for analysis, effusive approval for critical judgment, nitpicking for reasoned objection.

Queenan believes this happens because "Reviewers tend to err on the side of caution, fearing reprisals down the road" or "because they generally receive but a pittance for their efforts, they tend to view these assignments as a chore and write reviews that read like term papers or reworded press releases churned out by auxiliary sales reps." While neither of these explanations speaks well of American book reviewing--even though Queenan does try to make excuses for it--I believe the simplest explanation goes even farther in clarifying the problem with newpaper book reviews: Honest criticism can't be found in these pages because criticism itself can't be found there, for reasons that are inherent to the medium.

Newspaper book reviews exist as extensions of "lifestyle" reporting. Some books also provide more refined grist to the conventional newsreporting mill, but in either case reviews function not as instances of literary criticism, not even in its most limited gereralist mode, but as sources of information, sometimes as "stories" in their own right. Since most readers of lifestyle journalism undoubtedly want mostly feel-good stories (negative stories only get in the way of "lifestyle" contentment), it only makes sense to provide book reviews, book coverage in general, that portrays the "bookworld" as full of pretty nice stuff. Anyone who thinks that real criticism--either as the serious examination of literary works in general or as the frank assessment of any particular "current book"--can be found in such coverage just hasn't come to terms with the shallow and complacent practices of contemporary journalism.

In the most recent issue of The Jewish Quarterly, Tadzio Koelb makes a similar point concerning the adulatory reception of Irène Némirovsky's Suite Française:

Whichever approach reviewers of Suite Française took — whether they followed the ‘lost book by dead writer’ angle, or played the French guilt card — they all used the limited space left after biography to indulge in fulsome but often strangely detached praise. In a perfect example of the abdication of critical responsibility in exchange for the more sensational copy to be had from Némirovsky’s biography, many reviewers used the language of the marketing material (e.g., ‘… hailed as a masterpiece …’, Financial Times; ‘hailed as a lost masterpiece’, The Times; ‘… hailed …as “a masterpiece…”’, The Scotsman). Some reviewers compared Némirovsky to great writers (to Tolstoy in the Saturday Guardian; to Chekhov in the New Statesman). Others, however, preferred to note that Némirovsky herself mentioned Tolstoy in her journals (see reviews in the London Review of Books, for example, or the Telegraph Magazine) or wrote a biography of Chekhov (as in the Evening Standard or the New Statesman) and let the implication sink in.

Both the sensationalism and the emphasis on biography, as well as "the fulsome but often strangely detached praise," to be found in the reviews of Némirovsky’s unfinished novel are entirely representative of the kind of attention works of fiction especially are accorded in newspaper book sections. Only books that will satisfy readers' desire for "quality," or that can be made to seem such through the reviewer's hyped-up language, are reviewed in the first place. Appropriate commentary then becomes an issue of finding the right kind of perfunctory praise, in some cases an emphasis on the "sensational copy" that occasionally accompanies this or that book.

I partially blame academic criticism for the dismal state of generalist book reviewing. First the wholesale retreat of criticism behind the walls of academe and then the virtual abandonment of text-based literary criticism for the treatment of literary texts as occasions for social, historical, and theoretical analysis left serious readers with few other organs of literary discussion than newspapers and a handful of magazines. These organs have been dominated by literary journalists more attuned to the protocols of journalism than to those of literature, and by writers who proceed according to the precautions outlined by Queenan. The paradoxical result is that now criticism exists neither in the academy nor in mainstream print publications. (Which is one reason that someone like James Wood, all of his shortcomings notwithstanding, has acquired the prominence he has. As someone who both closely reads and does so in accessible language, he's such an anomaly.)

Némirovsky's Suite Française is a book that could have used some actual literary criticism, by critics (maybe even "scholars") rather than "book reviewers." Such critics might have been able to explicate the novel more rigorously and with a more informed perspective on its historical, national-literary, and biographical contexts. Tazdio Koelb maintains that for fiction to be examined adequately on its own merits "we will have to resurrect the critic." I agree, but I don't see how this will be possible from within the existing conventions of either book reviewing or academic analysis.

Middlebrow Mediocrity

Everything that keeps our current literary culture mired in midddlebrow mediocrity is exemplified in Amy Bloom's novel, Away, and its reception by mainstream book reviewers when it was published last fall. The novel itself is not per se a "bad" novel--many worse ones are published and reviewed every season--but it is entirely undistinguished, to the point that my most immediate reaction to it was to wonder why it needed to exist in the first place. Moreover, that book reviewers would so exorbitantly praise such a novel, as in fact most of them did, strongly calls into question the standards being applied by those working in that branch of "literary journalism" represented by newspaper book sections. If Away is considered by "professional" book reviewers to be an exemplary work of serious literary fiction, which my reading of the reviews leads me to think is the case, then as a culture attuned to the possibilities of fiction as literary art, we are in a sad state indeed.

In her Los Angeles Times review of the book, Lionel Shriver writes:

Amy Bloom's new novel, "Away," could be called formulaic. Her protagonist, Lillian Leyb, is on a quest of the most classic variety: to be reunited with her young daughter, lost in a Russian pogrom. Yet. . ."Away" testifies to the truism that execution is all. Bloom isn't fighting traditional forms; in some respects her second novel is one more standard American immigration tale. But her execution is exquisite. . . .

Later she adds:

Bloom breaks no new formal ground, yet not a line is trite nor a character stereotypical. Working comfortably within a conventional form, she renews and redeems it. The ultimate test of any writer may be taking on the most traditional of genres -- the love story, the ghost story, the immigration story -- and pouring new wine into old skins. . . .

Shriver's review reeks of the kind of rationalization book reviewers constantly offer when recommending "formulaic" fiction written "comfortably within a conventional form." Such fiction may otherwise seem "standard" in its use of all of the hand-me-down practices of traditional narrative, but it's still full of "finely wrought prose, vivid characters, delectable details," as Shriver puts it a few paragraph later. It may be utterly predictable, reinforcing safe and complacent reading habits by going no farther than to pour some "new wine into old skins," but if its "execution is exquisite," then no more should be asked of it. Who needs fiction that challenges formal expectations, offers an alternative to our hackneyed notions of "finely wrought prose"? Writers who pursue such challenges and alternatives are just "game-playing," anyway, so why not just settle for another feel-good novel and its "soft-smile, along-the-way humor."

Away is in fact just what Shriver initially judges it to be: a tired piece of formula fiction rehashing familiar themes of immigrant stories that cannot be redeemed by its "colorful" characters" or its "soft-smile" humor. In fact, both the characters and the "humor" with which their stories are larded seem only more cloying for the obvious effort being made to use them to inflate an inherently cliched narrative--a mother treks her way across the continent to be reunited with her child--into something less sentimental and more "vivid." Unfortunately, the vividness of the characters is almost entirely a result of their being enlisted in the attempt to justify retelling a "standard" story that otherwise has no real justification. As the novel's protagonist, Lillian, meets up with these characters--a homosexual actor, a black prostitute, an isolated telegraphist in the Yukon, etc.--the narrative becomes only more labored and the characters themselves only more an obvious effort to compensate for the fact the Lillian is essentially a cipher. It's hard finally to care much about her journey, or about the people she meets along the way, since she is so resolutely a blank slate on which these melodramatic adventures are being written--which is not, I don't think, the role for Lillian the author intended.

In her review of the book, Heather McAlpin observes that "Away is a compact epic, an adventure story, a survival tale and an incredible journey wrapped up in a historical novel cloaked in a love story. It evokes E.L. Doctorow's Ragtime in its playful fusion of fiction and fantasy and its exuberant tone. . . . " I don't know if Doctorow could have foreseen the influence Ragtime (as well as his subsequent historical novels) would have on writers following him, but contemporary fiction has indeed become inundated with novels whose primary purpose, or at least so it seems to me, is to "recreate" the past. If Away has any reason for being at all, this is it, to recreate a period of early 20th century American history (with the requisite allowance made for the "local color" as necessary literary device). Since I have frequently indicated my impatience with this sort of historical fiction--in which no other aesthetic purpose beyond evoking an historical event or period can be discerned--I will not dwell on its shortcomings here exept to note that Away is apparently based on historical fact, gleaned from several historical and autobiographical sources Bloom lists in her acknowledgments page, although "reconfigured. . .when it suited the story" (Author's Note). That reviewers would still be welcoming this sort of thing over thirty years after Ragtime, would even extol its virtues in the hyperbolic language used to praise Away, seems to me to indicate an even more impoverished attitude toward fiction's potential to continue to surprise than that illustrated in Amy Bloom's decision to write such a novel.

In what she apparently considers praise for Bloom's writing, Shriver exclaims that Bloom "conjures the kind of specific details that creative-writing teachers are eternally begging their students to generate." However, it is precisely Bloom's "finely wrought" prose, cut to fit the sort of default narrative realism encouraged by creative writing programs (or any other kind of systematic writing instruction) that makes Away seem so perfunctory, so indistinguishable from all the other manufactured works of narrative realism produced--with a few acceptable variations--according to a preconceived model of what a "well-made" novel should be like. That a novel like Away would be widely reviewed and favorably received is probably not surprising, since book reviewers, may of them "creative-writing teachers" themselves, generally seem to accept this model as well. But American fiction is not well-served when book review pages (the few of them that are left) give over so much of their space, and so little critical judgment, to such backward-looking, unimaginative work. Perhaps it is too much to ask that the editors of these pages more often consider art over commerce, the interests of literature over the interests of the status quo, but must they so consistently valorize the mediocre?

Becoming Visible

Elizabeth Baines would prefer to have bad reviews of her books rather than no reviews at all:

I'd rather have a negative review and my book be thus a visible part of literary debate than have it buried in silence. Books like mine - short stories, newish independent press - don't get reviews easily in the newspapers. . .or indeed as easily on much of the web, as those hyped by big publishers. A bad review from [a blog] would at least have made more people aware of its existence than none. . . .

It has been my practice to give negative reviews (really negative reviews) only to books whose authors can certainly withstand criticism, whether in print or in the blogosphere (authors such as Ian McEwan or Steve Erickson), or when a larger point can be made beyond simply registering a critical opinion of a particular book or author, especially if the book is not likely to gain a wide audience, anyway, or if the author is in a vulnerable state of his/her career (at the beginning, lagging in mid-career, on the verge of being forgotten,etc.). I read (or start to read and don't finish) many books that I do not discuss on this blog, precisely because to give them negative reviews just for the sake of announcing I didn't like them doesn't seem very productive and because sometimes I don't have anything useful to say except "this book didn't hold my attention" or "I liked it!."

However, Elizabeth's comment makes me wonder if it wouldn't be more helpful to unknown or midlist and small press writers (whose cause I generally support, my opinion of individual books notwithstanding) to mention their books, even if it meant passing a negative judgment or just noting I had read a particular book and offering a brief assessment. If a significant proportion of writers and aspiring writers agreed with Elizabeth that making "more people aware of" their work would be better than silence, I would be willing to take note of their books, along with some expression of my opinion.

Do you agree with her?

Style and Depth

B. R. Myers's critique of Denis Johnson's Tree of Smoke essentially amounts to these two complaints: a) Johnson is not a psychological realist, and b) there are passages in the book that Myers doesn't like. To my mind, neither of these points is relevant to an honest assessment of Johnson's novel, and thus Myers's "review" should be read (as the Rake also points out) as another installment in his "manifesto" against contemporary fiction and its readers and should not be confused with actual criticism of Tree of Smoke.

In his admitted ignorance of Johnson's other fiction, Myers finds it a crippling flaw that this latest novel does not "depict characters with extraordinarily rich and complex inner lives." Myers warns potential readers of Tree of Smoke: "Anyone expecting a psychological novel from characters so lacking in complexity deserves to be disappointed."

But what if, in fact familiar with Johnson's other books, we don't expect this latest one to be a "psychological novel"? What if we have concluded that Johnson's strengths as a writer don't lie in detailing the "extraordinarily rich and complex inner lives" of his characters? And what if this is so because Johnson so often portrays characters who lack an ability to reflect much on their actions, whose lives seem propelled by forces they don't control or who get caught up in events they can't foresee? What if in taking up a Denis Johnson novel we just don't think Tolstoy is a particularly apt touchstone in beginning to evaluate it?

Further, what if we think the very concept of "psychological realism" is specious to begin with? Myers thinks that the mark of a good novel is "style and depth" and that it's the psychologizing that brings the "depth." A "psychological novel" is one in which the novelist descends into the murk of human consciousness and brings up nuggets of clarity and enlightenment. Exactly what it is that makes a novelist a sufficiently expert analyst of the human mind that I would care what he/she comes up with in this dive into the depths, or that qualifies some passages of discontinuous prose or halting exposition as "psychology," has never been adequately explained to me. Pretending to mirror the ongoing operations of consciousness (or to translate those operations into coherent language) is just another way of getting words onto the page, and by now it's a dull and overused strategy. It has no special merit that entails an inherent superiority to other ways of writing.

For me, that Denis Johnson is not a psychological novelist is one of the primary reasons I would want to read his fiction in the first place.

And then there are Johnson's putative lapses in style. I'm prepared to believe that in a book as long as Tree of Smoke there will be some sluggish moments, some stylistic treading of water, or even that in this particular novel Johnson's subject has not called out the best in his prose style. However, I can't rely on Myers's analysis in order to entertain these possibilities, mainly because he doesn't provide any analysis. Most of the examples of bad writing he cites are condemned for their lack of psychological astuteness--surely a colonel would never use an "artsy compound adjective thrown in with profanity and genteelisms"--for trivial "mistakes" in word choice--apparently one must never use the word “bric-a-brac” if Vietnamese villagers are in the vicinity--for insufficent knowledge of physics--"Could someone standing in such a noisy place hear even his heartbeat, let alone his pulse?"--or an overreliance on "startling word combinations"--one's pulse shouldn't "snicker" and one's sweat shouldn't "creak--but rarely are they examined in any detail or with much insight. Frankly, many of the passages Myers cites seem ok to me. But because I don't share Myers's assumptions about how a novelist's words "should mean something," I guess I'm just one of those who "contribute to the rot" of the King's English.

Certainly Myers does almost nothing to demonstrate that Johnson's prose style actually is deficient, aside from quoting a number of passages and making some irritated remarks about them. He assumes we will agree with him that the passages are indeed bad, but I don't, or at least I want some close reading of them that points out their particular flaws. Instead I get this, about one extended sample of "bad prose":

It is not always easy to tell whether Johnson is being serious or merely unfunny, but I sense no irony here. Rather than disdain Edward’s puerile humor and self-importance, we are to share his condescension toward a society that would never “get” his lampoon, which, by the way, has little chance of being off-color with an “unmountable” lead (another case of Johnson canceling out his own words). We are also to accept that although Edward is now the kind of man who lets puppies starve to death, and is something of a sociopath to boot, his experiences afford him unique insight into Philippine society. In a mad world only the madmen are sane, and all that. . . .

Note that what is supposed to be an example of bad prose turns out to be a criticism of one character's "puerile humor and self-importance" and of the notion that "in a mad world only the madmen are sane," etc. Nothing in Myers's commentary is an examination of style. Perhaps he tells me that I might not like this particular character or that the underlying theme is banal (both a matter of individual judgment of course, each requiring a separate critical argument), but he tells me nothing about Denis Johnson as a stylist. In fact, there is nothing in Myer's review that suggests to me that he knows anything at all about what makes for an effective prose style, nor that he read Tree of Smoke in order to fairly appraise it for what it is trying to accomplish rather than find in it what he wanted to find--an excuse to engage in more splenetic denunciation of contemporary fiction.

Myers's review serves to remind us that he doesn't much care for contemporary fiction. (Although, having read A Reader's Manifesto as well as several of his subsequent reviews, I still don't really know why.) I'm not sure, however why the Atlantic Monthly's book editor otherwise thought it was something worth publishing. As a piece of literary criticism, it's pretty wretched.

Problems in the Story Line

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 and 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--an often are--as biased, uninformed, ungrammatical, and critically illiterate as they like. (122)

Pool, as she does throughout her book, shares the delusion 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 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.

As I have suggested previously, 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 implicity 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. To me, this is a non sequitur. 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 some 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 heirarchy of a newspaper or magazine. Bias-, fact-, and grammar-checking are imperatives of journalism as practiced by a self-appointed group of so-called professionals in a self-limited sphere of work, 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?

As far as I can tell, the concern among print reviewers and editors such as Gail Pool (also expressed by numerous other such figures over the past few months) that book reviewing be saved, not least from the ragtag bloggers, comes from a fear that their identities as "book critics" are imperiled. It can't be from a fear that literature or literary criticism is imperiled, since Faint Praise itself demonstrates that book reviewing as now exemplified by working "literary journalists" has precious little to do with either. Since book reviewers are paid so little, and since, as again Pool herself attests, book reviewing is viewed by other journalists as occupying the bottom rung of the prestige ladder, the disdain for literary blogs and other "nontraditional" sources of literary discussion that drips from the pens of Gail Pool and Richard Schickel and Michael Dirda must rise from a mounting fear that their sense of separation from mere "amateurs" is at risk: If you can't look down on bloggers, after all, who can you look down on?

Faint Praise at the same time both pinpoints the reasons why book reviewing in the usual print publications can't be taken seriously 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 and a little "education' of reviewers who game the system to their own benefit and of readers who have otherwise come to see this system as the adjunct to "book business" hucksterism that it is. 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.

Authorities

What I take most from Sven Birkerts's contribution to the anti-blog campaign is that there are some critics who have so utterly fetishized ink-on-paper, or who are so thoroughly invested in "print" and its its "biases and hierarchies" (Birkerts's own words) that they will attach themselves to the last sheet of paper passing through the last printing press before they will turn to the pixel as an alternative. (At which point they will no doubt endorse it as if their protests had never been never uttered, since where else are they going to go?)

Birkerts has been worrying over the transformation of print-based reading into digital-based reading for quite a long time now, so he is probably more entitled than most of the other blog-bashers to question the value of literary blogs. And his criticism is less that any particular blogs are deficient in critical standards or acumen than that the blogosphere as a whole is not able to provide "authority and accountability," which are apparently Birkerts's bottom-line criteria for worthwhile literary criticism. For Birkerts, there is an inherent, metaphysical difference between print and blog that makes the former not just superior but absolutely crucial in maintaining anything that could be called "literary life" at all.

Suffice it to say I find this notion absurd. Birkerts proceeds according to a number of fixed assumptions that to me are not fixed at all. One is that blogs are "predatory" on print sources. This is, of course, the same old charge that's been leveled against blogs since they first began to threaten the hegemony of print, and where litblogs are concerned, it becomes less true with every passing day and with every new litblog that comes to my attention. Increasingly, litblogs use print articles as a jumping-off point for further commentary that has much more in mind than simply pointing readers to the source. This sort of thing has long gone on in academic criticism, which often similarly uses previously published commentary as a touchstone, something that motivates additional commentary, a response that broadens the critical discussion. Journalists and book reviewers, it would seem, are not to be responded to in this way. Their words have authority.

Another such assumption is that the blogosphere is "fluid," a "slipstream" in which the unwary reader can get too easily "lost," whereas print book reviews provide an "echoing wall" back from which "the sounds produced by individual writers and thinkers are returned as a larger coherence." I suppose it is possible to become entirely passive when navigating the blogosphere, letting the links and cross-references lull you into a critical somnolence, but I don't quite see why this is inherently a feature of blog-reading. Couldn't you pull yourself out of the "slipstream" and exert some critical intelligence of your own? Couldn't you muster up some "coherence" yourself, rather than waiting for some "authority" to provide it? Besides, the days when most blogs provided primarily links are coming to an end, for the reasons I indicated above. The free-standing blog post, without "predatory" designs on print sources (or in which such sources are themselves "supplements" to the post), will only become more common. (Are in fact already common: many of the blogs listed on my blogroll to the right consistently feature these kinds of linkless posts.) At the very least, there's no reason to believe that the "slipstream" defines the blogosphere, except insofar as there are many good blogs, and you could get "lost" trying to keep track of them.

Perform a thought experiment: Sven Birkerts publishes one of his reviews on his own blog rather than in one of the newspaper book review sections. Does it thereby get lost in the slipstream, its content too "fluid" to manifest "authority and accountability"? Does it automatically lose its authority? Having "New York Times" stamped on it is what finally confers authority, regardless of how compelling the review is in and of itself? Is literature really well-served by this specious, artificially-induced authority?

Predictably enough, "editing" has its role to play in the print world of authority and accountability:

The implicit immediacy and ephemerality of "post" and "update," the deeply embedded assumption of referentiality (linkage being part of the point of blogging), not to mention a new of-the-moment ethos among so many of the bloggers (especially the younger ones) favors a less formal, less linear, and essentially unedited mode of argument. While more traditional print-based standards are still in place on sites like Slate and the online offerings of numerous print magazines, many of the blogs venture a more idiosyncratic, off-the-cuff style, a kind of "I've been thinking . . ." approach.

I really don't understand why Birkerts would so directly oppose "editing" and "thinking." I myself, I now admit, do a fair amount of "editing" of my own posts. I try to put them together with some care, and I think I'm my own best editor. But I edit precisely to clarify my thinking, enhance my thinking, not to erase all signs of its taking place. If it nevertheless comes off as "idiosyncratic," so be it. I'd rather encounter the idiosyncracies of writers thinking through the implications of their responses to books they've read than most of the book reviews published according to "traditional print-based standards," if what I see in most of the Sunday book reviews are the fruits of these standards. Birkerts's "authority and accountability" and Gary Kamiya's "distance and objectivity and humility" are just self-justifying buzzwords invoked by writers who seem increasingly desperate to differentiate themselves from anarchic bloggers who won't hold themselves "accountable" to the powers that be (and who might be in the process of stealing their audience).

Ultimately, Birkerts wants to preserve a space for "unhurried thinking," a phrase he takes from Cynthia Ozick's recent essay on the decline of literary criticism. I do too, but I can't say I think he makes a very good case that the conventional book review as practiced in mainstream book review sections is a good forum for this kind of thinking. Some good critics (Birkerts frequently enough among them) are able to exhibit considered judgment and unhurried thinking in their reviews, but by and large the newspaper book review is a lost cause, done in by the consumerist approach increasingly adopted by most newspapers and by editorial myopia. Not much thinking at all goes on in most newspaper reviews, just rote plot summaries and stale recitations of received wisdom.

In my opinion, "unhurried thinking" is more likely to be cultivated in literary blogs than in the dwindling pages of newpapers and magazines. Bloggers have no imposed deadlines, no restrictions on the kinds of books that can be discussed, no need to stick to the stifling conventions of "literary journalism." As Frank Wilson (himself the editor of a newspaper review section) puts it in his own response to Birkerts, "Nothing is stopping anybody from being unhurried in their thinking, letting their views ripen, so that no nuance is released before its time - and posting the results online when they feel ready to. Just because the Web allows one to do things quickly doesn't mean that everything done there must be done quickly." The "fluidity" about which Birkerts complains can just as easily be channeled into productive chains of discussion that far surpass print book reviews in both depth and breadth and that will establish their own kind of "authority." Litbloggers don't have to be "accountable" to editors or to Sven Birkerts or to anyone else beyond the curious readers who can regard literary weblogs as "echoing walls," or can just go with the flow.

UPDATE See also this response to Birkerts's essay at The Wooden Spoon.

UPDATE Also this.

Just Do It

I finally managed to watch on C-SPAN the "Ethics in Book Reviewing" panel discussion from the recent Book Expo America. Quite frankly, most of it was pablum (except for John Leonard's remarks and some of David Ulin's), when it wasn't largely just self-serving. The discussion really wasn't so much about "ethics" as it was about insuring that most of the assumptions motivating mainstream book reviewing remain resolutely unexamined. The general impression I got from the panelists was that what reviewers and editors are doing these days is just fine, except in the rare instances when it's not, but those don't really matter since print book reviewers are clearly so well-intentioned.

One of the unexamined assumptions that seems to be shared by these book reviewers is that the reviewer should not look at other reviews before doing his/her own, an issue that came up near the end of the session. "Just review the book" seemed to be the consensus advice among those left to discuss the matter.

There are several problems with this notion that reviews should be written in a critical vacuum, however. One is that it implicitly posits a recognized, shared set of criteria by which reviewers should go about "just" reviewing the book at hand. The reviewer needn't look at what others are saying because everyone is applying these same standards, even though they might come to different conclusions in the process. Ignoring those other reviews presumably avoids contaminating one's own conclusions with theirs, leaving the purity of one's response intact.

There is no such purity of response. If there is a shared set of critical standards that reviewers must apply, that in itself is the product of reviewers' assimilation of those standards through reading other reviews. If there are no critical standards to be uniformly and objectively applied in particular cases, then the reviewer's response is unavoidably intuitive and subjective, and while this sort of encounter with the text might thus be more recognizably "pure," I don't see the point in protecting it from intelligent or provocative things other reviewers might be saying. As a reviewer, you might be overlooking something in your own apprehension of the text, and to be alerted to this by another review can only be helpful. Why let your impoverished reading stand when you can easily enough enrich it?

In my opinion, this hands-off approach to reviewing only reinforces the idea that book reviews are essentially "consumer reports," an attitude to which Francine Prose earlier in the discussion took exception. Each reviewer goes about his/her business of "just" reviewing the book and sends the results out to the reading public. These readers then consult a sampling of such assessments and make a decision about which one to trust, or how each one contributes to an overall assessment that helps the reader choose to purchase or not to purchase the "product" in question. Unless you think the reader is only going to read your review, which is possible but not likely, and certainly not likely among readers of the more intellectually weighty book review publications such as the NYTBR or Bookforum or The Atlantic, to refuse to consider the commentary other serious reviewers and critics have already provided seems to me a refusal to engage in the kind of ongoing critical discourse about new works they most decidedly need if they're not to become like most movies--appear with great fanfare in the form of reviews (mostly offered up over the same weekend) and then, after the equivalent of the obsession with a movie's "grosses," effectively disappear.

Certainly not all reviewers would be able to cite other reviews even if they wanted to. With every new book, some reviewers have to go first. But surely Prose and Leonard and Carlin Romano don't really have these kinds of "notices" in mind. (Although there probably is some pressure among editors to get his/her review out first, itself a destructive impulse that's all about bringing attention to one's own publication rather than considering the literary quality of new books.) They're interested in the kinds of reviews that might also claim the status of criticism, even if of a relatively preliminary sort. I, for one, don't see how serious criticism can occur without the critic taking some account of what other critics have said. Moreover, to maintain that reviewers ought to actively avoid engaging with other analyses, should consider book reviewing as the opportunity to "just do it," seems to me an outright repudiation of criticism as anything other than the insulated opinion-mongering of self-appointed "experts."

Only Read By Literary People

It's too bad that the National Book Critics Circle has now so thoroughly discredited itself and its "save book reviews" crusade through its inability to curb its blog-hatred, since buried beneath the ignorant rantings Critical Mass has been posting is also this short piece on the role of criticism in literary journals by novelist Eric Miles Williamson, who is also an editor at American Book Review.

And while our efforts are noble at saving the book review sections of newspapers, it seems to this Board member that the battle we're fighting will ultimately be lost. Newspapers exist to make money. They are commercial enterprises. The Hearst Corporation (from which I receive checks) is not, ultimately, concerned with advancing culture or belle lettres. It wants, like any other creature, not only to survive, but, as Faulkner says of man, to prevail. . .

This said, I believe the book review is in better health than it has ever been in this country. I have in front of me a recent issue of Kevin Prufer's Pleiades: A Journal of New Writing, the literary journal published out of the University of Central Missouri. It comes out twice a year, and the issue on my desk has 27 reviews totalling over 100 pages, some as long as 4500 words. None of these reviewers get paid a nickel. Also on my desk is American Book Review, for which I edit. We publish six times a year, and our most recent issue has 30 reviews, each of which is at least 1000 words. We pay fifty bucks, but we beg our reviewers to accept a subscription or a gift subscription, and most of them forgo the cash. Then there's The Georgia Review, Poetry, The Virginia Quarterly Review, Chelsea, The Southern Review, The Arkansas Review, The Chattahoochee Review, and hundreds of other literary journals published both independently and by universities. . . .

I certainly agree with Williamson that the book reviews to be found in publications like Pleiades, ABR, Bookforum, and Context (alert: I've written for three of these journals) are more fully developed and considered, are better, than most of the glorified plot summaries that pass for fiction reviews in American newspapers. Good reviews are to be found frequently enough in the literary magazines Williamson lists as well (further alert: I've also written for two of them), but unfortunately the ones on the list are just about the only print literary magazines that do regulalry publish book reviews and literary criticism. The principle, and partial reality, that Williamson champions in his post is well worth stating and defending. Literary magazines (what used to be called "quarterlies" or "little magazines") should play a vital role not just in publishing fiction and poetry but in maintaining criticism as an ongoing practice. However, this principle is not followed, perhaps is not even recognized, by the editors of most of these magazines (of which there are indeed hundreds).

(I have to say I think online literary magazines are doing a better job of providing reviews and criticism than their more-established print brethren. Why this would be true I can't quite say. Perhaps there's a feeling that print space is too valuable, more long-lasting, and thus ought to be taken up primarily by fiction and poetry. It is true that perfunctory reviews of the newest and the latest aren't likely to seem that urgent in retrospect, but good reviews that aspire to the status of criticism don't have to be mere book reports and don't have to focus only on upcoming releases. Some extended discussion of books that have already passed the window of immediate critical regard but that remain well worth readers' attention would do American fiction a lot of good right now.)

A very good reason why literary magazines ought to cultivate critics and criticism stems from Williamson's own honest assesement that "the battle we're fighting [on behalf of newpaper book sections] will ultimately be lost." It will be lost. Newspapers are well advanced in their furious endeavor to alienate as many of their natural allies (readers) as possible, and in a few years we may well look back on the idea that serious book reviewing could be sustained in American newspapers with some hilarity. Without some system of critical support, none of the writers featured in our literary magazines are going to be able to make much in the way of long-term connection to readers who might be interested in their work. The mere appearance of the work in these magazines, absent attention to it when it later appears in a collection or leads to a first novel, isn't going to suffice. Simple concern for the careers of the writers they're promoting ought to motivate litmag editors to include thoughtful reviews among their offerings.

There will continue to be resistance to the idea that book reviewers should seek the more congenial, if also more narrowly focused, space afforded by the quarterlies (or, for that matter, literary blogs). Such resistance is vividly illustrated by the very first comment offered on Williamson's post: "I'm all in favour of literary journals; but they are only read by literary people. Surely the importance of having fiction and non-fiction reviewed in daily newspapers is that books remain an essential part of everyday culture, rather than becoming the preserve of a select few." Martin Levin also voiced a similar objection in last weekend's Globe and Mail: "Here's what worries me: The malignant idea that books, and book talk, are culturally marginal, even irrelevant, to be consigned to special publications and websites. Newspaper book reviews are often the first voice in public conversations about issues and ideas and writing that matter. And that's what we're in danger of losing."

I just can't agree that book reviews have ever been, or are ever likely to be, part of "everyday culture." Like or not, book culture is "the preserve of a select few," although a "select few" in a population of 300 million can still add up to a lot of people. "Book talk" may not be entirely "culturally marginal," especially if that includes talk about nonfiction books related to current events, public policy, and history, but it's hard to make a case that book talk about fiction and poetry occurs anywhere but among the "select few" who think such works are important. Perhaps it is true that "Newspaper book reviews are often the first voice in public conversations about issues and ideas," but those conversations also take place mostly among a "select few" and again the books Levin must have in mind are mostly nonfiction. Moreover, this more rarefied view of the role of book reviews seems at odds with Levin's previous claim that "book review sections are still where casual readers, and that's most readers, go to find out what books they might possibly want to read." (I don't think this is true. I think most "casual readers" go to libraries and bookstores and look around, or get recommendations from their friends. I doubt that many such readers ever seriously consult book review sections to determine what "they might possibly want to read.")

There's something very peculiar about the notion that literary journals are insufficient because they appeal primarily to "literary people." Literary people are people who take books and reading seriously. They want to know not only what new titles have been published this week but also how these books relate to other books (including other books by these authors) and what the experience of reading any one of them was like for an engaged reader. Book reviewers who want to keep plying their trade are going to have to get over the idea that they're bringing culture and edification to the great unwashed. Even if the unwashed wanted to get clean, newspapers (and many magazines) clearly are no longer going to pay for the effort. We should be content discussing the literary with literary people.

Childish Free-for-All

Attacks by "mainstream" press and literary figures against literary blogs have been appearing with some frequency lately. The most recent comes from Michael Dirda:

Every blogger wants to write a book. In fact, the dirty little secret of the internet is "Littera scripta manet"--the written word survives. A book is real, whereas cyberspace is just keystrokes--quickly scribbled and quickly forgotten. . .If you were an author, would you want your book reviewed in The Washington Post and The New York Review of Books--or on a website written by someone who uses the moniker NovelGobbler or Biografiend? The book review section, whether of a newspaper or a magazine, remains the forum where new titles are taken seriously as works of art and argument, and not merely as opportunities for shallow grandstanding and overblown ranting, all too often by kids hoping to be noticed for their sass and vulgarity. Should we allow our culture to descend to this playground level of discourse? . . .Newspapers sift, filter, and evaluate; they are responsible and strive to be trustworthy. So, too, do their book review sections. To curtail such coverage is to abandon an intellectual forum for a childish free-for-all. We would be shortchanging not only readers, but also the art, culture and scholarship of our time. Playgrounds, as we all remember, are ruled by bullies, loud-mouths and prima-donnas.

Apparently newspaper book review sections are suffering not because the reviews they publish increasingly go unread, or because the newspapers that sponsor them are being irresponsible in abandoning literary/cultural coverage that doesn't fill the financial coffers amply enough, but because of bloggers and their incessant scribbling, their blogs with funny names, and their goldarned "shallow grandstanding and overblown ranting," their "childish free-for-alls." (The word choice is telling. Free? For all? There goes the condo in Georgetown.) Presumably if bloggers hadn't come along and sucked all the air out of the room, the book review drudges would still be in there dutifully typing their 750 words and nobody would have been hurt.

That Dirda lets loose in this way suggests to me that he and his fellow ink-stained wretches really do think litblogs are threatening to make them obsolete. The twisted logic and the barely concealed rage (shared by many other anti-blog screeds) on display here is ever so revealing. Why lash out at the "kids" and their "sass and vulgarity" if they otherwise aren't worth taking seriously? Why focus exclusively on defending book reviewers from bloggers, rather than the bottom-line empty suits actually giving reviewers the ax, if you don't think the future probably does belong to the blogs? Playground bullies operate from a position of power, and it would appear that Dirda thinks litbloggers have seized it (and that he and his colleagues are victims.)

I have to say that the fury Dirda expresses in these comments takes me somewhat aback. I was under the impression that Dignified Critics such as himself mostly ignored litbogs, or at least that they didn't think real "book people" paid them much mind. I guess I was wrong. I guess literary weblogs have arrived, after all. Dirda's own "overblown ranting" only confirms it.

Oh, and the bit about how newspaper book review sections are the "forum where new titles are taken seriously as works of art." What a kidder.

Seasonal

In the first paragraph of his review of Peter Ho Davies's The Welsh Girl, Alan Cheuse declares that "Sentence by sentence, character by character, scene by scene, it's one of the best of the winter so far."

I haven't read the novel, so I can't comment on the accuracy of this statement. I am more interested in Cheuse's choice of critical measuring-stick: The Welsh Girl is "one of the best of the winter so far."

When did book reviewers start conceptualizing their jobs as akin to that of fashion writers, that is, to track the latest developments of "the season"? Is announcing that a given book is "one of the best of the winter so far" to say that it's actually a good book--judged by the perennial standards applicable to all seasons--or merely that it will do to while away an evening before the fire? Does it tell us that the winter book season is going gangbusters, as evidenced by this swell new book, or that it's afflicting us with a variation on Seasonal Affective Disorder and that this new book will have to do? What does the fact that it was published in a winter month have to do with anything relevant to the book's merit?

One might reply that Cheuse's statement is merely an offhand comment, a handy way to indicate the book has just been published, but it does seem to me that the critical discussion of books has become fixated on "season". Each fall and spring brings newspaper articles and blog posts on what's likely to be hot for that "quarter," and if it's not literally the "season" that drives book publishing and reviewing, it's the year-end prizes and awards and "best-of" lists that seem to channel book discussion into the "seasonal" rut. Everyone has a top ten list, and others chime in with the "top ten overlooked books" or the "top ten books about adultery" or the "top ten books with red covers." The book business has already become distressingly like the movie business--a new book needs to do boffo business "over the weekend," it needs to gain the attention of the judges at the (Fill-in-the-Blank) Awards--and these December lists don't do anything to temper this trend.

(I have to say that litblogs have only brought more attention to the compiling of such lists, some blogs breathless reporting on the appearance of each new one. This is one of the few instances in which the litblogosphere has had a more deleterious effect than otherwise. These lists are mindnumbing and eventually become meaningless, as almost every book published manages to get on some list or another.)

I would not bother to kvetch about this topic at all, except that book review pages and literary weblogs have become about the only available venues for anything resembling literary criticism in this country. Academic criticism has only pinched its nose harder at the idea of considering general literary merit in the books it examines, and there's a huge gap between the books of the season and those destined for the canon. Some general literary criticsm ought to be filling this gap. I want to know if this or that new book will be around in the longer run, whether it transcends the season of its appearance. I want to know if it's worth reading and rereading, whether it can compete for my attention among all the best books that have been written period (which I could be reading instead), not whether I might find it enjoyable after raking the leaves or planting the garden.

Tools

I agree with Brendan Wolfe that book reviews can be "tools that teach us how to think about books, how to read books, how to judge books." I also agree that a negative review can be used as such a tool just as readily as a positive review--but only just. If a negative review needs to be more than "snark," a positive review needs to be more than simple praise. Reviews ought to go beyond being simply "consumer research tools" (quoting Brendan), whether they result in readers seeking out a book or in leaving it alone.

(I can't agree with Brendan, however, that Dale Peck in particular is a reviewer who "writes well, makes interesting & thoughtful arguments, advances the discussion, advocates for the relevance of art," even if his judgment can ultimately be called into question. In my opinion, Peck is, snark aside, a dull writer who rarely offers thoughtful insights that aren't just bluster, "advances the discussion" only in the sense Scott Esposito has in mind when he complains about reviewers whose reviews are ultimately "more about [the reviewer] than the book," and advocates only for himself.)

However, I still question the utility of negative reviews that are not focused on a flaw that can be used by the reviewer to illuminate some larger issue relevant to literature as a whole. If, for example, a first novel illustrates an endemic problem the reviewer finds in first novels in general (or recent first novels, at least), then a negative review can be entirely justified, but I don't see the point in trashing a writer's first effort just for the sake of registering one's disapproval. (Or even books by established writers. Recently I've had the displeasure of reading a series of books by otherwise well-known writers that, unfortunately, I didn't like. In some cases, I couldn't even finish the book because of my extreme boredom with it. But I haven't posted about them or attempted a review of them simply to make my indifferent response a part of the public record. Here, William Gass's advice that an unworthy book will be "quickly forgotten" if we "simply not speak its name" seems appropriate.) I also think that negative reviews of books or authors whose reputation is (in the reviewer's opinion) unduly inflated are perfectly acceptable, if the reviewer is able to again make the question of "how to read books" and "how to judge books" central to the review.

If, however, I had to declare which kind of review or critical essay, the censorious or the laudatory, has in my experience more effectively allowed me to discharge what I consider to be the critic's most important tasks--to describe and evaluate the various ways writers can exploit the possibilities of fiction or poetry--I would say it is the latter. I feel I am doing some kind of service (or attempting to do so) toward the maintenance of these possibilities by calling attention to writers and works that embody them in compelling ways, more than I am usually able to by focusing on what's wrong or what isn't there.

A Critic's Virtues

Jonathan Derbyshire reports that his fiction reviews written for the Financial Times over the past year are now available online.

Readers who survey these reviews will find there a critic admirably free of ideological distortion and political pleading. While some highly-regarded novelists come in for their share of criticism (Umberto Eco and Nicholas Mosley, for example), such assessments are always made in a measured and informed way that shows considerable literary intelligence.

This passage from the review of Mosley's Look at the Dark illustrates one of Derbyshire's most notable strengths:

The moral and aesthetic difficulties signalled explicitly by the narrator are precisely those that Mosley has explored in his critical writings. He locates his fictional practice in the “great tradition” of novelist-moralists (Jane Austen, George Eliot, Henry James), whose work doesn’t so much prescribe the way to live as stimulate in the reader, through its attentiveness to the messy privacies of human lives, the cultivation of a properly moral sense. For Mosley, what distinguishes human beings from other animals is what he calls “creative consciousness”. Achieving an authentic existence is a matter of self-creation, which the form of the novel is well-suited to describing or exemplifying.

The English novelist Mosley most closely resembles in his philosophical ambition is Iris Murdoch, who also regarded the novel as embodying a kind of moral outlook. As with her, it seems reasonable to measure Mosley’s novels against the standards set by his criticism. And by these, Look at the Dark must be judged a failure. This isn’t, as with many English novels, a failure of ambition - it’s an aesthetic failure that is felt at the level of the sentence, in the grimly unmetaphorical prose and in the carelessness of Mosley’s descriptions. . . .

Derbyshire wants to situate the novel under review in its appropriate context, to let the reader know where it fits in the trajectory of the author's career and to make the appropriate standards of judgment clearly known. In other words, he wants to describe the work at hand as accurately as possible, even if the judgment to be passed on that work is ultimately negative, or includes pointing out the work's flaws. This does not mean simply providing some perfunctory plot summary or an account of the reviewer's degree of emphathy with the novel's characters--although another of Derbyshire's strengths is an ability to sketch out the immediate particulars of plot and character in just a few paragraphs. It means offering the reader as full a sense of what the experience of reading the book might be like as a relatively brief book review allows, as in this explication of Joyce Carol Oates's Rape: A Love Story:

As if to unsettle readerly sympathies from the start, Oates filters this account of what happened in Rocky Point Park through the scepticism of Teena’s neighbours, who recall what she was wearing (cut-off shorts and a vest), wonder why she would risk her daughter’s safety in the park after midnight and conclude that “she had it coming”.

A second-person narrative voice, which alternates throughout the book with a more conventional third-person style, tells Bethie that these are some of the things that “would be said of your mother... after she was gang-raped, kicked and beaten and left to die”. And it is in this second-person, occupying Bethie’s point of view, that Oates scrupulously anatomises the assault, most notably in one breathless, page-long paragraph in which the characteristically interrupted rhythms of her prose, inflected by a fiercely controlled lyricism, are refined to a point of rebarbative perfection: [example follows]. . . .

(Note: Derbyshire thinks more highly of Oates than I do, but his reviews contain many such passages as this, which relies on close and alert observation.)

Derbyshire does not evade the task of evaluating the books he reviews, supplying the kind of "consumer guidance" mainstream print publications, especially newspapers, usually demand, but he assumes some intelligence and interest on the reader's part and avoids simplistic verdicts. Here is a paragraph from his review of Zadie Smith's On Beauty, which attempts to get at what is finally (in Derbyshire's view) most rewarding about the book:

The so-called truth of fiction lies in the way it reveals what, in ordinary life, remains hidden; its “solace” in the glimpse it allows us of a “more comprehensible and thus a more manageable human race”. Smith’s earlier books may have suggested that her commitment to this novelistic doctrine was merely formal (in White Teeth, for instance, the Forsterian injunction “only connect” is recast as a post-colonial, multicultural platitude); but On Beauty follows Forster’s example by allowing its characters to fail at knowing themselves - and others.

This is a rather nuanced insight, not the sort calculated to create controversy by exaggerating a work's strengths or flaws and thereby deflecting interest away from the work itself and onto the reviewer's own inflated rhetoric. Perhaps it ought to go without saying that the kinds of virtues Derbyshire brings to his reviews--attentiveness, a willingness to consider a work of fiction according to the critical standards that seem appropriate to it and to it authors work as a whole rather than those dictated by doctrine or ideology, an appreciation of fiction's subtleties--are those we expect to find in a literary critic. But at a time when reviewers for well-known publications are encouraged to mine novels for their "ideas" (which then become the subject of tedious "think pieces" about "issues") or to substitute equally tedious "edge" for literary analysis, the cultivation of these virtues is all the more welcome, and all the more necessary.

Flair

According to the editors of Poetry:

These rules [for assigning book reviews] were put in place a couple of years ago, because it seemed to us that the state of reviewing in contemporary poetry was so dire. Not only was there a great deal of obvious logrolling going on (friends reviewing friends, teachers promoting students, young poets writing strategic reviews of older poets in power), but the writing was just so polite, professional, and dull. We wanted to eliminate the descriptive review, those pieces you finish without any clear idea of whether its author loved or hated the book in question. We wanted writers who wrote as if there were an audience of general readers out there who might be interested in contemporary poetry. That meant hiring critics with sharp opinions, broad knowledge of fields other than poetry, and some flair.

But isn't there something in between "sharp opinions" and purely "descriptive" reviews? How about something called "critical judgment," an "opinion" supported by the attempt to engage with the work in some detail and on its own terms? If the reviews currently available at the Poetry website (only two of eight, alas) are any indication, the problem with its reviews is not that they are too uniformly negative, as some readers seem to be contending, but that they are all opinion and no critical analysis at all.

In a review of A.R. Ammons's Bosh and Flapdoodle, for example, Danielle Chapman devotes one paragraph to free-floating generalizations about Ammons's career, one paragraph to equally airy generalizations about his poetry (which includes one quotation, but unfortunately it is from a poem not in the collection under review), and a final paragraph in which she pronounces that:

The real problem is that Ammons had seemingly lost the strength, or the will, to suppress his most banal thoughts. Though the inclination towards praise still exists here, it leads only to frustration, even rage, and the scatological ruminations seem like expressions of that rage, as if he intended them to deface the page that no longer welcomed him. It’s harrowing to see how Ammons’s restless need to produce—however uncertainly—kept him from perceiving the magnitude of his earlier accomplishments, or taking solace in them. And while we can understand how a poet who sought greatness as fiercely as Ammons did would react this way to the diminishment of his gift, it doesn’t make it any less painful to watch.

This judgment--about Bosh and Flapdoodle and about Ammons's late work in general--may be entirely correct, but we have only Danielle Chapman's unsupported assertions to vouch for it, and I, for one, am certainly not going to take such assertions as evidence. These may indeed be "sharp opinions," but they are also mostly worthless as criticism. As Judith Kitchen puts it in her published letter, such reviews "elect negativity at the expense of informed analysis, substituting shallowness for depth, attitude for understanding."

The editors' response to Kitchen is remarkably obtuse, inisisting only that it "is important to publish these negative reviews along with the positive ones" to provide "some ballast and context to the critical praise. . . ." Why not ballast both the praise and the condemnation with some actual literary criticism?

Undoubtedly an underlying problem with Poetry's reviews is that the editors do not allow reviewers enough space to say anything of real value about the books under review. Poetry is mostly in the business of publishing poetry, not criticism. But if you're going to review poetry at all, it seems only sensible to encourage your reviewers to make some attempt at "informed analysis." The editors also say in their response that their review policy is a "gesture toward treating poetry as a public art in the same way that films or novels are, both of which are routinely and fiercely argued over in the mainstream media." God help us if magazines like Poetry are now going to submit the discussion of poetry to the same kind of inane blather with which the "mainstream media" currently considers films and novels!

It says something about the editors' perception of the potential audience for poetry--"there are all kinds of signs that a much larger audience for poetry exists in this country," they say--that their review policy encourages such superficial opinionizing. Why would you want to cultivate an audience that prefers such opionizing in the first place? Poetry for those who don't really like it but thrill to frivolous conclusions stated in just the right empty but perky phrases? Who have "broad knowledge of fields other than poetry" but don't demonstrate much "flair" for poetry itself? How does this provide "a service to serious readers"? If anything, it insults them.

Gangs of Dullards

In a post commenting on Jack Schafer's recent defense of bias in book reviewing, Kevin Holtsberry (Collected Miscellany) correctly identifies this statement as the core asssumption of Shafer's argument:

The point of a book review isn't to review worthy books fairly, it's to publish good pieces.

Shafer continues: "Better to assign a team of lively-but-conflicted writers to review a slew of rotten books than a gang of dullards to the most deserving releases of the season."

Kevin takes issue with Shafer's "discarding" of the standard of fairness, asking "Isn't a fair review of worthy books what [readers of book reviews] are looking for?".

If I have to choose between "fair" reviews and "good pieces," I'll side with Kevin and take the former, if by "fair" we mean attentive to the tangible features of the book under review, as well as to the needs that a reader might have in placing the book in an appropriate context. Apparently Shafer believes this leads to "dull" writing, but that will be true only if the reader is more interested in the forced "liveliness" so many American journalists seem to think is a good substitute for thinking, or if the reviewer implicitly believes that reading the book in question is probably too much to ask of most readers and thus the "piece" he or she is writing ought to itself substitute for doing so. (Kevin identifies the problem with Shafer's position by noting how publications like Slate "get on [his] nerves" because so many of their writers "seek to be clever and entertaining" rather than informative.)

Shafer cites a review of John Updike's Villages Walter Berthoff as an example of the kind of "gutless" reviewing he opposes. Reviewers like Berthoff "genuflect to 'major writers'. . . composing fawning reviews that barely hint at how bad the books are." But Berthoff doesn't think Villages is a bad book. He attempts to put it in the context of Updike's other novels about his native region of Pennsylvania, establishes that it is "the most directly autobiographical of all Updike's novels," calls attention to Updike's signature prose style and attempts to describe how it works, provides a judicious summary of the novel's plot and characters. In other words, he tries to give as thorough an account as he can of the relevant issues to be considered in assessing this novel, to be as "fair" as possible both to a writer who's surely earned fair treatment and to readers who may or may not be as familiar with Updike's work as the reviewer. In my opinion it's a very scrupulous review, and why Shafer would choose to characterize it as "fawning" and "gutless" is a mystery to me.

(Obviously Shafer disagrees with Barthoff's conclusion that Villages embodies "a certain rueful but forgiving intelligence and, yes, wisdom about the accumulating passages, overt and hidden, of ordinary human existence," but that Walter Berthoff liked this novel while Shafer did not certainly seems an insufficient reason to call Berthoff dishonest. Shafer disdainfully notes that Berthoff is "the Henry B. and Anne M. Cabot Professor of English and American Literature Emeritus on Harvard University's faculty of arts and sciences," but if anything this information makes me more inclined to take his review seriously, while Shafer's qualifications to judge American fiction are. . .well, whatever they are.)

On the other hand, this is what Shafer takes to be a model of book-review prose:

Not all American novels are too long, but most novels which are too long these days are American. The bloated book belongs in a category with the yard-long hot dog and the stretch limo. The main difference is that the craving for extended sausage and limo comes from the customers—the eaters, the renters.

The need to publish ever-larger books, such as John Irving's 800-plus page Until I Find You, is a mysterious part of the psychology of the writer. It may be that readers like a book they can get their teeth into, but one which will dislocate their jaws? Not likely.

AS far as I'm concerned, this is babble. The generalization in the first paragraph is vacuous, and the remaining "clever" analogies are just puerile. Quite frankly, whenever I encounter a book review employing these kinds of tricks, I stop reading. The reviewer wants to impress me with his peppy prose and his cheeky views, wants to convince me his knowing attitude is much more entertaining than anything I'll find in the target of his wit. (Writers like Irving, who have unfortunately made themselves an easy mark for this kind of approach, are especially likely to receive such sophomoric treatment.) But I'm not interested, thanks. Maybe I'm just a dullard, but I'd rather have book reviews that take literary works seriously, that are not just excuses for the posturing of reviewers.

Shafer suggests that the best policy for book reviewing is anything goes, that even biased reviews can create "tension": "Can the prejudiced reviewer write against his personal feelings to tell the truth, the readers wonder?" But why should the reader have to wonder this? Why should I be more interested in some ridiculous squabble going on behind the scenes or in the banal jabbering of mod book reviewers than in the book purportedly under consideration? I take this issue of what book reviewing is for seriously because newpaper and magazine book sections are about the only forums remaining for what used to be called literary criticism. Academic journals have long abandoned text-based criticism, and literary magazines, which might be expected to compensate for this lack of serious criticism where contemporary fiction is concerned, publish very little critical commentary at all.. If general interest literary criticism is reduced to Shafer's brand of "let it all hang out" hokum, the future of serious writing in this country is bleak indeed.

The Larger Scope of Literature

In a response to this post, Kevin Holtsberry writes:

I think what Dan is talking about is a different form of "review." I would label this as criticism. Criticism takes the process a little deeper and has a different perspective. This is where concern for and judgments about "literature" come into play. Often these type of reviews engage the work at a deeper level and the result is more of an essay than a review. Criticism is for people who have already read the work and have a background with which to judge more broadly. There is no attempt to leave plot twists or unique characters unexplored. Criticism seeks to unpack a work, judge its effectiveness, and place it within the larger body of the author's work and within the larger scope of literature.

I don't necessarily disagree in principle with the distinction Kevin is making, but in my opinion we live in an era when those of us who love literature can't really afford to let "criticism" be relegated to the backwaters of literary commentary (which is where essays of the sort Kevin describes are often published--when they're published at all). Academic criticism no longer preserves a role for the kind of essay that "unpack[s] a work" and "judge[s] its effectiveness." At best academic critics use works of literature to illustrate favored theories or a brand of cultural analysis, but the time has long passed when "scholarly" criticism bothered with such things as "the larger body of the author's work" and "the larger scope of literature."

Thus, this kind of more reflective criticism has to be done in magazines and newspaper book reviews (perhaps in literary magazines as a supplement to the fiction and poetry these publications mostly feature) or it won't be done at all. Critics such as James Wood, Sven Birkerts, and Daniel Mendelsohn do engage in this sort of criticism, and they generally do so in the form of book reviews. It's not just a matter of the extra space allotted to some reviews in publications such as The New Republic or the New York Review of Books. These critics bring something other than "consumer guidance" to their reviews, even when (as they do) they write newspaper reviews. They bring a wide and deep knowledge of literary history, an ability to place current works of fiction or poetry within the context of that history, and an understanding that expressions of judgment need to be grounded in honest analysis. Even when I don't agree with them, I usually feel that they have proceeded through a "familiarity with the practices generally associated with the 'literary,'" (as I put it in my original post) and that they are ultimately most concerned to advance the cause of literature as a whole.

Furthermore, "analysis" doesn't have to be something dry and pedantic. In the context of book reviewing, it simply means that an attempt has been made to relate the parts to the whole, both in the work under review and between the work and the tradition or genre to which it belongs. A review does not itself have to be written in the form of a "critical analysis" as such; it merely needs to allow the reader to feel with some confidence that the reviewer has indeed paused for some reflection and analysis, has thought seriously about "the larger scope of literature."

If anything like "criticism" is to survive, it's going to have to be through book reviews and other forms of non-academic literary discourse--blogs, in fact, have made a good start at providing a forum for this kind of discourse. (And in this context, the "reviews of reviews" that are being done on several lit blogs are performing a very useful service, despite what some at the New York Times seem to think.) I wouldn't want to see book reviewing become dull and pompous, or, for that matter, entirely lose sight of the need to inform ordinary readers about new books that have been published so that those readers can decide whether to acquire any of them or not. But some effort to, as Kevin puts it, "engage the work at a deeper level" is never inappropriate, especially if you think that readers of serious books are more than just "consumers" and that literature is more than just another product to be sold.