Kathy B: two writers discourse on book reviewing (NY Times)

THE NEW YORK TIMES

 

Is Book Reviewing a Public Service or an Art?

FEB. 3, 2015

 

Each week in Bookends, two writers take on questions about the world of books. This week, James Parker and Anna Holmes debate whether book reviewing should be considered a public service or an art.

By James Parker

The point of the review, after all, is not the reviewer: It’s the book. The book that somebody else wrote.

 

James Parker 

CreditIllustration by R. Kikuo Johnson

 

Oh, a public service, definitely. Like keeping the drains clear. Book reviewing is an act of cultural hygiene, and in a republic more symbolically tuned-in than ours the book reviewers would all be wearing boiler suits and big rubber gloves. Think about what they do: From the great porridgey swell of incoming print, its level always rising, they pluck out the good stuff and kind of sluice the rest away. Hard work, dirty work, underappreciated and not well paid. And do they get it right all the time? Certainly not. Gems are overlooked, mediocrities are exalted; it happens every day. But somebody’s got to process this stuff, as it bellies up against the levee — offer an analysis, pass a judgment, make a call. Somebody’s got to read the book before you do.

Having said that (and here the columnist makes his neat little pivot), there is an art to book reviewing. Or a craft, I should say — because if the reviewer tries to be artistic, if he once abandons the secondary zone of criticism for the primary zone of creation, he’s sunk. The point of the review, after all, is not him: It’s the book. The book that somebody else wrote. So good reviewing demands a certain transparency of language, and an absence of prancing and posturing, of which I myself am regrettably incapable. I can write about the grotesque — the grotesquely bad, the grotesquely good, the grotesquely generic — but anything in the quiet midrange tends to confound me. Assign me a pretty good novel, or a fairly interesting memoir, and watch me sweat.

So much for me, anyway. There are plenty of other ways to go wrong. As inert as it might look on the page, the book review is a weirdly pressurized and verbally jeopardized space, crisscrossed with potential errors. There’s a huge pull toward pomposity, for one thing. Drop your guard, mid-review, and you’ll find yourself holding forth like a drunken bishop. “Insofar as our author blah blah blah. . . . ” Book review bombast comes in three flavors: highbrow (“Every page witnesses the overflow of his vast erudition”), middlebrow (“magisterial . . . that rare thing”) or lowbrow (“Wade through burning gasoline to get this book”). And everybody does it, automatically as it were. It’s why blurbs all sound like blurbs. My sub-psychoanalytic theory: The reviewer desires not-quite-consciously to “master” the text, to prove his superiority to the book under review — otherwise why should anybody listen to him? — and this desire, unless acknowledged, warps his lexicon and inflates his language.

Consider the various operations that are going on, simultaneously, inside a proper, 360-degree book review. You need to describe, nimbly and briefly, the contents of the book. You need to offer a considered, but not ponderous, critique. And most trickily, you need somehow to solidify in the reader’s mind the aesthetic criteria by which this critique is being made. Let them know, in other words, who is doing the reviewing. It’s a kind of sleight of hand, this — you do it with tone, and frame of reference, and hints and jabs and nudges. Have reviewers always had to do it? I’m not sure they have. Aesthetics used to be more of a communal business. So it may be a symptom of modernity, this desolate feeling as you begin to write a review that you are writing the first book review ever — that you are, in fact, inventing the form. There is also a minor obligation to entertain the reader, or at least get him painlessly to the end of the column.

Which is — oh, look! — where we are now. So I’ll say in conclusion: Book reviewer, I salute thee. You absorb whole books and rotate them slowly in your mind. You stagger to the keyboard. You fulminate, you glorify. You try and think of something clever to say. Then you take off your rubber gloves, and fall asleep.

James Parker is a contributing editor at The Atlantic and has written for Slate, The Boston Globe and Arthur magazine. He was a staff writer at The Boston Phoenix and in 2008 won a Deems Taylor Award for music criticism from the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers.

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By Anna Holmes

In the Internet era, writers often feel pressured to perform rather than inform.

Anna Holmes 

CreditIllustration by R. Kikuo Johnson

 

The Fourth Edition of the American Heritage Dictionary, which I found on a crowded, dusty bookshelf in the corner of my bedroom, defines the word “service” as follows: “Employment in work for another, esp. for a government.” Also: “Work done for others as an occupation.”

That same dictionary on the word “art”: “Creative or imaginative activity, esp. the expressive arrangement of elements within a medium.” And: “Works, such as painting or poetry, resulting from such activity.”

The American Heritage definitions only reinforce my feeling that book reviews, as practiced professionally today — which is to say, for money and for an audience — are more public service than art. For one thing, book reviews are written to be read: They are work done for others’ enjoyment and edification; unlike some art, they are meant to inform an audience, not perform for one, and they usually follow a predictable pattern: name of book, summary of what book is about, followed by a competent, well-argued opinion as to whether the book’s author achieved his or her aims.

This is not to suggest that book reviews cannot incorporate a measure of artistry. Any type of criticism, in the hands of someone skilled, imaginative and courageous, can indulge in and experiment with form as much as function. But I’d argue that a majority of the reading public doesn’t necessarily benefit from the sorts of reviews for which artistry is the point: Books cost money, sometimes a lot of it, and they also require a significant investment of time and concentration. I think it’s fair to say that most readers of general-interest book reviews in general-interest publications look to them to provide entertainingly but clearly stated answers to a few, fairly simple questions: (1) Is a book good? (2) Is a book good or interesting enough to justify buying it? Review writing with ambitions of art often says more about how a writer wants to be seen than what his or her readers need to hear.

So, as unsexy as it may sound, public service it is.

Among people who care about books, there’s been a fair amount of discussion and debate over the years as to whether negative reviews are worth the effort, or whether they’re even fair. My answer: Of course they are fair and worthwhile; they help to warn book-buying audiences away from books that might end up being a waste of their time. But what I suspect is embedded in the debate over positive versus negative reviews is a debate about literary criticism as performance — literary criticism as art. And in the Internet era, in which everyone is a critic and provocative “smart takes” reign supreme, the bar has been set ever higher in terms of standing out from the crowd. As a result, writers often feel pressured to perform rather than inform.

This can have disastrous consequences. A little over 10 years ago, John Leonard, in the pages of the Book Review, addressed the issue of “responsible reviewing” in his assessment of Dale Peck’s “Hatchet Jobs,” a collection of literary essays published by Peck, many of which appeared first in The New Republic. Leonard argued that Peck’s show-offiness and self-regard were not of service to those who care about literature, and that Peck’s attempts at artistry had failed spectacularly. “This isn’t criticism,” Leonard wrote. “It isn’t even performance art. It’s thuggee. . . . It causes the kind of tone-deaf, colorblind, nerve-damaged and gum-sore literary journalism that screams ‘Look at me!’ ” I am all for expressing one’s personality in prose, but when it comes to book reviews, critics should remember that the best things they can do for readers is to be straightforward, unselfish, and to remember to get out of the way.

 

Anna Holmes is an award-winning writer who has contributed to numerous publications, including The Washington Post, Salon, Newsweek and The New Yorker online. She is the editor of two books: “Hell Hath No Fury: Women’s Letters From the End of the Affair”; and “The Book of Jezebel,” based on the popular women’s website she created in 2007. She works as an editor at Fusion and lives in New York.