Book Reviewing in America

In her book Faint Praise: The Plight of Book Reviewing in America (University of Missouri Press), former Boston Review editor Gail Pool writes:

Readers dismayed by the lack of criticism in reviews won't find more of it in other coverage, most of which is promotion, sometimes in disguise. Newspaper book features--profiles and interviews--are promotional. Readings are promotional. "Reviews" written by booksellers, even independent booksellers, are promotional. Book clubs are promotional. Even readers' guides are promotional: produced by the publishers to enhance the books' value for--and sales to--reading groups, they may be designed to encourage more thoughtful reading, but they don't encourage a critical approach. None of the guides seem to ask readers to question the quality of a book's prose, its cliched characterization, or the problems in its story line. They start from the premise that the books are good, and it's their purpose to help readers "understand" why they're good, not discover they aren't.

Nor will readers frustrated by the quality of criticism in traditional reviewing find it improved by its nontraditional counterparts. On the contrary, in self-published reviews on the Web--the main nontraditional alternative--critical failings are 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.

Comments

[hershel Parker]

As I finish Melville Biography: An Inside Narrative it seems possible that a pack of New York City reviewers can never annihilate any well-researched book as totally as they could do in 2002. The usually innocuous New York Times Book Review survives, in diminished state, as does the often rabid New York Review of Books, and they are read, still. Yet never again will pompous, error-filled articles in the New Yorker or self-serving misrepresentations and outright lies in the Nation or the New York Times or the New York Review of Books or the New Republic hold place on the Internet unchallenged for years.
When John Palattella in the Nation (June 2, 2010) lamented “The Death and Life of the Book Review” (arguing that book review sections should not be judged by whether they turn a profit) “TheBigAl” posted this comment on the Nation website: “You don’t seem aware of the breadth of quality literary blogs on the Internet. As an editor, we find these days that we often have more luck getting attention from persuasive and prestigious blogs than from newspaper book review sections, where editors have their own agendas.” A blogger posted: “Beyond Barnes & Noble Review there are actually a number of websites that provide quality books coverage,” among them “The Complete Review” and “Berfrois.” Daniel Green, one of the heroes of Internet reviewing, quoted Palattella’s claim that although we “are in the throes of another newspaper crisis” nothing has appeared in print or online the way newspaper strikes brought forth the New York Review of Books and the London Review of Books. On June 3, 2010, Green objected: “This is manifestly not the case. Just two examples: The Quarterly Conversation (http://www.quarterlyconversation.com/) and Open Letters Monthly (http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/). You might have more honestly said, ‘Nothing comparable to the NYRB or the LRB written and edited by recognized, mainstream literary journalists, preferably based in New York, has emerged.’”
Rain Taxi in the Summer 2005 issue (that early) contained Scott Esposito’s survey, “Litblogs Provide a New Alternative for Readers.” A writer on the topic of litblogs was sometimes lucky if a link to a brilliant litblog or personal literary blog outlasted a recommendation. Nevertheless, the situation is stabilizing, Esposito made clear:
One trait shared by virtually all litbloggers is their enthusiasm for defying mainstream opinion, and because of this willingness to offer a countervailing point of view the litblogging community has managed to attract a substantial audience in a relatively short period of time. The highest-trafficked blogs get thousands of hits per day (sometimes tens of thousands if they’re in the news), and the publishing industry has taken note. Many litbloggers regularly get galleys from publishers ranging from Random House to Copper Canyon Press to the Dalkey Archive, and anecdotal evidence indicates that their coverage has helped sell books and prop up emerging authors . . . . Several well-regarded midlist authors . . . have done interviews with litbloggers, and some publicists are beginning to develop lasting relationships with favored litbloggers.
After intelligent reviews of my 2008 Melville: The Making of the Poet appeared in litblogs and individual blogs, I arranged that review copies of The Powell Papers (2011) be sent to some of the bloggers. I expect that presses, more and more, will send review copies to litblogs and pre-tested bloggers (the “veteran” bloggers of the future), where the best reviewers consistently write more intelligently than the average New York Review of Books pontificator.
Of course there is resistence to Internet reviewing. On his Reading Experience 2.0 site (October 23, 2007) Daniel Green hilariously surveys the motives of the blog-bashers: “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?” The hacks and the occasional admirable mainstream media reviewers will not soon be driven out by “ragtag bloggers” (although newspaper book review sections are dying month by month), but authors may have multiple chances to be heard in the new Internet age. We will see what happens when MELVILLE BIOGRAPHY: AN INSIDE NARRATIVE is ready to be reviewed.