The Reading Experience

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.

Positive and Ennobling

In discussing "Banned Books Week," David Ulin asks:

The basic message here is one of astonishment: Why would anyone ban books when literature is such a positive and ennobling force? Yet while I agree with that, I also believe that some books truly are dangerous, and to ignore that is simply disingenuous.

He continues:

Yet it's foolish, self-defeating even, to pretend that books are innocuous, that we don't need to concern ourselves with what they say. If that's the case, then it doesn't really matter if we ban them, because we have already stripped them of their power.

Throughout his essay, but especially in these quoted passages, Ulin betrays the sort of sloppy thinking and confusion about the nature of literature so prevalent among the practicioners of "literary journalism" in the mainstream print media. His ultimate point--that even obnoxious books ought to be tolerated--is cogent enough, if something of a bromide. But his enlistment of "literature" in the cause of defending "dangerous" books is hardly credible.

The most immediate flaw in Ulin's thinking is in his casual conflation of "literature" and "books." He invokes "literature" and its "positive and ennobling" associations, only to base his analysis on "books" understood as those works advancing an argument, that make a claim on us through "what they say." Ulin's analysis works only if he first evokes the literary as "ennobling" and then contrasts it with particular (in some cases repellent) books that no one would categorize as "literary" in the first place. It's a move that depends on the reader accepting the blithe but shoddy equation, books = literature, on which Ulin balances his argument.

But works of literature are not identical with "books." A literary work is a verbal composition that exists independently of its medium of transmission. It can be presented on paper, through bytes in cyberpace, or can be stored in a word processing file. (It could also, of course, be recited orally.) It is an act of linguistic imagination that does not coincide with any of these methods of publication (as in "making public") and can exist simultaneously in all of them. A book is a commodified object, an artifact of the printing press, the culturally-sanctioned form of communication assigned to journalists like Ulin for their "coverage." No matter how much they try to smuggle in references to literature in describing their subject, such journalists are always going to prefer books to literature because the former are presumed to have something to "say," provide the reviewer with the opportunity, as Ulin also puts it, "to confront someone else's ideas." Books are what prompt the editor of the New York Times Book Review to convert that publication into a forum for dreary "cultural criticism" and the pedestrian discussion of media-filtered "ideas." Literature is not to be found in its pages, except through the fortuitous conjunction of fiction and news, or an accident of publication date.

I would agree with Ulin that both good books and works of literature ought to "make us uncomfortable," but where the former do this by challenging established ideas about the subject at hand, the latter make us uncomfortable with our own reading practices, with our unsustainable assumptions about the very nature of the "literary." Literature is inherently neither "positive" nor "ennobling," and the "danger" it poses is not to be found in the printed embodiments of "someone else's ideas" but in the reading experience itself, the complacency of which is threatened by works of literature that seek to reconfigure perceptions of the literary. A preoccupation with "ideas" only reinforces such complacency, reducing the more expansive power of literature to the ordinary charge provided by "books."

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?

Realistic

Jacob Russell is mostly right in his critique of American book reviewing practices:

It occurred to me as [Maureen Corrigan] repeated her formula reviews, book after book, why it is that reviewers (make that, commercial--print or electronic... even "non-profit" versions of commercial reviewers) have such a preference for realist narratives. It makes it so much easier to review the books. In effect, all you have to do is name the subject, reduce the book to a summarized report on a fictional event--as though the story might well be real, as though any distinction one might make between "story" and "real" is of no matter. Next, list the cast of characters, offer a movie level sketch of their problem/conflict/search-for-meaningful-resolution-of-past-trauma, etc, sprinkle the review with enough adjectives to make it sound like they're statements on the merit and quality of the book--but so general and empty of specifics that they function rather like movie background music. And there you go.

I would quarrel only with his identification of book reviewers' preference as specifically for realist narratives, for reasons Jacob himself begins to indicate. Reviewers privilege narrative, but not necessarily realism. There is no necessary connection between "story" and "realism," although narrative in literary fiction has been used so often as a way of nominally depicting "real life" that most reviewers--and many readers--assume that they are inseparable, that real life can only be presented to us through a summarizable "story." Thus, I would argue that the stituation Jacob describes is a consequence less of laziness or apathy on the part of reviewers than of the widely held assumption that "fiction" correlates to "story" which correlates to "realism" in a more or less natural progression.

"Realism" thoroughly applied, in fact, would almost certainly reject "story" as itself an artificial imposition on the real (or at least on fiction's attempt to approximate the real, since in the final analysis "realism" is just another kind of fantasy we are willing to accept, an illusion created to deflect our attention away from the fact that there's really nothing real or unreal about works of fiction--they're just verbal compositions, words on a page.) Little in our ordinary lives proceeds as if following a narrative arc. Freytag's Triangle ("problem/conflict/search-for-meaningful-resolution") is no more a reflection of how life actually unfolds than the absurdism of a Beckett play or the most resolute postmodern "game-playing." Writers like Stephen Dixon and Mary Robison are much closer to "reality" in their fictions than the realism that dominates the book review pages. How often are their books reviewed in the New York Times Book Review?

I don't underestimate the willingness of "mainstream" book reviewers (and editors) to cut corners and cling to formula. However, I think that finally their predilection for the kind of hand-me-down storytelling Jacob describes (perhaps spiced with some appropriate "psychological" realism, which is about the only contribution to the store of available techniques made by literary modernism that current reviewers appear to recognize) is even more simply explained: they actually believe that "realist narratives" are what fiction is supposed to provide. Anything else, any serious challenge to the hegemony of such narratives, just doesn't get the reward of their attention.

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.

A Vast Wasteland

For the past several months, I have been dutifully making my way through the Sunday (in some cases, earlier published) book review sections of numerous American/British/Canadian/Australian newspapers, looking for "notable reviews" to which I then have provided links. I attributed my early difficulties in finding more than two or three such reviews per week to the general downturn in coverage during the summer months, although I might have hoped that this otherwise slack season could be used by editors to bring some attention to books that had been overlooked in the fall and spring rush months.

But the beginning of this fall season's publishing carnival has been no more fruitful in finding reviews that either bring attention to less-hyped books or that exemplify the art of book reviewing at its best. The same old handful of "big" books, most of them sounding just Godawful, by the same old "name" authors, reviewed in the same trite and inflated phrases, present themselves week after week after week. This past Sunday was especially gruesome, as I clicked on paper after paper offering a prominent review of Alice Sebold's latest atrocity and had to work very hard to keep my breakfast down.

Thus there are no "notable reviews" this week. There will be no more "notable reviews" in future weeks, since I have given up my earlier hope that within the overflowing quantity of dreck spewed out by "professional" book editors and reviewers each week there might be a handful of valuable critical nuggets demonstrating more commitment to contemporary literature and to serious literary criticism than to propping up the "book business" or the "books as news" approach to reviewing. Print book reviewing is truly toppling from the rhetorical dead weight it has voluntarily assumed. It's overloaded with fake sobriety and riddled with bad faith. From now on I intend to get my reviews and my book news entirely from blogs, from promising online sources of reviewing such as Open Letters and The Quarterly Conversation, as well as the few print magazine sources that still do good work, such as Bookforum and Harper's. The rest is just irrelevant.

NOTE Ed Champion actually provides here an apt example of what's wrong with book reviewing in America. A review of a book with which most of us are probably unfamiliar, and that therefore really needs a review in a prominent place, but that had to be "killed" because of "lack of space." No doubt its space was taken by a review of a book already reviewed in umpteen other spaces.

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."

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.

Triage

"Nothing like a 900-page book to make me stand up for what I believe in," writes Malcolm Jones, a Newsweek book reviewer. Apparently what he believes is that books are a nuisance, unless they can be consumed quickly, without undue claims on one's time and without usurping the place one has already set aside for the after-dinner cocktail.

My time is precious. Your time is, too. Who has enough time in the day to do all that we want? When I go home after work, it’s triage every night. I can listen to music. Or I can play music. Or I can answer letters or write. Or I can read a book. Or watch TV. Or watch a DVD on TV. Or go out to a concert or a movie. And those would be the nights that I don’t have to clean up the kitchen, do the laundry or help with homework.

It's unclear from Jones's brief essay whether he had taken on Vikram Chandra's new novel Sacred Games (the 900-page novel in question) as a review assignment and decided to forgo it, or whether it was simply one of those books he tried to wedge into his otherwise busy evenings "after work." If the former, it's hard to see why he couldn't have forced himself through the book (although he claims to have found Sacred Games a good book, just not a great one) during the time he was actually at work. Is this not what full-time book reviewers for national magazines do during the day--read the books they then review? Or are they otherwise too busy taking lunches and doing meetings? Perhaps I'm not sufficiently informed about what the job description for a journalist-reviewer like Malcolm Jones really looks like.

Even if this particular novel was one Jones took home with him to read in the easy chair, it might be assumed that a book reviewer undertakes that job in the first place because he/she has some overriding interest in books that would make finding a slot for them in the evening's schedule not such a difficult decision, despite those other "entertainment options." But as Amardeep Singh puts it, Jones "comes dangerously close to admitting he'd rather be watching TV." Surely there are many people who do find that other responsibilities and time constraints deprive them of the opportunity to read, an opportunity they might otherwise take, but those who merely find reading a possible choice among others for spending "downtime" probably don't take books very seriously in the first place, and it's discouraging that a professional book reviewer would be giving them cover.

Also according to Jones, "there are few things more aggravating than getting well into a book and discovering that you don’t like it after all. You’ve wasted your time." Well, I guess it depends on what you mean by "well into." Since Jones seems to prefer shorter novels, "well into" need only be, say, 25 pages. I put books aside at this point all the time, and I can't say I find it aggravating. If anything, I'm glad I can dispense with this book (and I may return to it later) and go on to one of the many (many) other books that seem worth reading, among which I'm going to discover that one gem that makes the whole process worthwhile. Jones says he abandoned Sacred Games after 100 pages, even though he thought those 100 pages well done. This suggests not a problem with the quality of the reading experience, but with the reader's attention span. As Amardeep also says, "a long novel is a qualitatively different kind of experience than watching a film, and thinking of them as interchangeable experiences doesn't speak well of Jones."

It's certainly possible that I, too, would stop reading Sacred Games after 100 pages, or even less. You shouldn't grind your way through a book "you don't like after all." But I think I can honestly say I would be discarding it not because I couldn't face its 800 additional pages but because it wasn't working for me whatever its length. I actually enjoy long novels, and one of the pleasures of such works is the pleasure of witnessing the author artistically redeem the large literary canvas. I enjoy short novels too, but the artistry involved is of a different order, an order of intensity and concision rather than breadth. In either case, they shouldn't be rejected simply because there's the Six Feet Under box set to watch.

Diving In

At her blog, The Palace at 2:00 a.m., Marly Youmans provides an excellent brief account of the benefits of rereading:

. . .it is in rereading that a story or poem reveals itself—and tells us the extent of its merit. Most reviewers know only the first cursory passage through a work when they pen a review; a reader can know more. Though life is short and art long, we ought to reread often, because it is there that we “dive,” as Melville would say.

Actually, I would say that Marly is describing not merely the difference between reading to review and truly reading--diving in, without concern for reporting on it afterward--but between the goals of reviewing in particular as opposed to the goals of literary criticism more generally.

The reviewer is charged with the task of immediately assessing a given work for its value to a "general audience" at least as interested in keeping up with the newest and the latest as in plunging deeply into any particular book (dawdling over the current book only prevents us from moving on to the next hot release). Good reviewers certainly do help us decide what books may reward a more careful and concentrated kind of reading, but the very nature of periodical book reviewing makes it necessary for the reviewer to assume the role of cultural quality inspector. It's the stage of literary life in which books are most conspicuously presented as commodities, another kind of "choice" to be made by the intelligent consumer.

But after this initial flurry in the literary marketplace and after most of the products offered by the "book business" have been consumed, ignored, or discarded, some books remain to be read and reread in the way Marly has described. They're books (or poems or stories) that call on us to immerse ourselves in the experience of reading them for reasons that go beyond the timely and the trendy. And I like to think that there is a kind of literary criticism that corresponds to this order of reading, that both reminds us what works these are and helps us to enhance the reading experience. Such criticism also attempts to "dive" in the Melvillean manner, providing "information" of a sort through patient description of the text's manifest (if not always immediately apparent) features (as experienced by the critic him/herself), but also drawing attention to the implications of the text's formal and stylistic qualities or putting the work in a relevant context, especially the context of literary history. "Interpretation" might be involved, but it is not the kind of interpretation that encloses the work in critical amber, telling us what it "means." It is interpretation meant to be supplemented, if not replaced, by additional informed interpretation.

At one time this sort of criticism was relatively abundant, in literary magazines and journals, although it was frequently labeled "academic." Unfortunately, academic criticism as now practiced bears little or no relation to the literary criticism I have described, criticism concerned first and foremost with the literary qualities of literature, with making the reading of works of literature a more satisfying experience for those who might be interested. In revolt against the mere "appreciation" of literature, academic critics now enage in its interrogation. Literature exists not as the effort to create compelling works of verbal art but as a category of artifacts to examined among others for its relevance to "cultural critique." "Reading" is the process of forcing the text to conform to one's pre-established critical paradigm, not the act of exploring its verbal complexities. Since no "diving" into works of literature is possible when they've been drained of all their vitality, what now passes for literary criticism in the learned journals does less than nothing to encourage active reading, much less rereading. It wades around in the shallow waters of ideology and second-hand social analysis, leaving serious readers of literature to swim for themselves.

The Corporate View of Books

The Hobgoblin of Little Minds on book reviewers like Michiko Kakutani:

The problem, as I see it, is that book reviews all too often lazily fall into the buy it or leave it category. Thumbs up or thumbs down. This book is worth spending $25. Save your money and avoid this one. The corporate view of books is that they are a commodity to be purchased and not much more, and, while Kakutani's review [of John Updike's Terrorist] does not come out and say "don't buy it," the tone is tainted by this narrow view. The short reviews with stars that you can find on Amazon are fine--they help people decide if they should purchase a book or not--but I think that serious reviewing should go beyond this and try to analyze more carefully what the book is trying to do.

I completely agree, and in fact made an argument much like this in a previous post.

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.

Grounded in Specifics

I agree with Frank Wilson about book reviewing:

. . .if one accurately and precisely describes what one experiences one will make clear what one feels and thinks about that experience. This frees you from having to use stale evaluative terms and forces you to be concrete in your judgments. Regarding criticism, it ensures that your opinions are grounded in specifics and substantiated by the details of the work under consideration.

Wilson gets his inspiration for this view of the reading experience from phenomenology. I get mine from John Dewey's Art as Experience, which accentuates not just the experience of art, but insists that art is experience (for both artist and audience) of a particularly intense kind--in Dewey's formulation, the kind of experience that can "clarify" what human experience itself might realize when we are most fully attentive.

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.

Freakish Literal-Mindedness

In the "Letters" section of the October issue of The Atlantic, two responses to Christopher Hitchens's very stupid review of The Annotated Waste Land with Eliot's Contemporary Prose (July/August).

David V. Griffin:

I read and reread Christopher Hitchens's review. . .without being able to discern what Hitchens thought of Rainey's book or why he feels that Eliot's poem is "the most overrated. . .in the Anglo-American canon". . .

. . .apart from a pair of tacked-on jibes at the end of the essay, Hitchens never really gets around to telling us what irks him about the poem. "What critic," he asks, "has ever succeeded in getting any sense or any beauty out of the final pages?" Well, if you're not going to bother with specific criticisms, the ad verecundiam question deserves an ad verecundiam reply: I, personally, have never had any trouble getting plenty of beauty and sense out of those pages.

Hitchens's other gripe--"In what conceivable universe. . .is April the cruelest month?"--is right up there in its freakish literal-mindednesss with Kingsley Amis's bizarre reading of the opening verses of Poe's "To Helen," where he mocks Poe for comparing Helen's face to "a lot of broken down old boats" (sic). This is a bit like claiming that Picasso was a bad painter because he put both eyes on one side of the nose in that portrait. . . .

Clarinda Harriss:

. . .Biography is interesting and sometimes helpful in coping with a poem. But the job of a poem is not to serve as biography. Hitchens seems miffed that Pound, by editing out some of the misogyny, excised lines that are "essential to an understanding of Eliot" and have "a very direct connection to the distraught marital relations that, among many other pressures, kept his nerves on a knife edge while he was composing the poem." Truly, Hitchens is the first reviewer I have ever known to assert that the purpose of an artwork is to serve up the artist's backstory. . . .

Without Redeeming Quality

James Marcus on Jonathan Yardley's dismissal of the first two Library of America editions of Philip Roth:

As he feeds Letting Go into the shredder, Yardley notes: "The novel is endless--some 660 pages in this edition--and, apart from the intelligence of Roth's mind and the vigor of his prose, without redeeming quality." Gee, I thought, aren't intelligence and vigorous prose redeeming qualities in and of themselves? They may not be sufficient to salvage a mess like Letting Go--that would certainly be Yardley's argument--but sometimes they're all we've got. Sometimes I'll even settle for one out of two.

And Letting Go is far from being a "mess." It may be somewhat overly earnest, but then so is The Plot Against America.

Actually, just about everything Yardley says in his typically wooden-headed review is wrong. The prose of When She Was Good does not "aim for the ironic." The novel is a perfectly straightforward account of the harm that can be done by someone determined to be "good." Our Gang may be "sophomoric from start to finish" but it was Roth's intention to be sophomoric. As it was in Portnoy's Complaint. As it was as well in The Breast, about which Yardley thinks it a pertinent criticism to say "its comedy mainly consists of obscenities." The humor in these books is "sophomoric" because the targets of their satire--male sexual obsessions, American politics--themselves fail to rise beyond this level.

Jonathan Yardley calling someone else "self-absorbed" is a real howler.

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.

Rigid and Impacted

James Wood indulges in his usual hectoring sermon masquerading as a book review. This time it's Cormac McCarthy who just doesn't understand that James Wood's approach to fiction is the only one possible:

. . .McCarthy has never been much interested in consciousness and once declared that as far as he was concerned Henry James wasn’t literature. Alas, his new book, with its gleaming equipment of death, its mindless men and absent (but appropriately sentimentalized) women, its rigid, impacted prose, and its meaningless story, is perhaps the logical result of a literary hostility to Mind.

Actually, it's James Wood's criticism that represents a "literary hostility to Mind," since it almost never engages in honest analysis of a given text in terms of what it seeks to accomplish, but instead just endlessly repeats the same old formula: psychological realism is all, psychological realism is all.

Rules for Writers

I'm not going to defend John Irving. I liked The World According to Garp, but almost nothing else he's published since then. (I was at least able to finish The Cider House Rules.) His new novel, Until I Find You, is getting mixed reviews, and it's quite possible all the bad things being said about it (see especially this review by Marianne Wiggins) are true.

However, in his review in The Boston Globe, Kurt Jensen says this:

. . .One senses Irving's attempt to achieve comic effect with such human oddities, and to some extent he succeeds. Yet there is nothing interestingly funny -- much less comically smart -- about any of it. The literary effect is one of extraordinary aesthetic banality.

What exactly makes something "interestingly funny" except for the fact that it is funny? Presumably, if it's funny it's also interesting, or it wouldn't be funny in the first place. Is this a way of saying that what Irving does is funny, but no more than funny? If so, this seems to me a moral judgment--Irving's fiction settles for mere comedy and doesn't dress its humor up in something more profound--and has nothing to do with the aesthetic quality of Until I Find You, banal or otherwise. If it does indeed achieve a "comic effect," it is, at least in this respect, perforce aesthetically successful.

By insisiting that the novel should be more "comically smart," Jensen seems to be asking that it "say something" with its comedy, that it in fact transcend the aesthetic altogether. Or at least that it transcend its own comedy. I won't claim that John Irving is a first-rate comic novelist (although the creation of a kind of Dickensian comedy is certainly the best thing he does), but Jensen's objection is less to Irving's comic method per se than to comedy in general, which, if inadequately leavened with "human interest." can only be, apparently, "aesthetically banal." Again Jensen confuses the moral and the aesthetic.

To be fair, Jensen wants Irving's characters to be more interesting, more "credible." I can imagine readers finding Irving's characters to be "flat," but in some ways this is the inevitable consequence of the kind of comedy he works in. Asking that these characters be more realistic, more rounded, would be to ask that Irving abandon his comedic strategy altogether. As David Markson says in a previously cited interview, a writer writes the way he does because he has to, and this is the way Irving writes. One can have more or less tolerance for it, but it doesn't really do anyone any good to request he write in some other way.

Furthermore, here is Jensen's idea of what makes for credibility in a fictional character:

Credible complexity in a character can be achieved in at least two ways: Either distinctiveness is a matter of the sometimes gaudy and eye-catching methods of personality -- stark red hair, deep sag to the breast, the tortured lisp of the poorly born -- or it can be a presentation of the sometimes invisible but momentously significant suasions that inhabit us all -- the ''not-thought" in thought, the unseen in the visible, the places into which the imagination must reach.

If anybody knows what the second half of this sentence means, please let me know. Although I'm pretty sure I don't usually look for the presentation of "suasions" in most characters I come across, whether they be "not-thought" or actually thought. As to the first kind of complexity: If this is a "credible" method of character-creation, why does Jensen go on to say that "If the novelist cannot, or is not inclined to, perform the second with his words, he may take recourse in the first" and reprove Irving for doing so? It must not be so credible after all.

Maybe Jensen should just have declared he doesn't have a taste for the kind of novel Irving has written, or that Irving's approach doesn't work so well this time around, and forgotten about making his own rules for writers.

Ocular Fatigue

I generally enjoy John Freeman's reviews (published, it would seem, in just about every newspaper book review section in the U.S.), but in my opinion his May 20 Houston Chronicle review of John Bayley's The Power of Delight makes at least one pretty dubious assertion.

Since Bayley began writing reviews, according to Freeman:

music, film and visual entertainment have replaced literature at the center of our culture's dialogue with itself. As a result, the skills a book critic needs have changed.

The "engaging but also rather depleting condition" of being "with it," which Bayley complains has watered down Updike's criticism, is in fact now central to a critic's ability to talk about books. Indeed, it is impossible to talk about books today without explaining why they, as opposed to the latest movie or graphic novel, deserve readers' attention.

One can only conclude that the "skills a book critic needs" in today's pop-dominated "dialogue" are those that make books seem as un-booklike as possible. Otherwise the critic risks the sin of "somnolence," something Freeman apparently experienced in reading Bayley's collected reviews. It just won't do to have a superior "sense of where the novel comes from," or to be "a voice of reason and restraint in a critical world prone to overstatement," both of which Freeman concedes to be among Bayley's strengths as a critic. One needs to leaven one's prose with an appropriate amount of vacuous attitude and be able to name-drop the requisite pop star or film title. Above all, one must not write too much, or Freeman will complain of "twisted syntax"--meaning, as far as I can tell, that your sentences are just too damn long--or zone out on the "thickets of reference." No context please, we're Americans!

It's a pretty sad state of affairs when a distinguished literary critic can be dismissed for being too literary, not reminscent enough of Nick Hornby (God help us). Once again we're being told that the best way for literature (or, in this case, literary criticism) to survive is for it to become more like the other popular arts. But I just can't agree that it's a book critic's job to convince people to read books rather than listen to the radio. It's the critic's job to explain why a given book might be worth the attention of those who read in the first place, not to gussy up his/her review with lots of trendy blather that might appeal to the nonreader. Watching a film, listening to music, and reading a novel are such fundamentally different activities that to suggest some kind of experential equivalence among them--that you'll find the same sort of thing over here that you'll find over there, if you'll just try it--is itself the most serious dereliciton of "duty" (the performance of which Freeman denigrates in Bayley's criticism) the book critic might commit.

Freeman's impatience with Bayley-style criticism is additionally perplexing because Freeman's own reviews are, at least compared with most newspaper criticism, reasonably erudite and mostly free of the kind of superficial posturing he otherwise seems to be advocating. At the very least it would seem possible for the kind of more learned criticism--the learning lightly applied--that Bayley writes to co-exist with the pop-cultural bombast that unfortunately passes as book discussion in some quarters. Surely not all readers are as prone to "ocular fatigue" as Freeman seems to think. Some even like books.

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.

Consumer Affairs

Sarah believes that in book reviewing "All that should matter is whether the book has merit, and whether readers should buy it." Jim Fusilli contends that "The reviewer is under no obligation to encourage readers of the review to buy or not buy the book under review. The reviewer is obligated to read the book as written, analyze it versus a consistent set of standards of excellence and present his or her opinions of the book when measured against those standards."

I agree with Jim, but might go even a little farther. Reviewers should feel they have an obligation to literature. The standards being used ought to be of the sort first of all grounded in a familiarity with the practices generally associated with the "literary," and the final measure of a given book is whether it illuminates or extends those practices in some interesting way. If this sounds too pretentious, then the reviewer should at least feel a responsibility to the ideal of good writing (opinions about this can vary, of course), and, if the book in question is genre fiction, to the standards established by the writers, readers, and critics of that genre. More is at stake than just the particular book under review.

The last thing a reviewer should think about (sorry, Sarah), is whether he/she has provided good consumer guidance. In my opinion, it's this practice that has corrupted mainstream book reviewing in the first place.

Fair Negative

Laura Demanski's review of Elizabeth McKenzie's Stop That Girl in last Sunday's Chicago Tribune is an admirable example of what might be called the "fair negative" review. Demanski concludes that the book is "a disappointment despite all of its promising elements and McKenzie's obvious talent," but she also patiently describes what McKenzie seems to be attemping in the novel, arriving at her ultimately negative assessment only after showing that, in the reviewer's opinion, the execution of the author's purpose comes up short.

Early in the review, Demanski writes:

. . .The nine stories that make up "Stop That Girl" cover Ann Ransom's life from age 7 until she's a 20-something mother. But we stop and look in on her only every couple of years, and a lot more happens offstage than on.

It's an unconventional method that may leave completists unsatisfied. In the typical bildungsroman, we closely follow the major events of a young person's life and see how they form the adult she becomes. The success of that kind of novel depends in part on how convincingly the results follow from the causes. McKenzie's method shoots for different effects and delivers different pleasures. When the reader doesn't know everything--not even close to everything--mystery and surprise are added to the mix.

From this description we understand that McKenzie is writing a variation of the "bildungsroman" (the coming-of-age novel), and that she is taking something of a risk in experimenting with the form. McKenzie's reader is going to be asked to read between the lines--or more precisely, between the stories--and make connections that in most such fictions are made more explicitly by the author him/herself. This provides what Demanski calls "breathing room," but obviously it would require some deftness on the writer's part to keep the reader interested after the more conventional strategy has been abandoned.

And it is precisely the writer's skill in maintaining the form she's adopted that is the basis of Demanski's subsequent judgment of this "novel in stories." She hasn't insisted that, in effect, the author should have written a different kind of book, merely that the results achieved do not really measure up to what seems to have been the writer's ambition.

Even so, Demanski's judgments are judiciously expressed:

What's left out between these stories isn't a problem; what's left out in them, however, sometimes is. McKenzie's deadpan, minimalist narration is well-suited to conveying Ann's chronic disenchantment with life; but over the course of the book it comes to feel stingy, shrunken and empty. To some degree this is a built-in problem with writing about disillusion and disenchantment: How does one represent them in one's characters without reproducing them in one's readers? McKenzie doesn't find a solution.

She also describes a selected number of stories from the book, giving the reader an opportunity, ultimately, to compare his/his own impression of them, and their relative degree of success, to the reviewer's. Or at least giving the reader some confidence that the reviewer has read the book carefully and has attempted to ground her evaluation in specific examples from the text.

Where one might question Demanski's evaluation is in a passage like this one:

The standard novel about growing up tells a protracted tale of learning and gradual loss of innocence. Ann, however, experiences disillusionment so young--in the first story--that the usual tale is moot. Beyond a point that comes especially early for her, Ann is incapable of being truly thrown by life, or truly moved by it. What, then, remains to be narrated? Neither Ann nor McKenzie seem to know for sure; there's a fair amount of floundering on both sides.

It seems to me possible for the reader to accept this early disillusionment and to want to read the rest of the book anyway, not as the story of the protagonist's disillusionment per se but as the account of how she subsequently manages to deal with it or not--as the "narrative" of how innocence lost affects a human life that nevertheless continues on. Perhaps McKenzie does "flounder" in her effort to carry this out, but one wonders whether Demanski isn't finally missing something in the book, after all.

Still, I am actually more inclined to read Stop That Girl than I was before reading the review, the reviewer's qualified negative assessment notwithstanding. If nothing else, I would like to determine for myself whether Demanski's view of the possibilities of the modified bildungsroman is a sound one or not. Finally, Demanski has both convinced me that she has taken her responsibilities as a reviewer seriously, and that her conclusions are worth testing in a kind of reviewer-reader dialectic. In my opinion, this means the reviewer has not only decidedly earned her pay (meager as it probably was), but also my gratitude as her reader.

Very Perceptive

Jonathan Mayhew recently put in a much more elegant and succinct way an idea I have tried to convey in some previous posts of my own about book reviewing:

My strategy for reviewing is to perceive the book in as precise a way as possible rather than to praise or dispraise. The praise or dispraise, such as it is, should arise organically out of the perception.

This is an admirably concise way of indicating why mere "praise or dispraise" cannot be the most important point of book reviewing/literary criticism. Such value judgments cannot be trusted at all if they're not supported by a clear "perception" of what the work under review actually does, what, to the extent it can be gleaned from the text itself, the aesthetic intention of the work seems to be. Thus a credible piece of criticism must include some degree of informed description of the work at hand. Jonathan is speaking specifically of poetry, but I believe the same principle he enunciates applies to fiction as well.

Critical Examinations

The following , from So Many Books, made me think of another recent post by Ed Champion.

What is the point of a review? One could certainly say it is to sell books, but not always since not all reviews are good. One could say that it is a critical examination of an author's work, but not always since some reviews simply provide a brief outline of the book in question. I'm not sure what the answer is. . .A Review that is more of an essay, that makes me think about the book in question but also about its context; a review that tells me enough about the book to make me interested--or not--and then discusses the author's writing and it's place in the author's oeuvre; those are the kinds of reviews I like best.

Ed wrote:

. . .I firmly believe that we're starting to see a troubling shift in the way that writers pen, review and appreciate fiction. There is a new political correctness at work in the literary world which stems from this McSweeney's feel-good schtick, which is not unlike Tom Hanks in its insufferable cheeeriness. A mandate being bandied about that fiction (and fiction reviewing) should stick to the safe n' sane route, that everyone is a winner, and that the more unpleasant realities of bad novels, heavy-hitters striking out and publishing in general are best left unmentioned. . .

The attitude that a book can be nothing but the bee's knees fails to acknowledge problem solving basics: first identifying its problems and then coming up with a few possible solutions for future authors to use or discard as they see fit. Is it not positive to identify a work of fiction that is "bad" and, from this "negative" standing, reinforce what is good and remain supportive and passionate in the process? Is it not good to point out certain things that a book critic may have a problem with so that the critic in turn develops a greater understanding of her own sensibilities and an active reader mining the reviews gets a few ideas? The answer, I would suggest, lies in being constructive, rather than turning pure white or jet black. . . .

Now, I mostly agree with both passages. But perhaps what Ed is seeing as a problem of "political correctness," an increasingly inhospitable attitude toward the negative review, is actually a problem implied by SMB's remarks: there aren't enough book reviews around that help us "think about the book in question but also about its context; a review that tells [us] enough about the book to make [us] interested--or not--and then discusses the author's writing and it's place in the author's oeuvre."

In a review of Michael Dirda's Bound To Please in The New Criterion (God help me that I should agree with The New Criterion), Stefan Beck writes:

. . .the total absence of vitriol from these pages is a flaw. After five-hundred-plus pages of loving praise, one yearns for nothing so much as Dale Peck’s savage, occasionally foul-mouthed hatchet jobs, or James Wood’s precise dismantlings. One wants to see clay feet in pieces. After all, to be educated is to be able to sniff out garbage as well as genius. Alas, Bound to Please cannot help one cultivate that discriminating nose. . . .

And:

The problem is: one tends to be suspicious of a critic to whom this chipper positivity comes so easily. There are bad or overrated writers in what we think of as the “canon.” Even the writers we love best stumble at times. Coming to grips with this is a necessary step in one’s development as a reader, but Bound to Please doesn’t adequately hint at it. It seems to say: Read, enjoy yourself, and you will have become a Reader. But Dirda doesn’t believe that, does he?

I don't think that the issue both Ed and Stefan Beck are raising finally comes down to "praise" vs. "vitriol." The question is whether book reviewing and literary criticism are about making fast value judgments, thumbs up or thumbs down, more broadly about advocating on behalf of books ("Enjoy yourself. . .become a Reader"), or whether book criticism is about providing some semblance of what SMB calls "critical examination." Such examination might lead the reviewer ultimately to praise or to snipe, but both will have been done by providing what Ed elsewhere in his post calls "compelling evidence backed up by multiple sources." This kind of review thus might even indeed wind up somewhere between "pure white or jet black." Unfortunately, the space currently allotted to book reviews in the mainstream print media is tiny and ever-dwindling, so that, almost inevitably, what we're left with is the pure snark and the empty praise.

Because of the declining interest in book reviewing shown by newspapers and magazines, it's hard to see where the more informed and considered reviews are going to come from. Except, perhaps, from blogs?

The Collective Backlist

From the weblog sublethal comes this provocative admission:

Every now and then it occurs to me how little I care about most literary news and gossip. I love books and I love to read but I don't care about the culture at all, probably out of simple bitterness at not being part of it. Now that I'm not involved in bookselling anymore there's even less reason to care. Everything I do in the realm of books is done in complete isolation. I might as well be reading in a wee igloo in some desolate arctic wasteland, with howling winds and the chilling sounds of distant wolves (provided I could fashion bookshelves out of ice blocks and somehow keep the books from getting too wet). I prefer not to read brand new literary works, it's a dull contrarian reflex. The older they are the better. Even giving something a year or two to simmer helps. Anything that smacks of buzz I stay away from, it doesn't matter whether it's genuine grassroots excitement or manufactured hype. . .A few years down the road no one will remember or care that a particular book made everyone vibrate with pleasure, and the author's book tour and his interviews and so on, the splash and the publicity, the groundswell, the breathless chatter about a possible movie sale. When all that is a dim memory, that's when I'll read the book.

I can't agree with all of the sentiments expressed here--I do care about authentic literary news, and I have to say I also care about book "culture," if only because it largely determines what books will be available for us to read--but I must myself admit that I nevertheless identify with the spirit of these remarks. One of the reasons I decided to initiate the dual-review posts such as the recent one on David Foster Wallace was to cajole myself into reading some new books while they were in fact new. If I was going to have something to say about these books, better to read them and write about them while blog readers themselves might most immediately be considering them--among other things, still considering whether to read them at all.

It's not that I have no interest in monitoring developments in contemporary fiction. Even when I still thought of myself as an "academic scholar," my scholarly interests were precisely in postwar American fiction, and although my "specialty" was American fiction of the 60s and 70s I still maintained a vital interest in current fiction as well. But, like sublethal, I tended to wait a while before reading new books, even for as long as a year or more, and even to the point of buying the books in hardback and letting them sit on my shelf for a while. (Even now I'm waiting to get around to reading Richard Powers's The Time of Our Singing, but not because I can't work up the appropriate curiosity about it. Indeed, Powers is one of my favorite writers, and I want to read the book as free as possible from the ephemeral debates it might have provoked on its appearance, in the same way I am more or less able to read the work of important writers from the past.)

So there apparently still remains with me something of the academic attitude toward literature I otherwise don't have much use for, the attitude that demands that a book's value be to some extent "tested" by the lapse of time. But I also believe that new fiction can only be well served by attentive and careful criticism (not "hatchet jobs" or apologias), and want to continue to do blog-reviews of recently published books. (Although probably my decision to pair off my review with another that might even clash with my own analsyis also comes from my preference for somewhat more extensive commentary, as opposed to the brief review.) At the same time, perhaps literary weblogs might usefully take up for consideration or critique books that aren't fresh off the presses, that after a suitable passage of time are free of "buzz" about "the author's book tour and his interviews and so on, the splash and the publicity, the groundswell, the breathless chatter." Some preservation of continuity between what's currently going on and the still-interesting work produced in the recent past would only benefit both the just-published titles in the current catalong and those to be found on the collective backlist.

Intellectual Vocations

Dale Peck must be wondering if his strategy for calling attention to himself and for waging verbal war against most of his fellow writers was worth the consequences of actually gaining that attention. Now that the whole thing has degenerated into the ugly farce of "bitch-slapping" discussed on tabloid tv, one hopes he has decided that literary warfare of this kind only trivializes the cause of serious writing, the very endeavor Peck professed to be defending. If Peck had been engaged in honest literary criticism in the first place, rather than merely projecting a kind of free-floating, incendiary "attitude," I might feel sorry for him, but as it is I can't help concluding he has received the very response his "hatchet jobs" were inviting.

In the aftermath of Crouch vs. Peck, however, I am more interested in the comments made by Leon Wieseltier, as reported in the New York Observer. As the literary editor of The New Republic, Wieseltier was ultimately the one responsible for soliciting, editing, and publishing Peck's "reviews" of Rick Moody, Stanley Couch, et. al., and even more than Peck he should have known what kind of reaction they would provoke. What does he now have to say for himself?

Mr. Peck’s unpopularity, Mr. Wieseltier said, "makes it more necessary to be clear that what Stanley did is unacceptable.

"Hitting someone for something they’ve written represents a fundamental misunderstanding of the intellectual’s vocation," Mr. Wieseltier said. . . .

Mr. Wieseltier said that after Mr. Peck’s review ran in The New Republic, he offered Mr. Crouch—also a contributor to the magazine—"ample space" to write a rebuttal. "I knew that Dale’s piece would be very wounding," Mr. Wieseltier said. "And I wanted to be fair."

Having known that Peck's review would be "very wounding," Wieseltier chose to run it anyway, but now "hitting someone" is a betrayal of "the intellectual's vocation?"? What sanctimonious blather. Which wound is likely to be the longest-lasting and was the most unprovoked: the bitch-slap or the hatchet job? Is inflicting any kind of wound part of the intellectual's vocation? And who's most reponsible for Dale Peck's current "unpopularity"? Who encouraged him to be an irresponsible critic in the first place, to substitute invective for analysis?

Wieseltier surely has a lot of gall to talk about the "intellectual's vocation" in this context. There was nothing "intellectual" about Peck's reviews. (This doesn't mean that Peck isn't or can't be an intellectual, to the extent anyone would want to be one of those. It does mean that his reviews were themselves the betrayal of the intellectual's vocation: to interpret carefully, to give good reasons for one's judgments, to avoid self-display.) Publishing them in The New Republic was not a contribution to intellectual debate, but a wholesale attack on contemporary fiction for not measuring up to the ponderous standards of literary moralism Wieseltier's book review section purports to uphold.

For Wieseltier and the reviewers he most often turns to are indeed exemplars of the current version of "moral criticism," the approach to literature that, in the succinct definition provided by Hugh Holman, "judges art according to ethical principles." At its best, moral criticism considers literature to be the greatest repository of illustrated "ethical principles," and takes works of literature seriously for this reason. (Although I myself can't see that literature really serves this purpose, or that it does so other than serendipitously.) At its worst, moral criticism is interested in literature only tangentially, to the extent it provides the occasion for moral reflection or discourse. This kind of criticism frequently dismisses the aesthetic qualities of literature outright (usually moral critics discuss only fiction, since poetry is obviously already too aesthetic for its own good). Here's Wieseltier approvingly describing Lionel Trilling in his introduction to the Trilling anthology The Moral Obligation to be Intelligent: "He did not read to be ravished. He was exercised more by 'the moral imagination' than by the imagination. And he grew increasingly suspicious of art. . .In works of literature Trilling found mainly the records of concepts and sentiments and values. . .Trilling was a very unliterary literary critic. His conception of his critical duty was less professional and less playful--and bigger. The novels and the poems that he pondered were documents for a moral history of his culture. Finally, he was a historian of morality working with literary materials. . . ."

Although Wieseltier remarks that these obsessions on Trilling's part "marked his limitation as a critic of literature," they are limitations only if you think there's merit in being a "literary literary critic," which Wieseltier and most other moral critics pretty clearly think there isn't. And I invite readers to determine for themselves how many of the attitudes attributed here to Trilling seem to be shared by Dale Peck. "Suspicious of art"? Novels as "documents for a moral history of his culture"?

Exactly how moral is it to write and publish essays that verbally attack most writers in sight, that condemn current writers en masse as morally defecient in too many ways to count, and to do so in language and tone (and this is true not just of the reviews by Peck in The New Republic) that is by turns smarmy, cynical, and mocking? In the final analysis, what kind of contribution to literary culture, to literature, is it to pronounce almost all contemporary fiction a waste of one's time? How many clueless, narrow-minded, self-righteous killjoys have said similar things in the past about books now unambiguously considered great?

Violence certainly is a violation of the intellectual's responsibilities, but so are disingenuousness and hypocrisy.

To Read or Not To Read

Judging from the book review sections of last Sunday's papers, the currently most noteworthy new fiction to be published is Kent Haruf's novel Eventide. By my count at least five of the larger newspapers chose this novel as the subject of this week's feature review. And in almost every case the response to the book was overwhelmingly positive. The Denver Post goes so far as to say "If readers plan to read only one of Haruf's books, Eventide should be the choice. It is a clear distillation of the writer's craft, a book that grabs you by the heart on the first page, refusing to release its grasp until the last."

I should make it clear: I haven't read Haruf at all. (This post at Rake's Progress, moreover, suggests that maybe I shouldn't.) Although his previous novel, Plainsong, received equally breathless reviews, nothing in those reviews ever made me want to read it. I generally do use book reviews as guidance in making decisions about what books to try, especially if the author is unfamiliar to me. Perhaps it is unfair to such an author to make the reviews he receives the standard by which to make an initial judgment, since very often perfectly good books get bad reviews. (Literary history is filled with stories about great books that failed to impress their initial critics.) However, I am frequently less interesed in whether a given review praises a book or not; I am looking for some account, some description, of what the author seems to be up to, of what the experience of reading the book is going to be like. Thus the Post's conclusion quoted above doesn't impress me very much.

Sometimes a plot summary will actually suffice, although usually as a way of indicating to me how much the novel or stories at hand emphasize "plot." Unless it's clearly some interesting variant on plot-driven fiction, I'm likely to pass on the book if its story seems to be everything.

If a critic whose judgment I trust likes a book, I'm definitely going to take this into account, but even here I'd like some further comment on style, on the book's formal qualities, on the way in which the author has matched form to theme, etc. Readers of this blog probably know that I tend to favor innovative or experimental fiction, but I've encountered many reviews of such fiction, many otherwise positive reviews, that just don't help me to decide whether a particular book is going to be a worthwhile expenditure of both time and money should I decide to read it. This requires some comprehension on the reviewer's part of what makes a novel truly innovative rather than just idiosyncratic or a repetition of experiments past.

Haruf's fiction seems to be about as far from "innovative" in this sense as a contemporary novel is likely to be. This doesn't mean I wouldn't read it. Ron Charles's review in the Christian Science Monitor comes close to telling me what I want to know about Eventide:

Quotations don't do it justice, anymore than a tuft of prairie grass could convey the grandeur of an open plain. Every decoration has been stripped away, leaving a narrative that almost never hazards an interior thought or authorial comment, forcing the story to rest entirely on Haruf's flawless selection of detail and ear for dialogue.

This is easy to do badly, as a thousand Hemingway imitators know, but Haruf never missteps, and I wish his books were required reading for anyone learning to write. Not that everyone should sound like him, of course, but his prose serves as a corrective to the super-hip, self-consciously clever storytelling that lures too many writers onto the rocks. After all, not everyone can write like Zadie Smith. (Even Zadie Smith can't always write like Zadie Smith.)

My immediate response to all the talk about Haruf's "spare" prose style is that his fiction is thus likely to be mostly an extended snooze. But Charles's review perhaps indicates that the prose style and the narrative technique that Haruf employs might be in some sense "organic," a way of dealing with the subjects and the setting ("the grandeur of the open plain") that a more adventurous approach might not capture or approximate. On the other hand, the crack about "super-hip, self-consciously clever storytelling" makes me think that Charles has some animus against more "self-conscious" fiction and in some ways cancels out his nice description of Haruf's method. He's right that not everyone should have to write the same kind of books, but in describing the alternative to Haruf as "super-hip" he certainly implies that Haruf's kind is the superior, more "natural" kind.

I come away from Charles's review with somewhat more interest in reading Haruf, but not enough to yet buy the book. I'd like at least one other reasonably intelligent review that confirms Charles's insight about the potential interest I might have in Haruf's approach to fiction-making. His review, however, has at least put Haruf on the list of writers I might want to sample, at least once.