The Critic, The Reviewer, and Reader-Response

responsibility, a book-reviewer has a job to perform which has certain objective standards that everyone understands. Besides, the concrete and tangible is therapy for ex-earth-shakers, believe it, apart from fulfilling a decent journalistic service that doesn't have to be either cheap or embarrassingly superficial. Having said aU this, I should now say that I know very well that reviewing is finally a much less significant response to literature than first-rate criticism. I've been around too long to kid myself that what I'm doing has any non-fleeting value. There isn't the time, the space, the patient inquiry in a newspaper to truly mine an important book (A Hundred Years of Solitude, Gravity's Rainbow, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance) and then generalize cogently about all the implications. And there certainly isn't a proper occasion, even if one had the temperament and gift for it, to advance any original blockbuster theoretical statements of one's own. Everything is too foreshortened, quick, practical. But reviewing suits me at this unexpected point in my life, and I'm glad I'm doing it—that's the nub of my contribution to this forum. We live in a time and place where forms have been shattered, both within and without, and if you can find one that is not an indignity and earns a dollar or two, the sense of familiar reality among all the scary phantoms that float above our desks is gratifying. I ask for bigger and better accomplishments for others involved with the great legacy of the written word. But for myself, right now, reviewing is hardly a dirty word. THE CRITIC, THE REVIEWER, AND READER-RESPONSE / Keith Opdahl Reviewing? Criticism? At first blush, the two appear to do very different things. The reviewer is usually entertaining—he's taking the book as an excuse to give his reader some recreational reading. In the process, he appropriates the interesting material in the book, giving the reader some of the fun of it without having to buy the book himself or to read the whole thing. Now, this is a most amusing and attractive process for the reviewer: if the book has fine things in it, the review is easy to write. If the book is dull, then the reviewer must be interesting by criticizing it—a strategy which entails a rough justice, since authors can get good reviews more "simply" by being fascinating. A second concern of the reviewer is to give an accurate account of the book—to see what the author is up to, to catch the feel of the work and 282 · The Missouri Review Seymour Krim summarize some of its successes and failures (one always assumes there are both). This, of course, is not easy, and reviewers often miss the point completely—but then so do critics. I don't mean subtle points: I mean just plain misreading—although I would be a little more generous toward the reviewer, since he has no time to digest the book, and since it is amazing how important this process of digesting can be. What we mean by a book, after all is the memory of that book, the memory of our experience of reading it. In this, reading a book is exactly like living an experience: there is the immediate meaning, and then, with time and a more distant perspective, there is the other—usually more accurate— meaning. An image, for example, sticks with one, and a return to the page confirms its significance. The critic, on the other hand, has the advantage of this very perspective. He may in fact work over a period of years, finding that as he teaches the novel, or talks about it, or reviews other novels by the same author, it comes clearer. A great deal of Saul Bellow's fiction is puzzling in this regard. I remember wondering about the criminals observed in court by Moses Herzog. While critics often comfort themselves with the notion that Bellow is formless (which means that one need not understand such events), it happens that Moses himself later comes before a judge; he gets thrown...