Faint Praise: The Plight of Book Reviewing in America

Unnatural Selection

Unnatural Selection \ Of making many books there is no end. —Ecclesiastes, 12.12 But the inventions of paper and the press have put an end to . . . restraints. They have made every one a writer, and enabled every mind to pour itself into print, and diffuse itself over the whole intellectual world. The consequences are alarming. The stream of literature has swollen into a torrent— augmented into a river—expanded into a sea . . . Unless some unforeseen mortality should break out among the progeny of the Muse, now that she has become so prolific, I tremble for posterity . . . Criticism may do much; it increases with the increase of literature, and resembles one of those salutary checks on population spoken of by economists. All possible encouragement , therefore, should be given to the growth of critics, good or bad. But I fear all will be in vain; let criticism do what it may, writers will write, printers will print, and the world will inevitably be overstocked with good books. It will soon be the employment of a lifetime merely to learn their names.Many a man of passable information at the present day reads scarcely anything but reviews, and before long a man of erudition will be little better than a mere walking catalogue. —Washington Irving,“The Mutability of Literature.” The Sketch-Book, 1819–1820. At a National Writers Union conference many years ago, I served on a panel called “Becoming a Household Name: Book Publicity and Reviews.” My role as the reviewing member of this panel, with its dual agenda of pragmatism and dreams, was to answer the question on the mind of every writer in the room: How do I get my book reviewed? The 15 difficulty of my task was to be honest without being entirely depressing about the difficulty of theirs. Had I been frank, I would have suggested they think hard about a nom de plume, say Anne Tyler or Philip Roth. More than 150,000 books are published in the United States each year. From this tidal wave of print, only a tiny fraction will be reviewed in the mainstream press, the review space authors most want. By recent estimates , the New York Times Book Review and the Washington Post Book World each review around 2,000 books a year, and the Los Angeles Times Book Review between 1,000 and 1,500—and these are the country’s largest book sections. Most newspapers review far fewer titles, and the total has been dwindling as newspapers themselves have diminished in number. General-interest magazines, whether in print or online, don’t begin to make up the deficit,reviewing,at most,a few hundred a year.And the percentage of books reviewed is smaller than these numbers would suggest, since there is considerable overlap among all book sections—mainstream , small press, Web—and a popular biography, a best-selling memoir ,or anything by a well-known author like John Updike will receive multiple reviews. It would be nice to think that the few titles chosen for these coveted spots are the worthiest.After all,to review insignificant or mediocre books while missing important or outstanding ones undermines good publishers ,depresses good authors,demoralizes reviewers,and cheats readers.No aspect of reviewing matters more. Yet the editor who relies on the tools and traditions of the trade is bound to make poor choices, giving attention to undeserving books and overlooking better ones. Any discussion of selection has to begin with those numbers: over 150,000 books and room for reviews of, say, 500. No other arts review editors deal with comparable figures. Film releases, for example, number only in the hundreds—according to the Motion Picture Association of America, 549 new films were released in 2005, up from 520 in 2004,—1 and a restrictive form of distribution means that many films won’t even play in particular locations across the country and thus aren’t choices for review in publications serving those areas. By contrast, online bookselling has made an extraordinary percentage of books published—and even self-published—easily available for all. On what basis does the book review editor decide? Are certain subjects more important than others? Is 16 Faint Praise fiction more worthy of notice than nonfiction? And is this to be decided by editorial fiat or by sales figures? Does he seek out the best books, the most important ones, the most influential...