Faint Praise: The Plight of Book Reviewing in America

Vermin, Dogs, and Woodpeckers

Vermin, Dogs, and Woodpeckers \ “Reviewing” work is too badly paid for any reasonable being to think of making it either an art or a business. —Idler, 1894 . . . The prolonged, indiscriminate reviewing of books is a quite exceptionally thankless, irritating and exhausting job. . . . The reviewer . . . is pouring his immortal spirit down the drain, half a pint at a time. —George Orwell,“Confessions of a Book Reviewer” The reviewing of novels is the white man’s grave of journalism; it corresponds , in letters, to building bridges in some impossible tropical climate. The work is grueling, unhealthy, and ill-paid, and for each scant clearing made wearily among the springing vegetation the jungle overnight encroaches twice as far. —Cyril Connolly,“Ninety Years of Novel Reviewing” . . . And the absolute dregs . . . write for the Books Pages. Why? Because it’s the lowest form of journalism there is. And the lowest form of that is reviewing fiction. You don’t have to go out and discover things for yourself. You don’t have to sit at the end of a telephone line. You don’t even have to know anything about the subject.All you have to do is read a couple of hundred pages of someone wanking their imagination, and write five hundred moderately clever words about it. —Amanda Craig, A Vicious Circle 33 Critics are like horse-flies which hinder the horses in their ploughing of the soil. —Chekhov, as reported by Gorky, in On Literature A critic is someone who enters the battlefield after the war is over and shoots the wounded. —Murray Kempton Book reviewing in America is a hybrid occupation. Part trade and part profession, part art and part craft, part literature and part journalism, it lies somewhere between the outskirts of the work world and the fringes of the world of letters. As a job, it has little to recommend it. The work is hard, the position insecure . As a “freelancer,” I felt anything but free. I was always hustling, waiting for editors to call, taking on books I had little interest in reading because I needed the work, and the reviewer who declines too often may not be asked again. Whatever I wrote had to please the review editor, and the review editor’s editor as well, an obscure figure whom in most cases I’d never spoken to and couldn’t even have named. Most writing in America pays badly,but reviewing has a scale of its own,with fees far lower than people outside the field would believe. As a columnist, I might well put forty hours into scanning twenty books and reading four or five for a one thousand-word critique of three for $250 (reprint fees included). If this is near the minimum wage, it is somewhat higher than the going rate for reviewing . A recent National Book Critics Circle Survey showed that newspapers standardly pay from $100 to $400 for a review.And while the glossy magazines may pay considerably more, some publications pay even less, and some pay nothing at all, though they do promise a copy of the book (and often renege on that promise, leaving the reviewer with only a flimsy set of galleys). Of course, it could be worse: had the IRS carried out its onetime threat to tax that barely resalable book at full value, some reviewers would actually have paid to do their job. Yet the job has its advantages. As a reviewer I can work at home, in the comfort of my study: I can avoid the commute,the noisy office,the moods and interruptions of colleagues.I can dress as I please.Books are delivered to my door, and I can send out my work easily these days, by e-mail: I 34 Faint Praise needn’t even face the weather. I can set my own hours, work early, late, or through the night, in long stretches or brief snatches, on weekends. And as work,reviewing can be extremely satisfying.To analyze how a book elicits its response is intellectually demanding and rewarding. To write so concisely that a few well-chosen words become an essay is an aesthetic triumph . To help others understand the nature and value of a particular book feels useful; and the commentary itself seems important, a contribution to thought and taste. In terms of status, though, the reviewer’s position is ambiguous. Like all published writing inAmerica,reviews enjoy...