Faint Praise: The Plight of Book Reviewing in America

Are Book Reviews Necessary?

Are Book Reviews Necessary? \ The history of criticism begins with the history of art. When the first artist drew his first horse in red chalk on the walls of his cave, the first critic was at his elbow. And as the other cave dwellers gathered to see and wonder, he doubtless diverted their attention from the artist and his work to himself by raising the pregnant question, “What is criticism, and what is its function at the present time?” —Robert Morss Lovett,“Criticism: Past and Present,” New Republic, October 26, 1921 . . . we might remind ourselves that criticism is as inevitable as breathing, and that we should be none the worse for articulating what passes in our minds when we read a book and feel an emotion about it,for criticizing our own minds in their work of criticism. —T. S. Eliot,“Tradition and the Individual Talent” In recent years, book reviewing seems to have added new dimensions to its perpetual decline. As many newspapers across the country trimmed their book pages in the past decade,the familiar lament about the declining quality of reviews was joined by a lament about their declining number. “Those Dying Book Reviews,” ran a headline on Pat Holt’s online newsletter“Holt Uncensored.”“The Incredible Vanishing Book Review,” ran the headline of an article on Salon. The declining power of reviews came into play as well.“Everyone says reviews are less and less important in selling books,” said the editor Jonathan Galassi, of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, in a Harvard Magazine profile in 1997. 108 Indeed, the former head of Book Sense, an organization of independent bookstores,suggested that“traditional”reviews might well be destined for extinction, replaced by alternative kinds of book coverage.1 It strikes me as a little early to write off traditional book reviewing, if by “traditional” we mean the process of editorial oversight, from the selection of books and reviewers to the approval of copy, a process that works equally in print and online media. Print reviews are still numerous: Publishers Marketplace, a publishing Web site, has in the past few years compiled an index of more than thirty thousand reviews.For prestige,our major print review media have yet to be surpassed.And publications,both print and electronic, now offer traditional reviews online. Nonetheless, it’s certainly true that as traditional reviews in print media have been shrinking in number, alternative sources of book information , commentary, and recommendations have been multiplying. The Web, of course, has opened up a vast field of coverage for books as it has for all arts journalism. Two bookselling Web sites offer full catalogs, with publishing data, book descriptions, excerpts, author self-interviews, customized recommendations, specialized lists, ads, plus their own and readers ’ reviews. Book Sense offers its own choice of noteworthy books—the Book Sense Picks and Book Sense Notables—all accompanied by bookseller write-ups, available through the Web sites of independent bookstores as well as its own. Online book sites provide news, interviews, discussions , and blogs. Individual bookstores, authors, publishers, and commentators have Web sites and blogs of their own. But the Web has accounted for only part of this expanding coverage. Both chain and independent bookstores as well as libraries schedule numerous readings and book signings. Print and electronic media offer author profiles and interviews . Television programs and book clubs spotlight authors and their books.A great many books now include readers’guides designed for reading groups. And reading groups are visited by authors, who answer questions about their books. This is an extraordinary amount of book coverage,surely more than we have ever had before, and the sheer mass of it raises the question of whether we need reviews as well. After all, reviews have been causing dissatisfaction for two hundred years. If they are disappearing, would it be such a bad thing if we just allowed them to vanish? Isn’t it possible that Are Book Reviews Necessary? 109 these many alternatives can better serve publishers and authors, readers and books themselves? Publishers apparently seem to think they might.When newspapers,suffering financial problems, reduced their book pages, many critics took them to task for their bottom-line approach to journalism. But the more striking issue, it seems to me, is that book publishers let it happen. I doubt after all that newspapers would have cut their book sections had book advertising been forthcoming.Yet publishers...