Faint Praise: The Plight of Book Reviewing in America

Introduction: The Reviewer ’s Lament

Introduction The Reviewer’s Lament \ How many competent critics have we in America? Not many. The critical judgment furnishes the most notable jargon of the literary world. There is not a work of art worth noticing at all that does not use up, in its critical characterization, all the adjectives of praise and dispraise. . . . It is probable that incompetence, flippancy, arrogance, partisanship, ill-nature, and the pertinacious desire to attract attention, will go on with their indecent work until criticism, which has now sunk to public contempt, will fall to dirtier depths beneath it. —Scribner’s Monthly, March 1875 In America, now . . . a genius may indeed go to his grave unread, but he will hardly have gone to it unpraised. Sweet, bland commendations fall everywhere upon the scene; a universal, if somewhat lobotomized, accommodation reigns.A book is born into a puddle of treacle; the brine of hostile criticism is only a memory. Everyone is found to have “filled a need,” and is to be “thanked” for something and to be excused for “minor faults in an otherwise excellent work.”“A thoroughly mature artist” appears many times a week and often daily; many are the bringers of those “messages the Free World will ignore at its peril.” —Elizabeth Hardwick,“The Decline of Book Reviewing,” Harper’s, October 1959 Book reviews first appeared in America at the end of the eighteenth century. They have been frustrating people ever since. So many essays and articles have been written lamenting the sorry state of Amer1 ican reviewing that they constitute a minor genre. For two centuries reviews have been lambasted by critics, often reviewers themselves, who have complained that reviews are profligate in their praise, hostile in their criticism, cravenly noncommittal, biased, inaccurate, illiterate, or dull. Generally, the argument runs, American reviewing has never been worse. I remember coming across a Publishers Weekly article in 1993 called “The Decline of Book Reviewing,”1 the precise title of Elizabeth Hardwick’s famous Harper’s article,published in 1959,which made me wonder whether the field was in decline yet again or whether this was merely the latest stage in one long decline. If book reviewing in America has declined, it is hard to say from what glorious pinnacle it has descended. The high point was probably not in 1987, when Andrew Greeley called reviews“self-important, pompous and supercilious,” or in 1963, when John Hollander suggested, “Whatever is wrong with reviewing in America has been growing steadily worse.” Most likely it wasn’t in 1942, when Max Gissen in Antioch Review labeled reviewers “part of the publishers’ selling force,” in 1934, when Helen E. Haines in Library Journal spoke of the field’s “engulfing and meaningless amiability,” or in 1926, when Edmund Wilson observed that “it is scarcely possible nowadays to tell the reviews from the advertising.” Undoubtedly , it was not in 1897, when the Bookman declared that “in no country is the current comment on books more lacking in thought and workmanship .” It couldn’t have been in 1875, when Scribner’s Monthly predicted that“criticism, which has now sunk to public contempt, will fall to dirtier depths beneath it.”And it was probably not in 1865, when the Nation spoke of American criticism’s “promiscuous and often silly admiration ,” or in 1833, when the Mirror called it “worse than worthless. Weak tea and bread and butter—milk and water—we cannot think of anything stale, diluted, insipid enough for a comparison. . . . Nothing but puff.” It wasn’t in 1817, when reviewers were compared to cannibals, or in 1805, when they were chastised for their “lavish encomiums,” and it couldn’t have been much earlier: we’re back at the start.2 Viewed in juxtaposition, these complaints—this“jeremiad concerning American book reviewing,”3 as one cultural historian has termed it—can seem faintly comical.The venom.The scorn.That asymptotic decline! The charges are so excessive, so extravagant, they rest so shakily on the myth of a Golden Age of reviewing that clearly never existed that it’s tempting 2 Faint Praise to dismiss them as typical publishing fare.As anyone in publishing knows, it is a self-critical, gloomy, hyperbolic field, in which something is always judged to be in decline or dying, whether it’s the novel or books themselves . As any reviewer knows, whatever one critic says is likely to set another ’s teeth on edge, the...