Faint Praise: The Plight of Book Reviewing in America

The Match

The Match \ . . . a tasteless exercise . . . an ego trip disguised as a novel. —Paul Erdman on Michael Thomas’s novel Hard Money It fails miserably (and) . . . left me with a nasty taste. —Michael Thomas on Paul Erdman’s novel The Last Days of America (Cross-reviews cited by David Shaw, Los Angeles Times, 1985) Sir,—I have not yet seen 1798: The year of the Lyrical Ballads. This book was so warmly reviewed by Seamus Perry . . . that I look forward to reading it. At the same time,I must observe that Nicola Trott (“an accomplished,nimble piece”) is Dr Perry’s wife; the editor, Richard Cronin (“deftly reads Gebir”), is Perry’s head of department; and Dorothy McMillan (“finds in Joanna Baillie a quasi-scientific project”) is Mr Cronin’s wife. All are in the Department of English Literature at Glasgow University, as are several other contributors to the volume (and as I was myself, until fairly recently). I do not blame Dr Perry for being fond of his colleagues, nor do I doubt the efficacy of their contributions to knowledge. But a degree of disinterest in literary criticism is always welcome. —Letters to the Editor, TLS, October 9, 1998 Most of the thousands of poets were bad, most of the thousands of critics were bad, and they loved each other. —Randall Jarrell, Letter to the Nation, 1948 If the first-time author worries most about whether her book will be reviewed, the author publishing his fifth worries equally about who 49 will review it: authors learn, sometimes painfully, just how much the assignment matters. In my own worst-case scenario, this book on reviewing is assigned to one of the reviewers I’ve criticized—perhaps the one I called sophomoric, or the one I said was incoherent—who proceeds to take his or her revenge. No aspect of reviewing is more charged than the matchup of books and reviewers: the choice of reviewer inevitably determines the outcome of the review. This is the case even if the editor is neutral in his search for a critic . Every reader has his own response to a book; different reviewers will write different reviews: John Reviewer may love the novel’s “lyricism,” while Jane Reviewer loathes its “pretentious imagery”; Jane may find the memoir’s nonlinear narrative “original and arresting,” while John finds it “fragmented and confusing”; one New York reviewer pans novel X for mismapping Manhattan, another finds the book’s errors irrelevant in a “terrific read,” and a Chicago reviewer, who doesn’t know the Lower East Side from the Upper West, praises the author’s use of locale. The author is lucky or not. And of course if an editor isn’t neutral, if he seeks out a particular viewpoint or goes with a reviewer who has one, his choice will not only determine the outcome of the review but may predetermine it as well. In an ideal world, every reviewer assigned to a book would be appropriately knowledgeable to deal with it, sufficiently sympathetic to be able to respond to it, and unbiased for or against. In the real world, the matchup makes for some dubious bedfellows: In the New York Times Book Review, I find a book by Times columnist Maureen Dowd reviewed by Kathryn Harrison—whose memoir Dowd had once described, none too kindly, as “creepy people talking about creepy people.” (Not a rave review .) In an issue of the New York Observer, Robert Gottlieb reviews a memoir by a former colleague, whose memories of Gottlieb, the reviewer tells us, are “warm and generous.” (He found the book a “triumph.”) In the Washington Post Book World, an anticonservative memoir is reviewed by a well-known conservative who, it turns out, is mentioned in the book (which he panned). And in the New York Times Book Review, a book critical of the New York Times is reviewed by a reporter who, as it happens, is a member of the Times’s own Washington Bureau. (Not a favorable review.)1 Most curiously, in the New York Times Book Review, a reviewer, writing about a mystery, pauses midstream to tell readers that he neither likes nor 50 Faint Praise pays much attention to the genre. “Let me confess that I am not a great reader of thrillers or detective fiction,” he declares, apparently unconcerned that this might make him a mystery reviewer of questionable value .“The latter in...