Faint Praise: The Plight of Book Reviewing in America

Private Opinions, Public Forums

Private Opinions, Public Forums \ . . . in a period when bad books receive more acclaim than ever—and when good books,if they do succeed in being published,are often lost in the shuffle —it can sometimes be a critic’s moral obligation to be“nasty.”But many literary folk do not see it this way: talking privately to some critics, one is astonished by the disparity between what they say in conversation about a given book or writer and what they say in print. —Bruce Bawer,“Literary Life in the 1990s,” New Criterion, September 1991 The curious element in our American situation is this divorce between the judgments of private conversation and the conventional banalities of the published literary column. —Bliss Perry,“The American Reviewer,” Yale Review, October 1914 If our public reviewing were to reach the level of our literary gossip, we would be putting a better foot forward than we do, as a national culture, right now. —John Hollander,“Some Animadversions on Reviewing,” Daedalus, 1963 Several years ago I agreed to review a first novel which had already received a few highly placed raves and which was written by a critic whose own reviews my assigning editor said she admired.As it turned out I found the book a workmanlike effort,a decently written but uninspired piece of prose. I neither liked nor disliked it intensely, but in the end I gave it a mostly favorable—i.e., dishonest—write-up and felt so guilty I almost vowed never to review again. This certainly wasn’t the first time in twenty years that I had failed to say exactly what I thought 87 of a book or had told the truth but told it slant.But I’d been so determined not to repeat the duplicity that I felt defeated, a recidivist who, I feared, would always be susceptible to the pressures that encourage reviewers to make books out to be better than they think they are. That reviewers say one thing in private and write another has been a long-standing source of cynicism,humor,anger,and scorn.“The next time you bump into a book critic at a party, ask what he or she has read in the past six months that’s really blown their hair back, that they’ve really admired ,” wrote Dwight Garner in “Crisis in Critville: Why You Can’t Trust Book Reviews,” which appeared in the online magazine Salon. “Chances are they’ll be stumped—at least long enough for you to refill your drink— even if they’ve written a heap of glowing reviews during that time.” In print, said Garner, they may have “purred” over one book or another; “in person, they get cagey.”1 That private opinions change on the way to the forum, that they tend to grow muted as they mutate, seems shocking, even to the reviewers who are culpable. And yet neither is inexplicable to anyone who looks beyond the reviewer at her desk. Reviewing may be a solitary activity, but it isn’t a private affair.When I first began reviewing,I imagined myself alone in my study, reading and responding to a book. But as I should have realized, reviewers aren’t hired merely to express their personal opinions but to write something designed for public consumption; and as I quickly discovered, I wasn’t quite alone in that room. In the shadows were the editor who had hired me, the periodical publisher who had hired him, the publishing house, the author, readers, and, an alternate persona, the Reviewer, with a career and reputation to consider. The context for reviews is commercial, American culture largely anti-intellectual, and American readers egalitarian , wary of criticism, and not deeply in love with books—as the publishing historian Donald Sheehan observed, “Whatever the glories of the American home,a large and well-used library has not been among them.”2 Freelance reviewers say they’re self-employed, but this is essentially a tax category; they’re working for the publications which publish their reviews and which have cultural and commercial aims that influence the kinds of reviews they publish. This seems to me self-evident, yet when I remarked once, on a criticism panel, that as editor of a literary magazine, I expected our reviewers to write for our audience, the comment enraged one of my fellow panelists, a popular-music critic for the Boston Globe, 88 Faint Praise [18.222.22.244] Project MUSE (2024-04...