In the introduction to her collection of essays, literary criticism and commentary, See What Can Be Done , the American novelist and short story writer Lorrie Moore recounts the horror of once meeting somebody who told her that there was “a well-known list of six things a book review must always do”. The person who told her this did not reveal what the six things were, and Moore presumably remains much the better for being in ignorance.
Three collections
But the question, what should a book review do (if not always, but often enough), hangs in the air after reading three recent collections of literary criticism — along with Moore’s, The Collected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick and Francine Prose’s What to Read and Why . There is no better place to start the discussion than with Hardwick, one of the founders of the The New York Review of Books in the early 1960s who passed away in 2007, and her famous takedown in 1959 of the (mostly American) culture of book reviewing at the time, “The Decline of Book Reviewing”. Almost six decades later, it still compels readers to reconsider what they seek from reviews, and also to become aware of the changing dynamics of book discovery.
Hardwick was withering in her verdict on popular book reviewing, with an eye focussed especially on The New York Times Book Revi ew: “A genius may indeed go to his grave unread, but will hardly have gone to it unpraised. Sweet, bland commendations fall everywhere upon the scene… 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 ‘minor faults in an otherwise excellent work.’” The inclination, she wrote, appeared to privilege “coverage” over “the drama of opinion”. One result of this was a sort of “democratic euphoria” that gave equivalence to lighter writing and more serious books. To convey just how dismal the effect of this critical flattening was, she wrote that the publishers of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita actually quoted bad reviews to get readers interested.
She had the data to back up exactly how rare these “bad reviews” could be. Of all reviews summarised in 1956 in the Book Review Digest , 51% were favourable, 44.8% were “non-committal”, and just 4.7% unfavourable.
It’s difficult to think that the situation now is much different anywhere in the world, but Prose, whose book is a follow-up to her magisterial Reading Like a Writer , says reviewers must be emphatic when they write a favourable review: “‘You’ve got to read this’ should be the first line of every positive book review.”
What to Read and Why is made up in great part with Prose’s introductions to reissued classics but also includes her “positive” review of Mohsin Hamid’s most recent novel, Exit West . Her purpose, she says, is to convey “the reasons why we continue to read great books, and why we continue to care.”
Prose’s is an eclectic collection, and you’d hardly expect to be surprised with a negative take in an introduction to a classic. But some years ago, in 2012, the American critic, Laura Miller, made, to quote the title of her essay in Salon , “the case case for positive book reviews”. Among others she referenced Hardwick for the criticism that reviews were too soft, but she argued that book reviewing could no longer assume that there still exists a critical mass of readers who would have read, or will read, enough of the books in question — there was “no slice of culture in common” among readers as there was among, say, TV viewers. “Even the novelists you may think of as ‘hyped’ are in fact relatively obscure,” she wrote. “As for those people who have heard of today’s best-known literary novelists, the vast majority haven’t read their books. This won’t, by the way, stop them from expressing an opinion on those books because they have, after all, read the reviews (and the author profiles and interviews).”
What use, Miller suggested in a powerful comment on the Internet age of multimedia, would it be to readers to be swamped by harsh critiques of books they were not likely to have considered reading in any case? It’d be better to bring to their attention, in an informed and honest way, books that are praiseworthy and thus recommended reading.
Practitioner’s take
The debate will, of course, go on. But Moore adds another angle to it: “A fiction writer reviewing is performing — I still believe — an essential task. Very few practising artists review the work of their fellow sculptors of painters or dancers or composers, and so the conversation is left to nonpractitioners.” She calls it “jury duty”, and says her style of criticism is a “practitioner’s take”. And of such writing, it can be agreed, there is not quite enough.
