Book Reviewers and Conflict of Interest

Posted 13 June, 2007 in Book Reviewing |

Much ink has been spilled of late (many pixels have been pixellated?) about the subject of ethics in book reviewing. This was the topic of a Book Expo America panel that consisted of such book industry mainstays as Sam Tanenhaus, Christopher Hitchens, and Francine Prose. Edward Champion has comprehensive coverage of the BEA panel here (and here, and here. There’s a point at which comprehensiveness shades into obsessiveness, but I’m still not sure where that point lies.).

I got to thinking about the subject after reading a column on the Writer Beware blog by an anonymous (of course!) reviewer who suggests that the only way for a book reviewer to avoid any conflict of interest — or even just the perception of conflict of interest — when reviewing is never, ever to meet the author whose book is under review: “[W]hat do you have to do to get me to review your book? Well, for starters, don’t meet me. Ever.” If you’re an author, don’t shake hands with this reviewer a party, don’t hold the door for her if she’s coming out of the subway behind you, and if you see her on the sidewalk, jump into oncoming traffic to avoid engaging with her.

Besides the affront to common civility implicit in the above, there is another, built-in problem with this approach, one to which our anonymous reviewer points in her post:

A lot of book reviewers are also writers, so we’re constantly skirting conflict-of-interest issues. Causes a lot of strange silences at parties, and the occasional ducking-into-the-bathroom. Recently, I attended a party when I probably shouldn’t have. The publicist grabbed me by the arm … and dragged me over to an author. Unfortunately, I was reviewing his book for a major magazine. I felt I had to tell my editor. My editor felt he had to pull the review.

To me, this doesn’t make a lot of sense. A reviewer whose opinion of a book could be swayed by a casual meeting with the book’s author at a party is probably not someone you want reviewing books to begin with. Such a person is clearly too fickle, too hot-headed, too eager to rush to judgement, and therefore unable engage in the kind of long view and sober second thought that book reviewing requires.

But beyond that, the only way for a reviewer who also writes (or edits, or otherwise moves in literary circles) to avoid even the possibility of such a meeting would be for that person to hermit herself away in her apartment and never leave. This, too, is contrary to the nature of the ideal book reviewer, who should be fully engaged with the world, not shut off from it.

Clearly, you don’t want book reviewers to be reviewing their spouses’ novels (necessarily: See below), or novels by their best friends or their bosses. However, there’s a world of difference between meeting someone casually over cocktails and having an ongoing relationship with that person.

Ultimately, as Adam Kirsch asserts in the New York Sun, such considerations are based on a false understanding of what a review is, since they “envision the book review as a transaction between author and reviewer, rather than between reviewer and reader.”:

To be obsessed with potential bias or conflict of interest on the book reviewer’s part is to imagine the reviewer as a judge, who is obligated to provide every author with his or her day in court. But that judicial standard is impossible, because there is no such thing as an objective judgment of a work of literature; aesthetic judgment is by definition personal and opinionated. Nor would a perfectly objective book review even be desirable. The whole point of a review is to set one mind against another, and see what sparks fly. If the reviewer lacks an individual point of view, or struggles to repress it, there can be no intellectual friction, and therefore no interest or drama.

Kirsch’s article devolves into a screed against litbloggers, trotting out the familiar, and by now quite shopworn, arguments against their very existence, which I have neither the time nor the constitution to engage with here. But on the limited point above, I must agree with him.

Which is not to say that there should be no standards as to who reviews what. History has shown that it’s probably not a good idea, for instance, to allow Ryan Bigge to review Leah McLaren. CanLit is a small pond, but it’s not that small. However, getting all in a twist over perceived issues of conflict regarding the fact that reviewer X once sat at a table of twenty people, one of whom happened to be author Y, who at one point in the evening asked reviewer X for the time, just doesn’t seem fruitful.

And it gives reviewers precious little credit for being able to think independently. Let us not forget that Rebecca West’s classic 1914 essay, “The Duty of Harsh Criticism,” was in part a negative assessment of The Passionate Friends by H.G. Wells, with whom West was romantically involved. Good thing West wasn’t around to read that anonymous reviewer at Writer Beware. She might never have written her essay, which would have made the canon of literary criticism that much poorer.

(For a contrary take on the Writer Beware piece, go here.)

Your comment: