The Reviewer’s Dilemma

Posted 27 February, 2008 in Book Reviewing |

In the process of writing about his conflicted feelings over giving the new Peter Carey novel, His Illegal Self, a negative review, Mark Sarvas of The Elegant Variation muses aloud upon the fears and uncertainties inherent in the process of reviewing someone else’s work:

I remember when I got my first New York Times Book Review assignment. Folks, I don’t mind telling you it scared me. Because, although I knew that a good review wouldn’t necessarily help the book, a bad one would surely hurt it. And I remember thinking, “Who am I to have such power over someone else’s work?” We tend to talk about how “The New York Times hated so-and-so,” but it’s not the institution, it’s an individual who has been given the Times’s imprimatur for the day. And so I read all eight or nine of James Wilcox’s previous books for an 800-word review because I realized it was something to take very seriously, indeed. (And I was relieved when my second assignment was a first novel.) And now, whenever I read a review — any review — I am acutely aware of the individual sitting with highlighter and post-its at the other end, not the 48-point type name on the masthead.

Book reviewers are paid very little for what is, let’s face it, time consuming and (not to sound too self-aggrandizing) fairly intellectually challenging work. The temptation is to breeze through whatever book is under review and toss off 300-400 words about it, then collect the meagre paycheque. But this approach elides the fact that, although it’s theoretically possible to read a novel and write a short review of it in a day or two, the author of the book under review likely spent years agonizing over it, writing and revising and polishing, worrying that it isn’t good enough, patiently crafting the words on the page.

Any good book reviewer will tell you that it gives no pleasure to dispense negative criticism in a review, but providing an honest assessment of a work is an essential part of respecting the artistic integrity of the work itself, and of its creator. However, reviewers should always bear in mind that it is much easier to read a book and come up with 400 pithy words about it than it is to write the damn thing in the first place.

2 comments to “The Reviewer’s Dilemma”

Kerry, February 27th, 2008 at 1:22 pm:

• Fabulous

Zachariah Wells, February 27th, 2008 at 8:08 pm:

• Not only easier, but frequently more remunerative. That’s the really sad thing about being a book reviewer, at least a reviewer who also writes books.

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