The Job of Dispensing Praise

Posted 12 May, 2008 in Book Reviewing |

Dan Green, commenting on Scott Espisito’s assertion that the National Book Critics Circle’s list of recommended reading is not particularly useful because it only recommends books that people are already reading:

“The authors everyone is already reading” are inevitably what a group of newspaper book reviewers is going to consider it their job to “recommend,” since these are the only authors who get reviewed to begin with.

I agree with the spirit of what both Green and Espisito are saying. What use is yet another list cobbled together from already extant bestseller lists? Surely Jhumpa Lahiri, Peter Carey, and J.M. Coetzee don’t need the NBCC’s endorsement: their books get reviewed as a matter of course by all the major news organs — including that most coveted of venues, the New York Times Book Review — and will likely find generous levels of readership. Better the NBCC uses its influence and reach to try to move a bit outside the mainstream and suggest worthy authors who might have fallen below the radar of a mass readership because they do not have the blue-chip track record that seems to be imperative for getting reviewed in the NYTBR and elsewhere. (This is a point that Sarah Weinman in the comments section of the NBCC blog post.)

Still, as a newspaper reviewer myself, I feel it incumbent upon me to point out that no reviewer worth her salt will feel that it is her “job” to recommend anyone, ever. The job of a book reviewer is to provide an honest assessment of a book under review, focused exclusively on its literary strengths and weaknesses, with no regard for the history or relative importance of the author. Every book reviewer will have had the experience of being disappointed by a favourite or usually reliable author, just as every book reviewer will have been surprised when a normally detested author produces a work of merit.

This is the ideal, and it is obvious that sometimes it goes wanting. There is enormous pressure on newspapers to keep their advertisers happy, which often means softballing reviews of lesser works by major writers. This does occur, although it shouldn’t.

But any reviewer who feels that it is his job to praise, say, the latest novel by Margaret Atwood or Philip Roth, based solely on these writers’ statures and previous track record, should not be in the job in the first place.

1 comment to “The Job of Dispensing Praise”

Corey Redekop, May 12th, 2008 at 8:07 pm:

• But…but I LOVE praise! Don’t cut me off, please!

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