The Job of Dispensing Praise

Posted 12 May, 2008 in Book Reviewing | No comments

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.

Revenge Is Sweet

Posted 2 May, 2008 in Book Reviewing, Mindless fun | No comments

From the NYTBR’s Paper Cuts blog:

It’s not often in the literary world that what begins as farce ends in whipped cream. But that’s sort of what happened last night when Rick Moody nailed Dale Peck squarely in the face with a fully loaded pie plate at a fundraiser for the writers’ retreat Sangam House, thus achieving long-overdue payback for the infamous 2002 review in which Peck called Moody “the worst writer of his generation.”

The best part of this post? There’s a video.

Turning the Tables

Posted 9 April, 2008 in Book Reviewing | 10 comments

Nathan Whitlock, review editor for Quill & Quire magazine, and newly minted first novelist, contemplates what happens when the reviewer becomes the reviewee:

As hard as I listen, I can’t make out the sound of axes being gleefully sharpened in anticipation of my book’s pub date. For one thing, I have a hard time believing there is anyone who cares enough about what I do or write—aside from my immediate family, at least—to bother plotting anything. I always assume anyone stung by something I wrote spends a few minutes cursing my name, and then promptly forgets it. (This is partly confirmed by the fact that I have worked for and even befriended a writer who once claimed to have shed tears over a single harsh sentence I wrote in a review years earlier.) I just figured most people would assume, correctly, that I am a non-entity and not worth the bother.

Although I don’t have a novel under my belt (yet … yet …), I have occasionally conjured visions of awkward encounters at book launches or other social gatherings when I would be forced to interact with an author to whom I’ve given a negative review. In practice, my experience has been in accordance with Nathan’s: authors don’t tend to hold grudges, so long as the review was thoughtful and fair. As Nathan points out in his piece: “I’ve never really seen a division between positive and negative reviews, only between well-written ones and poorly written ones.”

On a side note, Nathan’s novel, A Week of This, is one I’m highly anticipating, but you will not see a review of it here. That’s because, as review editor at Q&Q, Nathan is my boss, and his publicist is the woman who shares a residence with your humble correspondent, so the levels of conflict-of-interest are just too mind-boggling to even contemplate.

Still, there’s nothing stopping me from encouraging you to pick up a copy and, if you’re in Toronto on April 16, you can come out to the launch at the Gladstone Hotel, as part of Pages Books’ This Is Not a Reading Series. Details are as follows:

Gladstone Hotel Ballroom, 1214 Queen St W, Toronto
Wed, Apr 16, 2008; 7:30pm (doors 7pm) free

An An Intriguing, Compelling, and Poignant Reminder for Book Reviewers

Posted 26 March, 2008 in Book Reviewing | 1 comment

Over at the Paper Cuts blog, Bob Harris has put together a list of seven words that book reviewers tend to overuse, mostly out of laziness. I am either very proud or very ashamed to admit that I’ve used all of them at one time or another, except perhaps for employing “muse” as a verb. I will point out, however, that when I referred to Nikolski as “intriguing,” I did indeed mean to connote a mysterious quality in that novel.

And I do take umbrage with Harris’s accusation that reviewers always use “lyrical” to mean “well written.” If I want to say that something is well written, I’m much more apt to use those two words. When I say a particular passage is “lyrical,” I mean something entirely different.*

My other complaint is that he failed to include the word “unputdownable,” which is one of the great linguistic abortions of our era.

P.S. I have also been know to use the word “eschew” in conversation. So bite me.

*Usually, I mean that it’s lyrical.

We’ll Slide ‘Cross the Surface of Things

Posted 16 March, 2008 in Book Reviewing | 3 comments

Book reviewers for major Canadian newspapers and magazines are largely stymied by the space restrictions placed on them; there’s rarely enough room to present a nuanced or measured account of how one reacted to a given book. As a result, many book reviews devolve into little more than glorified plot summaries, or cheers and jeers on the order of “I loved it!” or “I thought it was trash.”

In some cases, however, reviewers get caught up short by a too-limited reading of the book under review, which provides a skewed or faulty perspective on the work under consideration. Case in point: Aritha van Herk’s review of Paul Quarrington’s new novel The Ravine, from Saturday’s Globe and Mail.

In her penultimate paragraph, van Herk writes: “The Ravine ends on a hopeful note, with Phil making at least a stab at reconciliation with his wife and his life.”

The scene to which she is referring is a passage of unattributed dialogue presented as a telephone conversation between the book’s protagonist, Phil McQuigge, and a female interlocutor. In other, similar passages throughout the novel, the speaker on the other end of the phone is identifiable through the details of the conversation or by name. In the final passage, however, there is no indication whatsoever that the person McQuigge is speaking to is his wife. Indeed, he could plausibly be speaking to any one of three different women. For those who have read the book — and not wanting to give too much away — it is possible to argue persuasively that the reference to Anthony Trollope in the scene strongly suggests that it isn’t McQuigge’s wife on the other end of the phone.

By assuming that the other speaker is the protagonist’s wife, van Herk reveals more about herself than she does about the ending of Quarrington’s novel. Van Herk wants it to be McQuigge’s wife, because that would provide the story with the kind of happy ending, involving a return to domestic tranquillity, that she feels most comfortable with. But there is no evidence in the novel that this is the correct reading.

The ambiguity in the finale is central to Quarrington’s approach in the book; by applying a more explicit reading than the text encourages, van Herk diminishes the force and effect of the novel.

The Reviewer’s Dilemma

Posted 27 February, 2008 in Book Reviewing | 2 comments

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.

A Quick Hit

Posted 14 January, 2008 in Book Reviewing | No comments

Gaa! Deadlines, deadlines, deadlines! After a fallow couple of months, I’ve had three big projects land on my desk in the span of a few days, all of which I was foolish enough (or desperate enough) to take on. So, I’m just a wee bit stressed at the moment.

In lieu of actual content, here’s a link (courtesy of Claire Cameron, author, blogger, and would-be diarist) to a post by the sci-fi editor at Publisher’s Weekly describing how she goes about choosing which books to review:

I review good books because our readers count on us to tell them about the good books. I review interesting books because I like drawing attention to them and they make for good reviews. (I never forget that PW lives and dies by the quality of its reviews.) I review important books–books by major authors, lead titles, books that are going to get a lot of press–because our book-buying readers care about our opinion and will want to have it to compare with other review venues, and also because it’s a service to the publishers. Maintaining good relationships with publishers is vital to our business and I wouldn’t dream of pretending otherwise. Of course it’s also vital to maintain our independence, which is why I will almost always review an important book but I will never guarantee a favorable review.

From my experience, this seems fairly standard as criteria for selecting books to review. Here at TSR the criteria are a little looser, based largely upon whether I feel I have something valuable to say (positive or negative) about a given title. It’s also been my ambition (more or less well realized, depending) to give space to books that might otherwise go wanting in the mainstream press.

I do appreciate Fox’s avowal never to guarantee favourable reviews for books; I recently declined a reviewing gig because the publication in question didn’t accept negative reviews. I have a problem with this policy, since what results ceases to be criticism (or even reviewing) and becomes advertising.

Stunning … Extraordinary!

Posted 25 September, 2007 in Book Reviewing | 6 comments

I was startled to pick up a copy of the trade paperback edition of Craig Davidson’s novel The Fighter and find my own words staring back at me. Specifically, the back cover blurb, attributed to the Quill & Quire (where my review of the book originally ran) and not to me personally, reads as follows: “The Fighter is a tough, brutal, blood-soaked book that leaves its reader feeling pummelled, battered, and beaten, but nonetheless strangely exhilarated.”

I was happy to see my comment used, since it was a fairly accurate summation of my feelings about the book, but it’s nevertheless a somewhat disorienting experience to have your words crop up in a context other than the one in which you intended them.

Some reviewers enjoy seeing their names appended to books and advertisements, since they are able to bask in a kind of reflected glory as a result. Certain reviewers even seem to craft their reviews for the sole purpose of providing ready-made quotes that the publisher can excerpt on subsequent editions of the book under review.

I’ve never written this way, in large part because I’m leery of having my words taken out of context and distorted to serve someone else’s ends. A review of 350 words, such as the Quill review of Davidson’s novel, has by necessity to be incredibly compact and concentrated; the reviewer doesn’t have a lot of space to get the point across, and must pay strict attention to the language and context of the commentary, since there’s not really room to clarify or qualify the judgements being rendered. As a result, when taken out of the context of the review proper, any single sentence or phrase can potentially be made to take on a different meaning or tenor from what was intended.

Zach Wells nicely sums up the dangers inherent in having pieces of a review appropriated for publicity purposes:

I have an intense distaste for the blurb qua literary sub-genre, but one can’t prevent someone else from quoting you.* In the cases of [John] Smith and [George] Johnston, I was pleased to find out I’d been quoted, since I genuinely admire both poets’ work and the excerpt was in tune with my overall opinion. But I’ve also been quoted in publisher publicity bumph, completely out of context, an ellipses eliding the true substance of my commentary.

This is where blurbing gets truly dodgy. A reviewer will write, “So-and-so’s book is a triumph of faulty thinking and poor logic. Its intense lack of focus is only equalled by its extraordinary bastardization of the English language.” Then that reviewer will pick up the paperback edition of the book and see this: “A triumph … intense … extraordinary!”

Don’t believe me? Consider this.

*Case in point. Sorry, Zach.

Lost in the Noise

Posted 20 September, 2007 in Book Reviewing, Publishing | No comments

Daniel Green provides a fairly accurate, if somewhat cynical, assessment of book reviews in today’s media-saturated society, viz.:

The process of book publishing and book reviewing has become indistinguishable from that which rules the release and reviews of movies: build up interest over that opening weekend, whose box office receipts tell us what we need to know about the quality of the “product” in question.

This has been the norm in Hollywood for some time: movies aren’t judged by their staying power, but by how well they “open” — that is, how well they do in the first three days of their release. Very few films that open at number one on a given weekend stay there for long; they are quickly displaced by the following weekend’s big release. Last week’s box office champ, the Jodie Foster revenge film The Brave One, which displaced the previous week’s champ, 3:10 to Yuma, is likely to be bumped this week by tomorrow’s release of the Brad Pitt western The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. In today’s Hollywood, no one stays on top for long, and most films are quickly forgotten once the opening weekend push dies down.

Sadly, there are signs that the same phenomenon is occurring in the realm of books, where publishers target reviews in major publications on the weekend of a given book’s release, then largely forget about those titles and move on to the next “big” thing. This results in even the heaviest of hitters getting only a very short kick at the can to make an impression on readers.

This is not true one hundred percent of the time, of course. Although Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows experienced a serious drop-off in the attention paid to it in the media after its July 21st release, I still see people reading or carting around hardback copies of the book practically daily in my travels. This is anecdotal, naturally, and there’s nothing to say that these people didn’t purchase the book in July and are only now getting around to reading it, but it still appears to have legs over a longer term than just a few weeks in the summer.

Likewise, Alan Wiseman’s speculative non-fiction book, The World Without Us, continues to chug along apace, selling steadily two months after its initial release.

However, with book reviews in major media outlets hemorrhaging pages and publishers clamouring for coverage of their biggest stars, it’s little wonder that most titles flash and burn instantly.

There are dangers inherent in this approach to promoting books. With publishers fighting to have their books reviewed on publication, and with newspapers and magazines competing for readership, everyone wants to be first out of the gate, which often results in reviews being written too quickly, with not enough time for thoughtful consideration on the part of the reviewer. Reviews in every major publication frequently fall over themselves to declare a major new work “significant” or “an important addition to our literature,” without being in a position to know whether these statements are true or not. The only real indicator of significance is time, which is the one thing that is being routinely taken out of the equation when it comes to book reviewing.

Too often what gets lost in the shuffle are those books that need time to build an audience; books that require word-of-mouth promotion or hand-selling on the part of booksellers. If a book like Matthew Firth’s spectacular 2006 collection Suburban Pornography garners the few reviews that it can expect to receive in the first couple of weeks of its release — when the reviews are likely to be lost in the noise of other, higher-profile new releases — and is then summarily ignored, it is never going to sell up to its potential.

It’s important for readers, reviewers, and publishers alike not to get suckered in to the attention-deficit approach to marketing books that focuses on large early returns to the exclusion of all else. There are some titles that need care and nurturing over the long term if they are to flourish. It would be a shame to sacrifice these on the altar of Hollywood-style front-end promotion.

That Rending Sound You Hear Is My Heart

Posted 19 September, 2007 in Book Reviewing | No comments

Here’s one to get all those “crisis in book reviewing” folks’ hearts racing.

New York Business.com is reporting that as of September 23, the New York Times Book Review will be augmenting its bestseller lists, separating mass market and trade paperback titles and including twenty titles each, up from the current list that amalgamates the two formats and only includes fifteen titles. Advice, How-to, and Miscellaneous bestseller lists will also increase in size, from five titles apiece to ten.

This doesn’t mean that the Book Review is getting bigger, however: the extra page for the steroid-enhanced bestseller lists will mean one less page of editorial content.

Book Review editor Sam Tanenhaus explains that separating the mass market list from the trade paperback list will better serve his readership: “Now you have a list [the trade paper list] that corresponds closely to what we review and what we gauge our readers are interested in.” This is because the putatively higher-quality literary fiction and non-fiction that dominates the trade paperback format often gets bumped from the amalgamated list by mass market titles that sell in high volume through big box stores or through non-traditional bookselling outlets such as Wal-Mart.

Fair enough, but, if its true that the NYTBR readership focuses predominantly on literary fiction and trade paperback books anyway, why have a mass market list at all? Who is your audience expected to be?

Furthermore, the loss of one page of editorial content in favour of bigger bestseller lists that are presumed to attract more advertising dollars seems a bit suspect, since New York Business also reports that ad revenue for the Book Review was up by ten percent last year, and is on track to increase another ten percent this year.

The NYTBR is the only quality, stand-alone book review in an American newspaper, since the Los Angeles Times folded its books section into the body of its paper earlier this year; to see it diminished like this is somewhat disheartening, particularly when the stated rationale for the move doesn’t exactly compute.