UNDER REVIEW


What do we want book reviews to do? The question is one of those worrisome ones that never quite goes away. Gail Pool’s 2007 inquiry into the state of the trade in the US, Faint Praise, raised the old spectres of nepotism, sloppy summarising and gushing hype, concluding that publishing and the critical community that feeds on it are still in far too tight and slimy an embrace.

While this degree of soul-searching is less likely on this side of the Atlantic, there is still a feeling that the currency of reviews may have undergone some cheapening. Such practices as cover quotes that adorn the first appearances of books, and the excitable blurbs that extend from the back cover to the first two or three pages of the paperback edition, don’t help. ‘Spleen-rupturingly funny!’ ‘If there is a better book to be written this year, I’ll eat my shorts.’

If it’s true that, like many another trade, reviewing has been subject to a healthy dose of web-led deprofessionalising, nonetheless a tenacious literary culture persists that sustains the likes of the LRB and TLS, and hasn’t entirely died out in the quality newspapers. It may well be that this community is still too closed, and too embroiled with the publicity departments of a handful of the big conglomerates, yet it manages to facilitate a weekly conversation about books that quite belies rumours of the decline of literacy.

A useful review of a new novel should convey the mise-en-scène and atmosphere of the story, consider it if appropriate in the light of the author’s earlier works, and offer some level of evaluation of its success or otherwise in achieving its own aims. (And not, of course, give away the ending.)

Non-fiction reviews might take a more scholarly tone, even to the extent of offering one’s own essay on the topic, before closing with some summary remarks on the book in hand. The weighty American work on eighteenth-century economic history I am currently reading for review is full of wearyingly stilted academic locutions, but is an undeniably valuable addition to the field. Should the one factor outweigh the other in my assessment?

What most readers are looking for is a sensitivity and receptivity of response, buoyed by the range of reference to make sense of it all. There is a certain kind of critical shorthand in British reviewing that can veer towards the lazy – how many books turn out to be ‘compelling’, ‘engaging’, ‘meticulously researched’? – but if there is sufficient acuity and detail in the analysis, readers will overlook at least some of the clichés.

In the Anglo-American world at least, there is often an inbred distaste for the subjective voice. We use words like ‘opinionated’ and ‘judgmental’ pejoratively, as though there were something embarrassing about the enactment of personal taste. But criticism has never been an exact science (despite the efforts of the structuralist movement), and most of us, I like to hope, are able to read a piece of fulsome praise and still know the book isn’t for us. Or conversely, enjoy a bloodbath of a review and go on to enjoy the murdered book even more.

There are perhaps too many authors reviewing each other, and too monotonous a reliance on using the same names every time to review particular categories of books, but our literary culture would be a more impoverished place without reviews.

Critics were the first pestilential nuisances to go into Stephen Fry’s Room 101, their uselessness evidenced by the fact that they spend their whole working lives parasitically judging the creativity of others. But the banning of critics from the Republic of Letters declares that its citizens are expected either not to have opinions, or else, like Victorian children, to keep them to themselves.

DUSTBINS OF HISTORY

People who raid supermarket waste-bins after hours to liberate the unwanted food have generally been known as 'freegans'. Some object to this term, though, on the grounds that it appears to imply, by portmanteau logic, a foraging for specifically vegan food. The preferred alternative is 'skippers', which runs the risk even more appallingly of suggesting a rummaging through building-site jetsam, but also has happier connotations of sports captaincy and a life on the ocean wave.

Only a small number of these nocturnal foragers are in financial extremis and half-starving. Most are people who could shop in the supermarket during opening hours if they wished, but choose instead to make a statement about the atrocious waste that goes on. Much of the recovered food is within its sell-by date, and even most of that which isn't is perfectly edible. To be fair, the supermarkets have made something of an effort to distribute nearly expired food to the needy, but it inevitably remains far too easy to dump it.

One chain has a policy now of securing its wasted food behind metal fences and cameras to prevent skippers from getting at it. Does this not pose a highly illuminating question? Apart from the legal issue of trespassing on private property, why should any company (or any individual) be concerned about what happens to waste material once it has been discarded? The very act of throwing away is a gesture of rejection, of declaring the disposed item to be superfluous to requirements, but as soon as somebody else tries to make use of it, an anal possessiveness comes over the disposer. The small child's conflict about the excrement that is expelled from his body is suggested. It is something repellent, and yet it must be his, because it has come from him.

The seeming reason that the supermarkets don't want skippers to take their refuse is that they may then stand indicted for their profligacy in a world of deprivation, when even the developed nations are plagued by growing poverty and mounting unemployment. But then skippers almost never advertise their activity (other than during the period in 2007 when the news media collectively seized on it). The chief reason for their opposition to skipping is of course that if you can help yourself to their products for free, why would you go back to queuing at the checkouts to buy them?

Notwithstanding the obvious capitalist objections, though, there remains the tantalising legal chimera of who owns rubbish, and why it should be as jealously protected from the enterprising forager as the products on shop shelves.

SHADES OF DOUBT

It remains vitally important, while the sun lasts, to remember not to respond to any sexual advances from people wearing shades, for the simple reason that you can't properly see what they look like. Sunglasses can be dangerously flattering. Indeed, most of us choose them with that precise effect in mind.

Faced with the unenviable predicament of having found oneself in a compromising situation with somebody who, now unmasked, turns out to be a googly-eyed horror, there is one possible recourse. We should quite properly ask our pursuer to put the shades back on again. For the same reason that the less one knows about a person, the easier it is to have unbridled sexual relations with them (think of Candy Clark in American Graffiti (1973) saying to the stetsoned Harrison Ford, whose car she has just got into as a way of punishing the long-standing boyfriend who has upset her, 'Don't say anything, and we'll get along just fine'), the less we can see of the face of somebody unattractive to us, the easier the deed itself becomes.

A young man in a baseball cap who invited another back home to his flat for sex kept his hat on more or less throughout the act. When asked by the other whether he ever took it off, he briefly removed it to demonstrate that he looked much more boring without it, and then put it right back on again. Is this gesture not indicative of the greatest, the most considerate, sexual camaraderie?