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.