Chekhov’s Mistess

September 21, 2006

On Amateur Book Reviewing

 

Lev Grossman’s provocative comment at Critical Mass has many pro-am book reviewers wondering why they weren’t his ”mortal enemy” from the beginning. When asked about how he’d “like to see book pages change in the coming years,” Grossman responds:

At the risk—nay, certainty—of sounding kind of snobbish, I wish book sections in general would leave book-reviewing to the pros. There’s a pervasive notion that anybody who can read can write a book review. Not so. Good god, there is nothing so boring, so dank and unappealing on the page, as a bad book review.

He’s right, there is nothing more boring than a bad book review, but echoing Dan Green, what’s getting paid got to do with it? If left to those “pros” the only books that would get reviewed are generally those that can be marketed to the masses. Besides that unfortunate fact, I’ve read plenty of rotten yet professionally written reviews.

I think the issue here is one of definition. To my mind a book review has a few distinct qualities: it only describes the book to the extent necessary to give a sense of what the book is and its point of view (i.e. a book description is not a review); it judges the book in context of other books that may be related in some way by temperament, subject, genre, style and the author’s other work; and lastly it judges whether or not the book is successful on its own terms. Furthermore, a book review should be written clearly enough that the reader can tell, as a friend once said, “what their opinions mean to me,” so that it should live in a vacuum of sorts, not requiring the reader to know the reviewer.

That to me sums up the essence of judgement that a critic can impose on a book. An exemplar of that type of review can easily be found in the New York Review of Books, but not often in the “entertainment” section of major news outlets (understanding full well the editorial constraints responsible for that, but nonetheless stating the fact).

Frankly, I’m not well read enough to be a critic and am quite content not to be (and who, like Art Winslow, can fill reams of notebooks on a book for a review). What’s more, I only write about books that I like because – here’s a professional differentiation – I don’t have time, short of getting paid for it, to finish a book I don’t like – and a likeworthy book is not the same as a review-worthy book.

Having defined a book review we have to acknowledge that what most people are doing, amateurs and professionals alike, are just writing about books, plain and simple. Whether or not there really is a “pervasive notion that anybody who can read can write a book review” is questionable. The truth is that writing itself stands on its own in this world of amateurism; a review by an amateur will not be read because the writer sits comfortably behind the reputation of a newspaper, but because it’s smartly written and interesting; the crème de la crème shall, to mix a metaphor, rise on its own.

A “reader’s response,” as I call my own writing on books – escaping from the aforementioned responsibilities – can be equally valuable to readers as a review. Firstly and most importantly, “book pages” in print media are dwindling like airplane meals and somebody has to talk about all these books, particularly, as I’ve discovered over the past few years, from the small presses that don’t have the marketing budget to differentiate their titles in the eyes of professional reviewers.

Secondly, it should be recognized that raw responses to a book are as intellectually important as a well informed response. A writer doesn’t write for a critic – if he or she writes for anyone at all, it is for a reader. The more readers write about books, the better off we all will be.

So, while many lament the statistics predicting the passing of a literate society, or others snobbishly decry amateur book reviewers, the rest of us will celebrate the vibrant world of literature that is being passed over by the professionals so they can write about smarmy memoirs, pandering novels and speciously au courant non-fiction. I’ll gladly take a well intentioned book review by someone whose only qualification is their ability to read, as bad as it potentially may be, if that’s the cost of keeping literature alive.

• posted by Bud Parr
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