Should book reviews draw blood?

Our classics editor, Mary Beard, made the shortlist for the first Omniture Hatchet Job of the Year, a prize for the "angriest, funniest, most trenchant book review published in a newspaper or magazine in 2011"; and in the TLS this week, in the following extract from the diary column, NB, J. C. acknowledges that this kind of prize is "good fun", unless you happen to be one of the hatcheted victims.

But is it necessarily a good thing to encourage reviewers in the direction of critical savagery? As suggested below, there may be a more difficult task for a responsible critic than simply wielding the axe (for a few recent instances of the more balanced review, see Gerald Mangan's piece on Alasdair Gray, Jonathan Bate weighing up several Keats-related books, or Niki Segnit on Nigel Slater et al). . . .

By J. C.

About once a year, there is a mini-debate about the timidity of book reviewing. It’s been going on for a long time. “Sweet, bland commendations fall everywhere upon the scene; a universal, if somewhat lobotomized, accommodation reigns.” That was Elizabeth Hardwick, in 1959. More recently, a writer in the online journal Slate suggested that the blogging, tweeting free-for-all that sometimes passes for criticism fosters too much “niceness”, not necessarily a nice quality.

To halt the saccharine spread, the not-so-nice sharpened their tools and carved out the Hatchet Job of the Year. The first award went to Adam Mars-Jones, for a review of Michael Cunningham’s book By Nightfall, and the shortlist for the second has been announced. There are eight nominations, including Richard Evans’s review of A. N. Wilson’s Hitler (“It’s hard to think why a publishing house that once had a respected history list agreed to produce this travesty”; New Statesman), Claire Harman on Silver: A return to Treasure Island by Andrew Motion (“at every turn the former Poet Laureate clogs the works with verbiage”; Evening Standard), Allan Massie on Craig Raine’s novel The Divine Comedy (“some of the writing is very bad”; Scotsman), Camilla Long on Rachel Cusk’s story of her marriage break-up, Aftermath (“quite simply, bizarre . . . acres of poetic whimsy and vague literary blah”; Sunday Times) and Ron Charles on Martin Amis’s “ham-fisted” Lionel Asbo (Washington Post).

The favourite is likely to be the review by Zoë Heller of Salman Rushdie’s memoir Joseph Anton, which appeared in the New York Review of Books last month. One commentator had already relished it as “a hatchet job among hatchet jobs”; another welcomed the “most pointedly brutal review” of 2012.

Brutality is never nice. Enjoying a healthy demolition as much as anyone, however, we reached for Ms Heller’s piece with a certain shameful anticipation – only to discover that it is thoughtful and well-written, not in the least brutal; on a par with the excellent review of Rushdie’s book in the TLS by Eric Ormsby. Hatchet-job prizes are good fun (not so much for Rushdie, Cusk and others) but it would be unfortunate if critics felt they were being urged to draw blood, to show off their “sharp” edge. The reviewer’s chief responsibility is to the potential purchaser of the book, who, unlike the reviewer himself, is asked to pay hard-earned cash for the product. The most difficult task for a reviewer is to remain true in writing to the feelings experienced while reading, to convey them in elegant, entertaining prose. It’s a lot tougher than being brutal.

Comments

[Natalie]

" The most difficult task for a reviewer is to remain true in writing to the feelings experienced while reading, to convey them in elegant, entertaining prose." Lovely way to put it. It seems to me that the argument that reviewers are too "nice" is simply only suggesting that they be the opposite: mean. Either way, we have an overly simple, thumbs-up/thumbs down judgment on a book, which we could get from the gaggle of amazon reviewers who engage in what Charles Baxter has called "Owl Criticism": (http://fictionwritersreview.com/essays/owl-criticism)
I don't like this book; there's an owl in it, and I don't like owls." I don't necessarily agree that the responsibility of the professional reviewer is simply to a potential purchaser of the book (we have amateur reviewers on amazon for that) but also to add to an ongoing intellectual and cultural conversation about literature. What seems to be so often lacking in so much book reviewing is actual analysis and engagement with the project. Zoe Heller's review may not have been a dithyramb, but it was insightful and thought provoking. William Giraldi, on the other hand, for instance, in a recent review of Alix Ohlin's books, gave a snarky, arrogant diatribe that read as if he were trying to just position himself as "better" than the author. The goal of the first is illumination and the goal of the second is humiliation. There is a big difference.

[David Martin]

Natalie is right to term Heller's review as insightful and thought-provoking. If cutting instruments have to be referred to, hers is the scalpel rather than the hatchet. I think she used it even more effectively in her review of Naomi Wolf's "Vagina: A New Biography" (also in the NYRB last year, on 27 September), but I suppose Rushdie is the more heavyweight author to take on.

[M.G. Piety]

Helen Vendler's review in the New York Review of Books of Rita Dove's anthology of twentieth-century American poetry for Penguin was pretty brutal (see: "Are These the Poems to Remember" http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/nov/24/are-these-poems-remember/?page=1 ). It may not be all that bad though compared to the Hatched Job of the Year winners. My impression is that too many reviews are written by people who are either not qualified to review the books in question (see the controversy over the English-language reviews of Joakim Garff's biography of Kierkegaard), or they haven't actually read the books they "review."

[Alex D-F]

Some of the tension of Heller's review derives from the fact that Rushdie's work is autobiographical, so the critical judgements inevitably come close to crossing that fine line, and of attacking the author rather than the work. I think that's what titillates people about it, but many of her judgements are ethical rather than literary. I didn't get enough sense of the content or structure of the book, or of the overall presentation of self rather than a few individual good/bad consistent/inconsistent incidents.

[Andrew McCulloch]

I think Christopher Knight puts the case very clearly in his book 'Uncommon Readers' (2003). Taking his title from Dr. Johnson's 'Life of Gray' - 'I rejoice to concur with the common reader; for by the common sense of readers uncorrupted with literary prejudices . . . must be finally decided all claims to poetical honours' (an idea that gave rise to a whole school of criticism) - Knight identifies three critics in whose work he believes this tradition survives: Denis Donoghue, Frank Kermode and George Steiner. These critics, he says, 'bring to their reviews less a position (though positions they have) than an acute intelligence, prepared to be provoked by the last book they have read and to place it at the centre of a discussion that ripples outward'. Although they are all experts in their field, their strength as critics is that 'they refuse the retreat of a discipline's discourse and think it imperative that the scholar find a way to engage the larger educated public in conversation . . . This Arnoldian faith 'that the mind may be made the source of great pleasure' is, one suspects, what first drew them to the study of literature . . .'