Notebook: On Reviewing
I wrote this Notebook for “Viva la Book Review,” a nonprofit that supports book reviews in print, digital, and audio media.
A while back I taught an undergraduate course, at intervals over a ten-year period, in “literary journalism,” which I got to define however I liked. I started off with narrative nonfiction, and then I had a little section on opinion writing, and then I moved on to book reviewing. The last time I taught my course, in the teens, I was startled by something new. The students didn’t know what I was talking about. They couldn’t understand the difference between articles about books in a newspaper or a magazine and “reviews” that appeared on a consumer site like Amazon or blurbs on the back of the book. Once I started to explain they all agreed that magazine and newspaper criticism was the least reliable of these, because everyone knows journalism is biased, whereas on Amazon people are giving their real opinions. Maybe by now there would be a bit more skepticism about Amazon, but I’m not sure there would be less about journalism. Later I encountered a similar blurring of what I had considered bright lines when I was writing about Bookstagram influencers, who argued that they deserved to be paid by the books’ producers the way beauty and fashion influencers are by cosmetic and fashion houses. They considered payment a sign of “respect”; they did not regard their work as an extension of the “criticism” tradition in which critics’ opinions are understood to be disengaged from the interests of their subjects. (For me the fact that cosmetics and fashion industries historically paid for placement in magazines always sat uneasily with the standards of the trade.) Followers on Bookstagram, and now BookTok, seem pretty unconcerned that they are being exposed to advertising via their influencers, likewise that their search results are quietly shaped by “advertising” dollars, an effect that will become even more subtle and pervasive as advertising is integrated into AI.
What do book critics do that is distinct from the opinions other people now have so many means of expressing to the general public? Do they bring anything special or valuable to the table? Is there a reason for people besides book critics themselves to lament their creeping obsolescence1?
There is a lively debate that has probably been going on among writers and would-be critics since at least Keats about whether literary criticism is too mean or not mean enough, whether it should be developing exacting standards for writing or nurturing the writing that is out there. Writers themselves certainly are anxious to be reviewed. (Though Elizabeth Gumport reminds us that, as books coverage in the popular press was expanding, Virginia Woolf, for one, complained of the din too many clashing opinions, and George Orwell bemoaned their cheapening proliferation.) Publicists wish writers cared less about chasing scarce reviews that don’t matter much any more when it comes to sales. I’m not speaking to these intramural concerns, or at least not just yet. I am asking what the presence of book criticism means for people who are not writers or book critics.
As journalism evolved away from the period of “yellow journalism,” in which it was openly partisan and for sale, pretty lively and fun but not always of much practical use, certain practices were developed to provide readers with information that was a step removed from the financial interests of journalism’s object. Among these was that you do not accept payment from your subject, whether it is an author or a publisher or an interviewee (getting a free copy of the book—movie, play, concert, etc.—to be covered does not count as payment, otherwise no one could afford to review anything, though travel and food writing create an interesting exception). Another principle was that the people who sold the advertising that kept the lights on were different people from the people who decided what got published, and they were not supposed to communicate with each other. Of course none of these firewalls was ever impermeable. The editors at a glossy magazine can’t afford to aggravate people who sell expensive cars too much, which gives them a certain set of editorial parameters, or gave. But it created an expectation of an inner discipline on the part of editors and writers that is a part of one’s growth as a journalist or a critic. Your job is to measure what you write against an inner standard of the truth, against the reality as you are able to uncover it; your work and your outlet will be judged by how successfully you do that. There is no such expectation in customer reviews. Anyone can pay their nieces and nephews to post admiringly of them on Amazon or Goodreads. (Of course now that these are filling up with AI padding it would be a relief to discover a red-blooded niece or nephew in a consumer review.) Rallying your friends to post admiringly about you is considered part of capably getting published. Goodreads is known for being particularly susceptible to personal grudges and rivalries. One respected scholar got into trouble on Amazon some years ago by reviewing himself favorably, and his colleagues unfavorably, under a pseudonym.
There has always been some variation in practice among professional reviewers about reviewing your friends. Major newspapers historically take great pains to avoid a review by nearly anyone a writer has ever been in a room with. I worked at The New York Review of Books which, at the time, was sometimes joshingly referred to as The New York Review of Each Other’s Books, but the sense there was that it’s hard to get an interesting review of a book about, say, cultural anthropology, out of someone who didn’t know any cultural anthropologists. Also sometimes people who knew each other make the most interesting reviewers (though the person trying to help out a friend is probably the worst—a hazard of the trade). The rule of thumb was, stay away if your relationship with this person would prevent you from saying what you really think. Editor Sean De Lone recently considered a variant of this problem in current sensitivities around identity, and whether a reviewer from a similar background as their reviewee considers themselves to have been recruited in order to represent their people, a distorting and belittling expectation. The point is, though, that if you are a critic who has been hired to do a job, it is part of the professional standards of the job for you to navigate these pressures with intelligence and integrity. When signing on to an outlet, be it a newspaper or a magazine or whatever it is, the reader is in receipt of a promise from that outlet that it is conducting itself according to standards that are its bread and butter; it risks losing you, its customer, if it falls short of them. The question of whether there is such a thing as “objective” writing is perennial and has no answer: of course all writing comes from a person and that person’s sensibility shapes its outcome. What is important is how seriously that person takes their responsibility to tell you the truth, and to wrestle with what the truth is. In our Notebook a while back about alt weeklies I quoted Vivian Gornick on the subject of the uniquely voice-driven journalism that alt-weeklies were cultivating in their heyday: “I learned early that ‘I’ was an instrument of illumination. I was not what it was about. I was to use myself to open the subject and to interact with it.” Influencers, or as they are now more often called “creators,” will usually say that they do not accept payment to promote a book they do not like. As we move away from institutions that, however imperfectly, represent a shared commitment at least to strive towards identifiable standards of truth-telling and practices that safeguard their integrity, it becomes harder and harder to discern whom to believe.
Personally, I am interested in books and in book reviewing, and have spent my life working on them, because I like to learn things. Books themselves are unrivalled receptacles of learning because of the long endeavor they represent, and also the shared, highly developed standards of intellectual labor that go into making them. For one thing, a book is permanent. An author (and a publisher) attaches their name to this enduring object as a bond: I give you my word. Reading a book review gives me a little window onto the capacious landscape of a book, like having dinner with it as opposed to marrying it. I expect a book review to convey to me some of the particular delight that the book’s maker has brought into the world. Learning how to do that is serious business. Becoming a skilled and rigorous reader is a life’s work, informed by one’s own reading and experience, by the example of others, and by one’s character. Now that I am out of school and not likely to run into great geniuses or lifelong students of a subject in the course of my day, I look to a book review to help me grow intellectually into the milieu of which the book is a unique embodiment. I do not want to waste my time with someone who has read a book in a careless or juvenile or uninformed way. I want to be in the company of an exemplary reader, someone who will thrill me, bring knowledge that is new to me, and show me how reading can be done. In a world in which we fear that people are forgetting how to read and don’t have time to linger over serious learning, making complex knowledge less and less available to them, what could be more important than enacting such processes where people can participate in them?
I am interested in how to put the joy and majesty that is reading in front of more people. That is why I talk also a lot about bookselling and libraries, and the threats of monopoly and digitization and artificial intelligence to serious reading. The daily book review in the daily paper, where news of a book—and news of culture, of ideas, that are borne along by that book—arrived as news, which it is, wove reading into the daily lives of millions of people who did not consider reading books to be their special vocation. Where local news exists it can still lend a hand to reading by calling attention to events in bookstores and libraries with reportage and even listings, a consequential local media practice that has surprisingly not yet found adequate digital life. Until it stopped distributing book reviews last year, the Associated Press shared reviews of impressive authority and diversity to more than a thousand news outlets (see our Editor’s Note of September 10). The University of Chicago Press’s Carrie Olivia Adams recently wondered whether the much-discussed declines in nonfiction reading might owe in part to the disappearance of regular book reviewing, directing nonfiction readers toward worthy (vetted) objects of their attention. The reader of nonfiction is looking for work that is recognizably … not fictional. Fiction readers gravitate to their communities of the like-minded, but nonfiction readers by their nature look to expertise for informed direction. Carrie Olivia Adams praised the substantial nonfiction reviews still carried by The Wall Street Journal, which she characterized as an “oasis” for “the kind of smart, general interest nonfiction” that university presses labor to produce.
It’s not enough just to put a book in front of people, or to be shown the interior of an author’s house, or told what they order for lunch, or watch someone cry while holding their book, or photograph it with a cup of tea, although those things are nice so far as they go. It’s becoming clear we also have, in different ways, to demonstrate reading it, especially when there are such great seas of things to read: part of what a great reader is showing us is how this thing, among all the things, earns attention, even if to criticize it.
I actually get pretty bored by the too mean/not mean enough discourse around books criticism. We do have a bigger problem with the number of books, especially novels, getting published; the demands that places on readers’ limited attention; and the overhyping of books that don’t add substantively to the whole. An apparent superfluity of writers wanting to be read seems to rise to cover other writers wanting to be read. The vast number of Americans who are not already reading are likely only repelled by this self-satiating spectacle. Some quarters of the publishing world have embraced the writer-as-customer—combining publishing with workshops and writers’ communities and working guidance. These circles give close attention to achievable metrics of craft and finish. So many Americans want to be writers, and our publishing and reviewing institutions naturally swivel toward them as likely customers, but they present a distraction from the urgent work of developing readers. How can literary coverage give reading the glamor of writing? I’m excited by particular communities that are finding books that inspire and invigorate them—like the great work we wrote about Jerid Woods doing at Baldwin & Co in New Orleans—even if these aren’t necessarily the particular books that are going to move other people off their screens. The point is that they approach the reader with a case: not just saying, oh this writer has a fine eye for detail et cetera but this book will grab you by the lapels and change your life.
Read more in Book Post about the highs and lows of book criticism! 1 and 2
The mid-century journalist Rebecca West advocated powerfully for harsh criticism in an essay kept close to hand by The New Republic that has particular salience now: harsh criticism reminds people to challenge bad ideas, and if no one is challenging bad ideas they will probably prevail. Elizabeth Hardwick in the 1960s lamented the “listless” effect of “all the agreeable judgments” emitting from contemporary review outlets, setting in motion The New York Review of Books; she feared that the blanket of “bland commendations” falling on weak and strong work alike “acts as a sort of hidden dissuader, gently, blandly, respectfully denying whatever vivacious interest there might be in books or in literary matters generally.” Dwight Garner argues that it’s the critic’s work to “wage guerilla warfare on consensus.” Book critic Ron Charles has written, “the good review gives a book a public arena in which its mettle is tested, its weakness exposed, its contribution to the coral reef of human knowledge celebrated.” The milieu is diminished if people are reading critical work that is less precise, strenuous, sophisticated; the cause of literature, or important work in any field, is diminished if it is not well expressed. Our reviewer Anthony Domestico made this point beautifully a few weeks ago in a piece about the critic Leslie Fiedler: literary style is a hard-won accomplishment, and probably out of reach for most people. Without it, literary criticism is pretty much useless. If a review is so tedious that no one reads it, it doesn’t matter whether it criticizes or praises the book.2
A great reviewer understands their audience and their publication’s purpose and does not impose punitive standards that drain joy from people’s pleasures (another variant of the criticism-is-too-mean case) or celebrate work that their audience will find banal. The art of it is to lift the standards just enough to give readers pleasure in the exercise of their own intelligence. Any writing about writing that has rigor, that has delight, that engages literature in its full breadth through the medium of one example, is welcome in the world, whether it is “pro” or “con.” A review that has charm and energy, that beguilingly advocates for the life of the mind, makes a case not only for or against the book in question but for being a reader, for engaging in ideas in a living way. The question is—is it urgent? Does criticism bring the reader into the level of thought and feeling that a book represents? Film critic Richard Brody wrote movingly last fall that a review captures the moment of experience of a work of art, from which an interview with its maker is remote—the point at which an audience touches on a work’s “potential vastness.”
Publishers, and the moneyed interests at the top of institutions like the press and academia and education, need to think not about whether this or that book review is selling this or that book, whether their own immediate interests are served by a particular instance of criticism, as whether public discourse has means for engaging ideas in a serious and satisfying way. Informed, enchanting books coverage is way upstream of the individual sale of a book. In their neglect of criticism, book and newspaper publishers assume that the development of readers, their customers, is happening somewhere else, offstage. Rather than frantically looking for AI to detect the incursion of other AI into writing, we should be growing our collective capacity to evaluate what ideas have merit and human value. Developing books criticism is not just a “strengthening” of “service muscles,” as the Times dispiritingly put it this week. It is giving full scope to the exercise of thought as social beings.
Ann Kjellberg is the founding editor of Book Post. Read more of her Notebooks on books and the reading life here. Paying subscribers can find her weekly Editor’s Notes in their emails or the Substack chat.
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Image: “Writing utensils,” Lucie van Dam van Isselt (1935)
The most glaring recent example of book review erasure is the firing of The Washington Post’s book critics by book-industry nemesis Jeff Bezos, which set off a round of books-criticism eulogizing, notably by Dwight Garner in The New York Times and Becca Rothfeld in The New Yorker, and in a packed valedictory at the Washington bookstore Politics and Prose (see also our Editor’s Note of February 5). It is the custom in elegies for the book review to blame the click-based digital information economy for book reviews’ disappearance from the normal media diet of readers: once it was possible to measure who was reading what in a newspaper, the pressure to focus resources on attention-grabbing subjects grew. But long before digitization books coverage was contracting as journalism consolidated and corporate owners, driven by considerations of the bottom line rather than the broader interests of public service that at least partly animated a previous generation of family-owned newspapers, began eliminating coverage that was not perceived as paying the bills. A huge response to the closure of the San Francisco Chronicle’s freestanding book review in 2001 actually shocked the newspaper’s corporate owners. No one had apparently considered that estranging the customers most dedicated to reading might be a problem. Steve Wasserman, who used to edit the Los Angeles Times’ freestanding book review, when there was one, has wondered why newspapers don’t recruit a broader range of advertisers in books pages, where the papers’ most committed readers are to be found, all the more needed since the major publishers have not seen supporting book reviewing with their advertising dollars (or, ehem, subscriptions) as a priority. We’ve looked into these histories in Notebooks here and here. Just this week the editor of both The New York Times’s book and culture section was reassigned, oddly, to the construction of lists, which Times editors without irony have dubbed “canon” formation; many lovers of reading have lamented the encroachment of lists on territory formerly held by sentences and paragraphs (a recent example).
The pan is its own kind of intellectual feat. Sean De Lone quotes Clive James that in the UK “ripping somebody’s reputation is recognized blood sport” and Dwight Garner quotes Norman Mailer’s view that “sometimes an off-the-wall review can be as nourishing as a wild game dinner.” In my class I taught a takedown of John Updike by Gore Vidal from the TLS that is such a delicious, bravura piece of writing that it almost stands aside from John Updike’s work. I’d say that it doesn’t dissuade me from reading John Updike, but it certainly adds a dimension and a hint of skepticism to my appreciation of him. David Foster Wallace’s frontal assault on the trio of John Updike, Norman Mailer, and Philip Roth, for its part, was a generation-defining moment. Attacking the negative review famously set both n+1 and The Believer in motion. Does it make a difference in the creative environment in which writers develop if there are more exacting standards? I believe that the imagination is unstoppable and really great work will materialize no matter what, but a discerning environment can certainly make for a more sympathetic world in which great work can land, and more generous material prospects for important writing. But criticism does not only exist for the benefit of writers; to argue in this way reduces the audience for work to a bunch of bystanders creating a pretext for art and thought.
I love this statement: "I am interested in how to put the joy and majesty that is reading in front of more people. " Me too! Glad you're out there.
Thank you for this excellent post.