Category Archives: Problems in Book Reviewing

More problems in book reviewing

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From this review in the Irish Times of Virginia Woolf's Essays (Volume 6) that has just gone out on the Woolf listserv:

[Woolf] rarely matched the best of her contemporaries: George Orwell, with his seamless connections carrying the reader cheerfully along all kinds of unexpected routes, or Rebecca West, with her journalist’s eye for a winning phrase. More conscientious than either of these, Woolf too often simply overwrote, lumbering herself with verbiage she didn’t really need.

Whew. Wow. Huh. OK, maybe. But can I have an example please?

(…) This is the sixth and final annotated volume of Woolf’s complete essays, edited (as was volume 5) by Stuart Clarke. It covers the 1930s, a decade in which Woolf wrote fewer essays while worrying more about how to write them. Could she invent a “new critical method”? Should she experiment with a “diary” mode? “The old problem, how to keep the flight of the mind, yet be exact,” she mused in 1940. As in her later novels, from The Years to Between the Acts , she seemed troubled by self-consciousness about her technique, unable, stylistically, to settle down.

Hm. What does that mean, I wonder, "stylistically"? Does it mean generically? Can I have an example please? no? not here either?

(…) ["The Leaning Tower"]'s rhetoric may sound passionate, but as an essay does it convince? And why does it go on and on, even to the point of windbaggery?

Windbaggery? Really? I mean, "The Leaning Tower" convinces me, but then I'm not impartial when it comes to Woolf. But I'm willing to entertain alternate readings! Can I have an example, please, just to know what you mean by that? At what point does Woolf become a windbag?… no? no example?

There are four more paragraphs to the review and I just don't care to read them. In an attempt not to freight the reader down with verbiage, the reviewer has chosen simply to unsubstantiate the better part of her claims. B-.

Problems in Book Reviewing, redux

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I'm sorry, but if you are only discovering Terry Castle's classic article "Desperately Seeking Susan" after you have been asked by the New York Times to review Sigrid Nunez's memoir about Susan Sontag, perhaps you are not the right person to be reviewing a memoir about Susan Sontag.

Laura Shapiro professes herself "baffled" by Nunez's memoir:

Not until I discovered Terry Castle’s essay “Desperately Seeking Susan” did Nunez’s book start to make sense. Castle was teaching at Stanford when she met Sontag, whom she had long worshiped as a writer and feminist; and they were friends, more or less, for a decade. The essay (in Castle’s recent collection, “The Professor”) zings right to the heart of a relationship built on the mutual neediness of the worshiper and the worshiped, in part because she’s able to step back and recognize the inanity. “Desperately Seeking Susan” is hilarious — her description of Sontag re-enacting on a Palo Alto street how she dodged sniper fire in Sarajevo could have come straight from Thurber. At the same time, a credible part of Castle’s psyche still idolizes the glorious braininess of Sontag’s feminism back in the ’70s. “She was our very own Great Man,” she writes — a perspective that sums up Sontag’s role in Nunez’s growing up better than Nunez does herself.

Castle's article first appeared in the LRB, before being republished in The Professor and other writings, but who reads that old rag. (Clearly not anyone at the NYT.)

Book review Bingo!

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Earlier this week the Examiner made up what sounds like the most fun game since Boggle: Book review Bingo! First Michelle Kerns compiled a list of the top twenty most annoying clichés used by book reviewers. Then she decided to up the ante and created a series of Bingo cards to allow us all to take part "in the joy of artificially inflated, knee-jerk, ultimately
meaningless book reviews.  Clichés have never been so much fun."

Bingo

But my own personal pet peeves aren't on the list! (I'm sure I've grumbled about these before but don't feel like researching my archives…) So in case you do a follow-up, Michelle, I would add:

1. "So-and-so does this-and-that and reminds us what it is to be human."

    Like I'm going to read the writer's work and go "Oh that's what it is to be human… Wow. I've been doing it wrong."

2. "So-and-so will be read for as long as the language endures."

    The protagonist of Nicholson Baker's The Anthologist will back me up here. Reading Ted Roethke on Louise Bogan, Baker writes

    And then he says the Big Thing. He says that Louise Bogan’s poetry will last ‘as long as the language survives.’ There it is. This was in one of the last review he wrote. It was what he hoped would be true of his own poetry.
    Her poems will last as long as the language–ah, yes. That used to be, in the nineteenth century, a much-employed piece of literary praise. Macaulay used it several times. He said, for example, that Byron’s poetry ‘can only perish with the English language.’ Mark Twain said that Uncle Tom’s Cabin would ‘live as long as the English tongue shall live.’ Many lesser nineteenth-century reviewers used it. And it’s a fearful phrase–it’s an Ozymandian phrase. Because you have to ask: How long, in fact, will the English language last? Not that long maybe. Another three hundred years? (221)

It's still a much-employed piece of literary praise. You'll also find variants of it: I've stopped counting how many times a critic has assured me that a particular writer will be read "as long as there are readers" and "as long as there are books."

Thing is– that time may come sooner than we would like. So let's stay away from these pre-fabricated words of praise, shall we, and try to engage with our writers right here and now?