Reviewing Allegiance

The original purpose I had for writing book reviews was to remind myself of what I had read and what I liked. Often times I would come home from a book store with a boxful of books, only to find that I’d purchased several that I already owned or read. I wrote synopses and reviews because the act of writing embedded the experience in reading the book into my memory. No longer did these books fade from memory like much of my youthful reading.

It also became a way for me to tell my friends what I thought of various writers and publications. In my circle of friends, I’m the reader. Most of them also read, but not so prodigiously. I have a lot of time on my hands. And so folks could read what I thought and make their own judgments as to whether to read these works themselves.

John Updike, one of the great American novelists, has written some book reviews himself. From his own experience as an author being reviewed, he came up with a set of six rules for book reviewing. I want to be a better reviewer. I want to be a better writer in general. I want millions of people to come to this blog looking for advice on their reading choices. I’m not above changing how I review or what I write in order to draw a few more people this way. I’m vain.

A taste of Mr. Updike’s rules (bold added by me):

1. Try to understand what the author wished to do, and do not blame him for not achieving what he did not attempt.

4. Go easy on plot summary, and do not give away the ending.

5. If the book is judged deficient, cite a successful example along the same lines, from the author’s ouevre or elsewhere. Try to understand the failure. Sure it’s his and not yours?

To these concrete five might be added a vaguer sixth, having to do with maintaining a chemical purity in the reaction between product and appraiser. Do not accept for review a book you are predisposed to dislike, or committed by friendship to like. Do not imagine yourself a caretaker of any tradition, an enforcer of any party standards, a warrior in an idealogical battle, a corrections officer of any kind. Never, never (John Aldridge, Norman Podhoretz) try to put the author “in his place,” making him a pawn in a contest with other reviewers. Review the book, not the reputation. Submit to whatever spell, weak or strong, is being cast. Better to praise and share than blame and ban. The communion between reviewer and his public is based upon the presumption of certain possible joys in reading, and all our discriminations should curve toward that end.

This reads very much like my mother’s old admonishment: If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all. To which I say, fooey!

Authors seem to be a very sensitive bunch. Many are like movie celebrities in temperament. These celebrities strive all their lives to become famous, then cry foul at their lack of privacy. One cannot attach their soul to the public’s reaction to their own written work, then require all those who are not touched to kindly keep their damn mouths shut.

I write a book review blog that has less than two dozen subscribers, and perhaps another ten people who stumble upon it every day and go away rarely to return. But, one of my favorite things to do each week is to check my statistics to see which authors are looking for validation. Invariably, I notice one or two log entries every month that can only come from the authors of the books I review (a shout out to Anne Argula!). I don’t blame them. I scour the internets periodically for my own name to see what pops up.

My advice though? Learn to let the negative criticism slide off. Don’t try to push folks to be nice to your ego by asking us to hold back our opinions. Authors aren’t the consumer. If we followed this advice for cars, we’d still have badly designed suspension systems in our Corvairs.

There’s a germ of truth in what John Updike wrote. That is that ultimately a large portion of appreciation for writing lies in the reader’s taste. I’ve ripped apart books that won big awards. My tastes don’t run the same as everyone else’s. Sometimes substantially different. My reviews are useful in respect to taste only so much as what my readers know of my taste. Some of those things I’ve made explicit either in the About page or in the reviews themselves. I like plot and characterization. Some things have to be gleaned from the reviews. I don’t like chaotic stories with too many characters to track. I don’t like sitcom plots where the story is the maintenance of a lie that a character doesn’t want to confess. There’s a whole host of them. The caveat on any review I write should be: my view may be complete bullshit; please read these thoughts with that in mind.

I don’t think I’ll be adopting Mr. Updike’s six suggestions. The last set of people I think I owe any allegiance to is the authors and publishers. The last thing I wish to do is to, through some sort of prism of fairness to the author, pretend a piece of crap is better than it is.

Photograph (via Flickr) taken by florian.b, licensed under the Creative Commons BY-NC 2.0 license.

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