Book Reviewing: A Proposal
Posted: May 20th, 2010 | Author: admin | Filed under: arguments, nothing to do with the book | Tags: book reviewing, book reviews, New York Times Book Review | No Comments »The New York Times Book Review has a policy of asking potential reviewers of a book they’ve chosen to cover if they know the author. If author and reviewer share a history, be they friends or antagonists or residents of some lukewarm state in between, it will be difficult in the extreme for the reviewer to approach the book free of personal baggage. That’s the idea, at least, because if the answer to the question is “yes,” the potential reviewer doesn’t get the assignment and the Times calls the next person on their list.
I think the question doesn’t go far enough. All criticism announces its author; it’s the rare reviewer who’s able to use the space allotted without an eye toward advancing his or her own career. As such, linking arms with a author via a glowing write-up, or the alternative — distancing yourself from an author / genre / scene via a negative one — is always and inevitably informed by meta calculations that have zero to do with the merits of the work being discussed.
So perhaps the NYTBR should ask not one but two questions:
1. Do you know the author of this book?
2. Would you like to?
I imagine the answer to this second question tells us as much, and a lot more.
Getting a bad review in the New York Times hurts. I speak from experience. Upon first reading the Times review of HTBU, dozens of ways I might enact revenge—my reviewer, I felt, had been careless at best, intellectually dishonest at worst—flashed before me. I typed up my thoughts. I deleted these thoughts. Finally, I decided this: Were I to meet Mrs. Jacobs at a party, I would say, “Nice to meet you. You’re taller than I expected,” and then excuse myself.
Subtle. Too subtle. But I’m not convinced that responding angrily accomplishes anything, particularly when, as was the case here, several authors the reviewer had scorned previously had already chosen that route. Clearly, my reviewer enjoyed bitch-slapping. No aggrieved bluster on my part could change that.
I mention all this because earlier this week, in response to his bad review in the New York Times, the author Alain de Botton posted the below in the comments section of his reviewer’s blog:
Full disclosure: I know Caleb Crain and like him personally and as an analyst. I’ve liked de Botton’s books—he’s published nine—also. How Proust Can Change Your Life is great, almost as good as The Architecture of Happiness. This screed hardly impresses. It suggests to me that De Botton has not only “lost perspective,” to put it in over-used therapeutic terms, but is so accustomed to adulation that he’s come to feel entitled to it. Or maybe he was having a bad day.
His response reminds me of nothing so much as Jon Gosselin, in fact. Gosselin is paid millions for allowing television cameras into his home, and chronicling his disastrous marriage and parenting misadventures for a national TV audience. He recently got riled up over negative tabloid attention. “I didn’t sign up for this!” he complained. And the only thing you can say to that is, “Well, what did you think all that money was for?”