barb@oliven.UUCP (Barbara Jernigan) (01/31/86)
Read the following article this weekend and thought you other bookopiles
might also enjoy it. If not, well there's always the n key -- ;-)
Enjoy!
REVIEWING
Notes on a complex and puzzling phenomenon -- the book review
--- Herbert Gold
[Reprinted unabashedly without permission from San Francisco Focus
magazine, February 1986.]
Book reviewing is an erroneous zone. It's time to say something
about the principle of the thing, or as it should be expressed, more
precisely -- with the precision of a mighty laser, of modern technology,
of California know-how -- the principle of the lack of principle.
Writers often have the experience of a happy interjection on the
model of: "I see the _New York Times_ says about your book. . . ."
Actually, the _New York Times_ is like a stately Indian chief; it hardly
speaks, except from its high horse on the editorial page. A particular
reviewer speaks. When I review a book for the _New York Times_, I am what
the smiler means when saying to some squirming novelist, "I see the _New
York Times_ says. . . ."
If the reviewer is young and angrily ambitious, or older and
bitterly disappointed, he or she is likely to ride hard on a successful
professional. The first review I ever wrote for publication was a
vigorously hostile notice of a book by Nelson Algren, _The Man with the
Golden Arm_, which, as the years went by, I found unforgettable. Probably
my theories about the book were correct, but I didn't credit the energy,
the voice, the passion. When, a quarter of a century later, I apologized
to Algren, his eyes grew heavy; he seemed to fall asleep as I spoke. It
was an old story to him. And his rage at the injustice of reviewers had
marinated in him, so that he had reached an Olympian state of paranoia.
Some writers review their enemies. I have been reviewed by ex-
students, by a man who thought I had flirted with his wife, by writers who
had campaigned unsuccessfully to be included in an anthology I was gathering.
I have also been reviewed by my friends. This cannot be avoided. What *can*
be done is to let the reader in on the degree of objectivity. A book is not
a product to be weighed and measured; it is a perspective on reality, and the
reviewer is offering his or her complex and personal perspective on that
perspective.
It's not even complicated -- it's worse -- to review friends well
when their books don't merit it. It's merely low-level cunning; i.e., stupid.
I suffered hurt feelings on behalf of the Muse when a writer I knew called a
soggy novel great -- and at length -- in the New York Review of Each Other's
Books, because the book was written by someone with whom he had film dealings.
I was injured for the editors of the magazine; I was sad for the reviewer; I
might have fainted with chagrin and the vapors, had I not been inured to the
pain by the earlier experience of seeing Ernest Hemingway on his boat in a
beer advertisement.
Not that any reviewing is objective; there is no set of scales for
measuring the worth of a book. This is why browsing in a well-stocked
bookstore remains essential, along with listening to friends and following
such clues as these: I liked V.S. Naipaul's _Guerillas_ and his essays in
_The Return of Eva Peron with The Killings in Trinidad_ -- better look at
his other books, too.
For a reviewer, there should be some decent principle. I'll not
review a book by someone I dislike; I'll not review as an act of revenge.
Twice I've reviewed books by writers I had reason to have personal grudges
against, both times for the _New York Times_, and in my anxiety to be fair,
I gave them both more favorable notices than they deserved. It's too
complicated.
The pleasure of reviewing for this magazine [_Focus_] is that of
speaking in an informal manner to a defined audience [public television
members -- KQED, channel 9] within the mega-family of the San Francisco Bay
Area. We are having a conversation about books with people we might meet
over coffee at Just Desserts or standing up at City Lights in North Beach.
So *caveat lecteur*, friends. You see, in this sort of conversation,
we can even confuse our Latin and French.