My Life and Thoughts

One of the remarkable things about our society is its insatiable thirst for book reviews. I didn’t fully realize this until I started producing reviews myself. I should perhaps clarify that there is no standard by which I can be called a “big name in the book reviewing community, because I have published a total of four reviews. Nonetheless, I consistently receive 2 or 3 solicitations a month for book reviews, from the most diverse publications. When my ex-potential literary agent decided to move to Dubai to work on a start-up newspaper, her second question (after whether I could sublet her apartment in New York) was whether I would write book reviews for her newspaper in Dubai.

Often—this was surprising to me at first—people who write to me asking for book reviews don’t have any particular book in mind that they want reviewed; they just want to know if there are any books I feel like reviewing. A related phenomenon is that, when you are a D-list writer, book editors will sometimes just randomly mail you a book, because who knows, you might review it! This is of course very flattering; although I do wonder what must it be like for C- or B-list book reviewers. Do piles of advance copies prevent them from opening their doors in the morning?

And honestly, these little attentions can actually get pretty stressful. Last month, for example, an editor at New Directions mailed me a collection of poems by the “Chuvash national poet” Gennady Aygi. (These poems were originally written in Russian, because Nazim Hikmet and Boris Pasternak convinced Aygi that nobody would read his work if he kept  it in Chuvash). It was very kind of the editor to think of me as someone who might be interested in this book, which is called Field-Russia; and naturally I read it (although would Philip Roth read this book if it was mailed to his house, I really couldn’t say). But it was a genuinely depressing reading experience.

It’s not that I thought the book was “bad” or anything; but I don’t have a very strong feeling for poetry, and these were just the kind of poems I would never read. They had a lot of the idiosyncrasies that I find exasperating about Marina Tsvetaeva (whom I readily recognize as a good poet), e.g. the hyphens between words (“both-giving-and-uninvaded”) and syllables (“be-ne-dic-tion”), plus the m-dashes suggestive of laboriousness or hypoxia or I don’t know what (“the simple/ slowly-eternal/ removal—of the hand”). As an extra bonus, it had the kind of “eastern” themes that make me crazy (roses, souls, etc.).

Again, I’m definitely not saying that Aygi is a fraud, or that nobody will like his poetry. It certainly has “technique,” and I honestly believe, in the most non-trivial sense of the phrase, that “those who like this sort of thing will find it to be just the sort of thing they like.” (To quote the single (to date) Amazon reader review: “It is a pity that Gennady Aygi, the best Russian poet ever, died in despair with no support from the Russian government.”) Nonetheless, the thought of reviewing it myself, even now, fills me with anxiety and dread.

So here is the thing about book reviews. They take forever to write—sure; the pay is lousy: fine. I can handle these things. But the genre itself, to me, makes no sense. It’s like literary criticism—except you know in advance that none of your readers have actually read the book in question—plus the addition of some extra ambiguity about your goal. As a reviewer, what are you trying to do with the book? To identify is role in the larger field of cultural production (like in regular literary criticism)? To evaluate it on a scale of literary merit (as implied by sites like Metacritic, that translate book reviews into numerical scores)? To help the members of a certain demographic guess whether or not they would enjoy reading it? To rate it on a scale of enjoyableness (rather than “quality”)?

To me, it is very rare that a review actually makes a book sound enjoyable. I identify very strongly with the Haruki Murakami character who reflects, on reading the book reviews at breakfast:

Not one of the books reviewed was something I thought I’d want to read: a novel on ‘the sex life of an old Jewish man, mingling fantasy and reality,’ a historical study of treatments of schizophrenia, a complete exposé of the 1907 Ashio Copper Mine pollution incident. It’d be a lot more fun to sleep with the captain of a girls’ softball team.

That passage really conveys the power of the single-phrase summary—a staple of book proposals, book reviews, and all aspects of literary marketing—to make the book sound like a boring guest at a cocktail party. (Murakami describes boring guests well, too: “the kind of party [where you have] to be introduced to strangers and listen to them rant for half an hour about how a vegetarian diet cures cancer.”)

But you know, dear readers, I have really outdone myself with this post: in addition to getting really depressed about book reviews, without actually managing to articulate why exactly I find them so depressing (I suspect it is something to do with the high rate of literary production/ low rate of readership/ atomization of the reading public… but I bet it is statements like these that fuel n+1’s dislike of blogs), I also didn’t come even remotely close to my original goal, namely, to plug my forthcoming book review of the new English-language edition of Platonov.

What can I do at this point, but cut my losses and move on. However, in anticipation of the day when I might write “Against Book Reviews,” I encourage you to share any ideas you might have about why book reviews are (or are not) depressing.

Tags: d-list, n+1, publications, reviews

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 23rd, 2007 at 7:37 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.