I know I should be grateful to the NYTBR for trashing my new book. I’m not.
So the New York Times Book Review just reviewed my new one, Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life. The most awesomest passage of the review likens the book to Going Rogue by Sarah Palin. Hey, it’s not every day a guy gets compared to his spiritual mentor.
The overall tenor of the critique isn’t exactly a shocker. Having written a book that vilifies self-serious cultural critics, I figured at some point it would be reviewed by a self-serious cultural critic, who would use phrases such as “an aesthetic of quasi-handmade approachability” and quote the Velvet Underground adoringly and decree that anyone who might enjoy my book is a cretin.
It’s a sore bit of luck to have this critic deployed by the NYTBR. But it more or less lines up with my expectations of the venue.
This no doubt sounds like sour grapes, given the context. Probably it is. I’m long past denying that most of what I do in life amounts to sour grapes. Still, here’s what I had to say on the subject a few months ago:
I am so ungodly tired of reading all this crap-ass literary punditry that passes for criticism. I mostly avoid reading the NYTBR for this reason. Rather than documenting the pleasures and disappointments a reader might encounter in a given book – offering a serious consideration of aesthetic and moral intent – they just do this stupid trend-mongering.
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I’ll resist the urge to revisit Katie Roiphe’s lazily reasoned publicity stunt, which I’ve discussed elsewhere.
Instead, let’s check out the Jay McInerney review of Joshua Ferris’ second novel, The Unnamed. You could just see the editors sitting around with this one going, ‘Yeah, yeah, we’ll get the old It Guy writer to take on the new It Guy writer!’ McInerney’s eventual verdict: Ferris should stick to writing droll comedies of manner.
He has a right to that opinion, of course. But it’s a facile opinion, the sort that refuses to engage honestly with the book in question.
The Unnamed is far from a perfect novel. My own take on the book found fault with its ponderous prose. But any responsible critic would also have to recognize that Ferris did indeed have a moral and aesthetic intent.
His hero is afflicted by a mysterious condition that causes him to walk compulsively, through “the scuffed aisles of candies and chips … the dismal fluorescent brutality that chain restaurants wore like trademarks … the national color of insomnia and transience.”
Ferris isn’t just dragging the reader on a forced march into America’s bleak capitalist hinterlands to torture poor Jay McInerney. He’s asking an essential question: will the base compulsions of our bodies defeat the contents of our souls? Will our lust for distraction and empty calories overrun our duties toward those we love?
Whether or not McInerney thinks Ferris is successful, he should at least recognize the dude’s deeper intent.
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Compared to George Saunders, Ferris should maybe consider himself lucky. A couple of years back, Will Blythe wrote a review of the essay collection The Braindead Megaphone that was astonishing for its intellectual stinginess.
Blythe mocked Saunders for his excessive use of capital letters, which he diagnosed as part of the author’s larger effort to buff his persona:
Maybe, as a Chicago-raised guy, [Saunders] goofs on himself to show he’s not some East Coast Intellectual Twit. One suspects that the irony of this maneuver is there to protect the very Midwestern Sweetness of the Author’s Soul.
For George Saunders has a Very Sweet Soul indeed.
Blythe has every right, even an obligation, to observe that he feels manipulated by Saunders. He can even be snide about it, and try to score laughs. But he also has an obligation to give Saunders credit for his insights.
That doesn’t happen. He writes off the title essay as a “solipsistic analysis” of the modern media. I can’t express how disappointing I found this judgment. Saunders’ piece is a strenuously reasoned argument against the Fourth Estate’s impulse to wring profit from neck of stimulation.
But the end of Blythe’s review, I felt this creeping suspicion that he simply had it in for Saunders, that he resented the author’s ostentatious decency and/or his optimism and/or the fact that he became a MacArthur Genius despite his Inexcusable Use of Capital Letters. He did what the lit crit crowd back in college used to call “reading against the text.” He thereby flattened the entire experience of reading Saunders.
Again: I’m not suggesting that critics can’t dislike the books they review, and say so. I do it myself. But I’m really tired of reading reviews – in the NYTBR and elsewhere – in which I feel essentially stuck inside some critic’s cant, with no clear view of the author’s world, let alone the broader ideas that ostensibly made the book worth reviewing. Or in which the subject of the review isn’t really the author’s book at all, but the imaginary book the critic not-so-secretly wishes he or she had written instead.
One of the most glaring recent instances was Jodi Kantor’s dismissal of Rebecca Mead’s One Perfect Day: The Selling of the American Wedding.
Kantor’s agenda is plain from the start. She had a great wedding. So did her friends. So why is Mead being such a party pooper?
What never seems to have occurred to Kantor – or the editors who published her review – is that Mead’s book wasn’t written as a rebuke to Kantor or her fun-loving pals. It’s an exploration of something larger. Namely, the insidious reach of the bridal industry.
I suppose a topic like that wasn’t compelling enough to capture the fickle post-millennial reader on its own merits. So the editors turned to the tried-and-true gimmick review, the one guaranteed to generate debate – not about the book’s subject, but about the review itself.
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Look: the NYTBR is supposed to be the gold standard of mainstream literary thought in this country. The disappearance or contraction of other outlets makes it, at the very least, the dominant arbiter. They’ve got scads of editors, and can get basically anyone on earth to write for them.
Given all this, I don’t think I’m being unreasonable in asking them to stop doing business in such a shallow, small-hearted manner. As for the perpetual moaning about space constraints: I’d be more sympathetic if the editors took a knife to the gratuitous plot summaries and indulgent, trend-mongering leads that eat up so much of their word count.
On that note, let me reiterate an uncontested point: I’m reacting to the sting of a particular review. (Full disclosure: this is actually the second time my work has been torched by the NYTBR.) Our loyal literary pundits will inevitably seize on this fact to dismiss my larger point. It’s kind of their job to do so.
But for the rest of us – the writers and critics – let me offer some parting words, before I put the finishing touches on my upcoming masterpiece, Chasing Sarah: A Life in Hunting and Pornography.
First, you have the right to react to the critical reception your work receives, or doesn’t receive. There are zillions of writers out there who are, this very minute, cursing the NYTBR for ignoring their work altogether.
Books – especially literary books – should be filled with smart, provocative ideas that deserve a response. They are intended to initiate a conversation about what it means to be human. A good review enlarges that conversation.
But it’s a loser move – an imitative fallacy, actually – to dismiss a bad review. As unpleasant as it’s been to read the assessments of my work in the NYTBR, both of the reviews in question had something to teach me – about dumb decisions I made at the keyboard, about the limited appeal of my sensibility, about certain habits of excess borne of my own doubt.
So, yeah, it’s okay to get pissed, maybe even inevitable. But we must not stop learning as writers. Even our least sympathetic reader has something to offer.
Second, as writers (of whatever sort) we should discuss books as seriously as we want ours to be discussed. I truly believe this. And not just in print, but in our daily lives, in how we talk about books with friends and colleagues, on our blogs, or even within some aggrieved comment thread. To degrade another writer without a respectful consideration of his or her intent and labor is to degrade our own vocation.
It would be wonderful if the NYTBR had a bunch of editors who held themselves to this standard. But that’s not really their job – as much as they might think it is. Their job is to drum up interest in a cultural artifact (the book) that keeps sliding further out onto the margins of our frenzied visual culture.
Our job, as writers and critics – as plain old advocates of literature – is to keep this larger discussion alive, about what it means to be living in this perilous historical moment, about our good intentions and our bad conduct, about those ecstatic confusions that made us fall in love with books in the first place.
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Now then. In the interest of giving credit where it’s due, as well as promoting good works over sour grapes, here’s a brief list of critical dispatches I consider excellent role models:
*“How Tracy Austin Broke My Heart” by David Foster Wallace (from his fantastic collection Consider the Lobster). Note how precisely Foster Wallace articulates his disappointment in Austin’s memoir, then goes on to enlarge the conversation about our worship of athletes.
*James Wood’s review of Paul Auster’s Invisible demonstrates why Wood is such a badass. He goes out of his way to understand and articulate the author’s intentions. He cops to his biases. He puts the book into a comprehensive aesthetic context, by which I mean that he compares Invisible not only to other Auster books, but to Flaubert, DeLillo, and the post-modern tradition. (I’m pretty sure Wood would chew me up and spit me out if he ever read one of my books. But I’m also sure I’d know a lot more about what I’m up to as a writer after he was done.)
*David Ulin’s review of John D’Agata’s About A Mountain. Ulin discusses D’Agata’s controversial narrative decisions in a way that actually helps us make sense of this unorthodox book. He takes in the forest without getting lost in the leaves.
*Justin Taylor’s remarkable inquiry into Zachary German’s Eat When You Feel Sad. Without passing easy judgment – the perpetual temptation for a critic – Taylor provides a detailed and thoughtful meditation on a book that most reviewers (myself included) would either write off as vacant hipsterism, or glorify for its affectations.
*Laura Miller on Eric Kraft’s Flying. I have a feeling I’d be less amused by Kraft than Miller, given my impatience with meta-fiction, but she does a terrific job of locating the writer, both among his contemporaries and a longer tradition of satirists. (Bonus points: This actually ran in the NYTBR!)
*Anthony Lane reviewing the film Lilya 4Ever. Lane can be savagely smart about dumb movies. Here, he’s unflinchingly honest about a heartbreaking film.
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Right. Enough of my blather. What critical pieces have you read of late that enlarge the conversation about literature, about art, about us? Even if you’re gonna rake me over the coals, that’d be swell to know.
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Rumpus original art by Jason Novak.
36 responses
“To degrade another writer without a respectful consideration of his or her intent and labor is to degrade our own vocation.”
Hear, hear.
I hate reviews that come across as “Look how much smarter I am than this [book, film, music]. You should be awed by MY skills, not theirs.”
It’s self-indulgent, insecure posturing.
I’d much rather read something that says, “I understand what he was trying to do here, but perhaps it would have been more effective if…”
Anyway.
http://www.pajiba.com/book_reviews/
Some reviews are better than others on here (and full disclosure: some of them are mine), but no matter the topic, there’s always discussion going on over at Pajiba.
Forgive me for posting about the illustration that accompanies this article (instead of the article itself), but it’s funny and perfect for the piece and I wanted to compliment the artist (as well as the editor that selected him/her). Would that the editors of the NYTBR be as choosy about matching reviewers to books.
This was great.
I sadly can’t think of a bad review that made too much sense to me recently- I also don’t read many reviews anymore– but here’s one that really pissed me off and I felt did not in any way engage with the book, but took issue with the writer’s religious ideas as well as hated on her for being a sexual woman or something- anyway- it made smoke blow out of my ears.
http://www.thenation.com/article/when-whip-comes-down-mary-gaitskill
Elizabeth Kolbert in The New Yorker on No Impact Man and other man/woman v. environment memoirs: http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2009/08/31/090831crat_atlarge_kolbert
Steve, what I like about your rant is
1)You don’t defend your book (It doesn’t need defending. Let it stand; it’s funny and fun and offers real insight into how music can fuse us together, yet still manage to give each of us our own soundtrack.
2)You are funny, intelligent, and articulate
3)You provide evidence for your argument that critiques should seek to expand our reading experiences.
Oh yes. And the illustrations are perfecto.
I thought Walter Kirn’s review of Solar was bush league, personally. I don’t particularly like McEwan’s work, but Kirn I thought Kirn was needlessly personal in his attacks.
Great essay.
Perhaps these reviewers could spend some time grading the undergrad papers I endure. You learn how to be effective and helpful but also how to soften the blow when you run across something like:
“Just as the hotel that the characters did the elevator experience in is the same hotel that John’s wedding is going on in and that Sara and her friend are staying in as Sara is trying to force fate, this confirms the cosmic irony of this film.”
Author intent, indeed… They want to say something good and probably are – so the job is to figure that out and try to coax that beast it from the weeds of early-writerdom.
Rarely read book or movie reviews–probably should. But there are so many writers I’ve heard or seen mentioned over the years–in footnotes, in passing, favorites of favorite writers–that my bookshelves are filled to overflowing. Speaking of bookshelves, I highly recommend going to independent bookstores and reading first pages of books that look interesting or reading bookstore staff mini-reviews scrawled on index cards. Here comes trouble: It strikes me that a large number of reviews in places like the NYTBR are a pretty insider-baseball or more concerned with posturing and positioning than with actual books. Maybe I’m wrong. Like I said, have avoided reading most book reviews for quite some time now. Probably not the wisest move, as I miss out on reading some very good contemporary stuff. Then again, there’s something pretty great about a review scribbled on an index card.
P.S. Wish I’d read this before I wrote book reviews (not many). Have to say, though, was given very low word-counts, which makes it tough to give anything its due.
I said “yes” and “right on”, like, five times!
Re word count and index cards: If there’s an index-card-reviewed book at, say, Green Apple (plug!), I know at least that that book engaged and moved the reader enough to cram 50 words onto a humble slip of card-stock and tape it to the shelf. Can’t imagine that jockeying for power or prestige enter the picture.
I think David Ulin’s review of Bright Shiny Morning is also quite a piece of work, because it states at the front how awful David found it to be and does so in first person and with venom…and then goes into minute detail as to why the first person and the venom are warranted. It’s a writing workshop in the form of a book review and I think it stands as one of the finest bad reviews in recent years. As it relates to your review, I’m never of the opinion that you should blame the reviewer for anything apart from his or her own writing — their opinion of the work is their’s and they are entitled to it — but in this case, I kept thinking that the reviewer clearly wanted you to have different taste in music, which is like convincing someone to have different taste in who they love. It’s a futile argument and one based in that person’s own sensibilities.
This is a great piece. Thank you.
Really, really fantastic piece. Thanks. Would love to find out who did the illustrations. (Was it you?)
Rumpus original art by Jason Novak (http://www.flickr.com/photos/ringofrecollection).
See, here’s why I pimp The Rumpus to my pals. You not only feature essays by some of the finest writers working today–like Mr. Almond–but you also attract the most thoughtful, informative respondents. A lot of online forums degenerate into the very same narcissistic I’m-so-smart-and-cool posturing that Steve describes in the essay above. But here at The Rumpus I’ve seen nothing but engaged, respectful readers and writers who want to have a dynamic conversation. Hail Steve Almond for going rogue! Hail The Rumpus for featuring such great pieces! Hail civil discourse!
Are reviewers writing reviews to enter into any discussion about contemporary literature? Very few, I suspect, with the lovely exceptions like the ones Steve mentions. Most reviewers are writing from that holiest of holy places–their own egos.
To review books from an ego-less place is a tough thing to do. I feel that the reviewer’s job is to help reveal the intent of the book. Criticism seems like a more academic discipline, while reviewing helps articulate something essential about the work and get into the hands of its readership.
What’s depressing to me about most book reviews is that their authors seem to be using them to promote their own selves or agendas. It’s all ME, ME, What I think, ME, Look here. Perhaps it is the by-product of our semi-celebrity culture, where anyone with a keyboard and can proclaim their importance to anyone who will listen. Under the varnish of the NYTBR, no less, the ego can hardly help itself. “I’m very intelligent and important,” it says. And the review becomes, “I’ll show you.”
Sadly, these kinds of reviews are doing little to help the downward trends of literary reading (or any reading!). It supports the idea of the exclusive club of literature, where critics need to remind us to keep the riff-raff out.
Finally, everything that Steve’s book illuminates flies in the face of the critic’s world-view. He writes “…somewhere along the line we’d convinced ourselves that acts of imagination only had value if strangers would pay for them, or if they won fancy prizes, or if the critics decided they had merit, notions that had proved a boon to the Suffering Artist. Because now, in addition to the anguish that arises from trafficking in unbearable feelings, artists had to worry about these vile forms of regard.” The NYTBR reviewer doesn’t mention this, does he? My guess is that Steve inadvertently found the soft spot, one that the kind of guy who would write this kind of review of *Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life* felt downright squeamish about. He NEEDS that commodity culture in order to continue on as he has. He needs to be the authenticator, the arbiter.
I suppose what I really want from reviews is to be inspired to read. Naive, yes, but true.
Renee’s take on this is spot-on. It’s not naive to wanna be inspired to read by a review. It’s common sense. But we’re living in cynical times. Sad.
One other note — her mention of how critics diminish the interest in books, by making literature seem like an exclusive club is also crucial. The idea that non-critics (civilians) can have deep and important thoughts about art is just anathema to these guys. Their attitude is: we are the elect! Don’t let the barbarians in the gates! But their snobbing themselves out of a job…
I sometimes edit critics. I’m going to save this piece for future use. Nice job.
Well said, Steve. Interestingly, I’ve found The Rumpus a lot more compelling lately than the New York Times. I oscillate between really worrying about old, venerable print pubs and feeling like I don’t want to be part of attacking them and making them seem less relevant–I don’t genuinely want them to be utterly obsolete–and then just being really disgusted at the snark and laziness like what you illustrate above re: the attack on Saunders . . . I feel in some ways as though they’ve started doing exactly what people often accused online pubs of doing in terms of not really holding themselves to a more rigorous “gate-keeping” standard, and that by contrast many forums like The Rumpus, where people are writing so out of passion and dedication (not for money or for prestige or posturing), the intellectual (and more so, emotional/psychological) standards seem to actually be higher.
And incidentally, I thought your response to the facile Roiphe piece was a stellar recent example of good cultural criticism.
Don’t care what Steve Almond’s reviews are like or what his musical taste is. Read him because he’s insightful, inventive and funny. And because he’s gloriously contradictory in many ways and seems comfortable with that. More like him please.
It was a bit odd reading this robust critique of a review that hit my doorway two days later. Anyway, I think we can agree on a few things:
1.) Some review in the NYT is better than no review in the NYT.
2.) Jason Novak rules.
3.) Howard Hampton did wallow in a bog of snideness for the piece in question. But even so, he is just one reviewer…one reviewer who’s written ONE review for the Times in the last year. I’ve read virtually every review in the Times book section over that time period, and feel it’s hardly fair to tar all its writers with the same brush.
4.) There’s still a great pull-out quote to take from this: “Almond’s [book] is perfect.” Feel free to use it in your marketing copy.
When I got my first bad NYT review (they have since given me a pretty nice one), a friend told me to go check out the initial NYT review of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, which, if memory serves, was written by Eudora Welty. The same formula seemed to be in place even then — they were pitting an old hand against a young gun, and Welty had little patience for Dillard. And the results speak for themselves, I think (and why the NYT would stick with a formula that made for such a colossal error is a bit baffling). Still, Welty knew how such a thing should be done — she had her say, but then she got out of the way. The review, remarkably, quotes big generous swaths of the book — and you can make up your own mind about it. Apparently, some did. Unfortunately, reviewers today aren’t as generous as Welty, and I suspect that for every historical “Pilgrim” that survived the inadequate potshots taken at it, there are five fine books that have been felled by less ethical hunters.
It’s funny how “going rogue” used to mean bucking tradition and trying something new. Now, if Palin is any measure, it means adhering to tradition and predictable emotions and strategies. As the NYT contemplates the changing world for newspapers (let alone book review sections!), it should be wary of following those footsteps. They lead to oblivion.
this meta-review gave me alot to think about. I really appreciate the point about how a review should enlarge rather than diminish the literary conversation — what a great insight! and it’s true — being compared to a writer (any writer) who shoots stuff from a helicopter is AWESOME.
Two good ones, both by Wyatt Mason, both (I think) in Harper’s: one on Gaitskill, another on Zadie Smith. The Smith was kinda negative but was a perfect example of what a negative review should do: it was exact, and precise, and he seemed to be rooting for her, tho he didn’t like the book in question.
Every once in a while, even the NYTBR gets it right, but I think that’s all about inviting the appropriate writer. Did you read Tony Doerr’s amazing review of Josh Weil’s debut book last summer?: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/07/books/review/Doerr-t.html?ref=bookreviews. I suppose since it’s Tony it’s not surprising that he manages to write both an engaged and serious review of the book while he’s also fashioning an incisive essay about the novella form itself, all in a little under a thousand words. Unfortunately, essays like his are too few and far in between for the NYTBR.
I’m glad you mentioned some recent good criticism. I wonder if you like Wyatt Mason. He’s someone who gets me incredibly excited about reading. I think of him because, like you, he took Ferris seriously in The Untamed, and wrote a terrific essay for Harper’s: http://harpers.org/archive/2010/02/0082836. It’s a very rare overall negative review for him, but he earns it because of the seriousness and openness with which he approaches Ferris. He also wrote a phenomenal essay about Edward P. Jones called “Ballad for Americans” that is one of my favorites of recent years: http://harpers.org/archive/2006/09/0081200. This is the kind of critical writing that I think you and so many of the rest of us are hungering for. I find it from him, from Wood, often from Sven Birkerts, and sometimes in the London Review of Books, which is much more serious about what it’s doing. Also, if you’re interested in a recent dissection of the problem itself, there’s another great Wyatt Mason essay about the art of book reviewing: http://harpers.org/archive/2007/12/0081837.
This rules.
Steve is one of the most literate writers around and this piece proves it. My hope is that reviews like this one are read by people who will make up their own mind and make their own sound decisions, and not be swayed by a review good or bad. This reminds me of parenting manuals, all of which contain a philosophy, an opinion, an agenda even, and certainly suggestions. Ultimately our instinct and our own preferences dictate our actions. And, our choice of reading material.
Yeah yeah! I second the sentiments in this article. Been reading NYTBR since I was a kid and recently I wonder about these “scads” of editors. Aren’t they supposed to shape the reviews, and say things like “don’t spend four-fifths of this on plot summary” or “give readers some sense of what this book is like”?
interesting that no one is rushing to defend the NYTBR. do you suppose they even know about this piece? i’d be fascinated to hear they’re response. would the rumpus ask one of their guys to respond, or is that just crazy talk???
Steve,
As I was reading your Times review this weekend, Edmund Wilson’s quote “no two persons ever read the same book” came to mind. But your critic is obviously a very, very different person indeed. I was fortunate enough to laugh my way through “Going Rogue,” just for kicks, and never in a million years would I compare it to “Rock n’ Roll.”
What hasn’t been mentioned here is the review’s stilted writing. Curious, those two-headed double-book review monsters, shifting between both works in alternating paragraphs. If your critic was driving a car, I would have split my coffee.
I read the NYTBR every weekend, delivered on my doorstep the old school way, and I see it as an extension of the newspaper itself. That is, it delivers news about recent releases. I never base what I’m going to read on it solely. There are far too many other outlets to get book recommendations, word of Rumpus being one of them.
If I want to read a good, educated, complete review, I’ll head to the broadside of the New York Review of Books, created when the NYTBR wasn’t being published because of a printing strike in 1963. According to Wikipedia, “Elizabeth Hardwick had published an essay in Harpers in 1959 called “The Decline of Book Reviewing”, a scornful look at the failure of criticism in reviews of the time that inspired Silvers and Epstein [to publish the NYRB].”
Here’s the link to the Hardwick piece (requires a subscription to Harper’s…but c’mon, Harpers is awesome!): http://bit.ly/dAHUcN
At the risk of exposing myself as an anti-cynic, I review a few books a year for literary quarterlies and I don’t bother writing reviews of books I don’t like. There are so many books published every week that it seems a waste of ink to bother writing something scathing–I’d rather hear an opinion of what to read than what to avoid. I also agree that I read far too many agenda reviews where it’s clear the reviewer is working through some personal vendetta or just plain showing off his/her intellect rather than actually writing about the book itself. But the reviews I read in literary quarterlies tend to be more insightful and in depth than much of what I read in NYTBR. Half the time I think those reviews were written based solely on the book jacket copy and skewed by whether or not the reviewer likes the writer personally. . . anyhow, here’s one of my recent reviews–read the review, then read the book. http://www.pshares.org/read/article-detail.cfm?intArticleID=9072
Some great suggestions for reviews. I’ve been mulling one of the comments — about whether it’s better to have a bad review in the NYTBR, or none at all. My point would be this: hundreds of thousands of folks (or tens of thousands, anyway) read the smug dismissive reviews in the NYTBR. How many of those folks go on to read the books in question? Is it really “great” to have your book dismissed in such a large venue?
The only way to answer that question, I guess, would be to go through it yourself. My own vote is: if the NYTBR is going to hire someone who refuses to seriously engage with my work, they shouldn’t bother.
Obviously, don’t tell my publicist I said this.
The problem is that the NYTBR hires too many middle-grade intellects as
reviewers, who are too uncertain in their own judgment to assert that
writing that is funny and plainspoken can be serious literature. It’s
intellectually simpler (and safer) to look for a particular tone and
style, and dismiss the rest.
Sounds like the takeaway is that we should be reading more Wyatt Mason. No one’s mentioned B.R. Myers…
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