Bah?

Yep. Bah.

The Seven Deadly Reviews
Envy, envy, envy, envy, envy, envy and envy.

Michael Ondaatje, author of The English Patient and Anil’s Ghost, says that the worst review he ever received was for a stage adaptation of his book The Collected Works of Billy the Kid. “They stop bad meat at the border,” the critic wrote. “Why not this?”

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Paper apologizes for review

A John Irving review is apologized for. Um, I don't see Irving apologizing for making us read the book.


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The problem with book reviewing (Part 8,237)
Slate weighs in on the conflict-of-interest issue surrounding the Washington Post's review of John Irving's new one.
The point of a book review isn't to review worthy books fairly, it's to publish good pieces. Better to assign a team of lively-but-conflicted writers to review a slew of rotten books than a gang of dullards to the most deserving releases of the season. British newspaper book reviews subscribe to the former ethos, often assigning books to the well-known enemies of authors, creating tension and reader interest from the get-go: Can the prejudiced reviewer write against his personal feelings to tell the truth, the readers wonder? Slate adopted this approach when it assigned Michael Isikoff (foe) and Timothy Noah (friend) to review Sidney Blumenthal's The Clinton Wars. The point of the double assignment wasn't to extend extra fairness to Blumenthal, it was to enlighten the reader.

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the point of a book review is to make a few hundred for lying on your back reading, which you would do anyway. As gravy, you get another line on your cv.

Can't figure out how I forgot this one...

I spent all weekend talking about how good I thought Martin Levin's reviewing the reviewers column in the Saturday Globe was, and then come Monday morning it had vanished from my head... Loose screws. That's how the light gets in, init?


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Edited by author 08-30-2005 12:53 AM
How good it was? Are you trying to insert yourself entirely up Martin's ass?

That, like all the other columns he's written that I've read (admittedly, few, since they're infuriating), was hogwash.

In this case, an attempted justification for the most engineered book review section in the country (OK, of the three or four I know anything about).

Everyone with an interest in such things has heard by now, I'm sure, about Martin trying to sway reviewers to his way of seeing things by offering them longer reviews (more money) or covers if they like the book in question, framing it, say, by talking about how much some good friend of his, whose opinion he really respects, likes the book or author.

Book review editors have a certain degree of engineering power built into their jobs - they pick not only what books are going to be reviewed, but who's going to review them. And with known quantities, though you're never guaranteed, you have a pretty good idea of what the outcome's going to be. But Martin goes several steps further, and that's just not on.

This was not a good column. This was evidence of why this quite bright but excruciatingly compromised man should find another line of work.

Oh, Bert. Canada's angriest young man. Now that David Solway is old, that is. Haven't you ever heard of positive reinforcement?

Critical edge cuts like a knife

Alex Good looks at the current trend in reviewing to smack up the established writers like Irving, Rushdie and (gasp) Coetzee.


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Alex is bang-on when he says that Levin's excuse for chummy reviewing is "bullshit." Going over my archives, of the 60 or so books, mostly Canadian poetry, that I've reviewed, only 6 or 7 of them were written by people that I knew at all prior to writing the review. In most cases, this prior knowledge consisted of one meeting in public or a handful of emails. One of the books was written by someone I consider a friend and one by a friendly acquaintance. In both cases, the editor was aware of the connection and in one of them, I made it explicit in the review. And it bears mentioning that I was recently offered an editorial role with a review journal because, in part, the publisher saw me as "well connected." In other words, it's not very hard at all to find reviewers who are strangers to authors if you have the will and the energy to do so. I've emailed Levin in the past offering my services, and got no response from him whatsoever. I dunno if this is part of the "engineering" Bert talks about, but he's not the first person I've heard this kind of thing from. Most of the others are G&M reviewers. 'Nuf said, I think.

For the record, despite being Levin's ducttape gerbil, every time I've reviewed for the Globe I've been asked about my relationships with the authors to be reviewed. I've refused books because of conflict of interest, and at times been told by Levin that he was uncomfortable even the appearance of impropriety and had the book yanked back for consideration elsewhere.

Only once have I reviewed someone I knew personally (Stuart Ross, and I justified it by knowing that if I didn't do it his very important selected would likely fall into the hands of some CanLit lyrical isolationist who would have wanted it to be about plashing streams and wheat fields) and that was fully disclosed (I had the tools to do that review and many others in the Globe stable did not, so I requested and got it).

Generally I've met authors post review (it IS a small community) and been thanked or stared at coldly, but at that point the deed is done. My experience with the Globe has been all above board and clean clean clean.

G

I dunno if this has anything to do with Levin's official or unofficial policies or is just the product of the political climate of the literary world, but I've read more than a few reviews in the Globe that left a bad taste in my mouth because I got the feeling the reviewer was obliquely concealing their honest impression of a book in order to err on the side of niceness. Karen Solie's recent review of Jan Zwicky's new book, in which Solie dances around the topic of what Jan Zwicky is trying to do and how important that attempt is, without saying very much at all about how successful it is, concludes:

"I cannot write that I believe every poem in this book works. But even considering why they might not raises some important questions about looking, thinking and how possibly to write them. For those who write poetry, or anything, for that matter, for those who read, for those who pay attention, these questions are crucial."

This is a total cop-out, as she hasn't really said definitively that she thinks any of the poems do work, and even so, to say something is "working" (in workshopese, this means it's not failing) is pretty faint praise. I'm at a loss to figure out why someone as smart and tough-minded as Karen Solie would waffle so badly in this medium. Is it because of her connections with Zwicky (an editor at Brick Books, the publisher of Solie's two collections)? Is it because of the Globe's editorial policy? (Keeping in mind that the Globe also ran a promotional spot on Zwicky's book.) Did she not want to risk not getting paid? Is it because she fears the repercussions of telling us in greater detail what she actually thinks about a book written by one of the most prominent citizens in the CanLit community? Who knows. But personally, if she can't bring herself to sing a small song in praise of it, I'd like to have heard Karen say where, why and how the book goes wrong.

"obliquely concealing their honest impression of a book"

Or obliquely revealing it. Perhaps the reviewers believe the general readership of the review section can actually read.

Sure, fine, but what's revealed in this manner remains wrapped in mystery. A reasonably swift reader can tell that Solie's hiding something here, but what precisely and how much is anybody's guess. The result, as a piece of writing, is indeterminate and not a lot of fun to read. This kind of coded occlusion would be understandable in an oppressive regime...