Against Reviews

Elizabeth Gumport takes down book reviews in N+1.

In the piece...

If book reviews are nothing but free advertising, they are among the most ineffectual, ill-conceived marketing campaigns ever conceived. It’s strange to think that an account of what’s inside a book would be a good way to sell it. Imagine if McDonald’s commercials told you what went into a Big Mac: rehydrated onions, high-fructose corn syrup, ammonia-treated beef.

Woolf imagined reviewers of the future using “an asterisk to signify approval, a dagger to signify disapproval.” Today both Kirkus and Publisher’s Weekly use stars to indicate books of especial interest. Reviewers, however, are not yet called “Tasters,” the term Woolf proposed, but fiction is indeed assessed in the same terms as a fish entrée: fresh, insipid, visionary, uninspired. Reading a book review is like reading about a restaurant in a city you’ve never been to, and have no plans to visit.

If there is a point to reviews, it is one that could be made more effectively, and without spectators. “With some differences,” Woolf wrote, “the medical custom might be imitated—there are many resemblances between doctor and reviewer, between patient and author. Let the reviewers then abolish themselves, or what relic remains of them, as reviewers, and resurrect themselves as doctors. . . The writer then would submit his work to the judge of his choice; an appointment would be made.” But true criticism, like an autopsy, could only be performed after death. “It is impossible for the living to judge the works of the living. Years, many years, according to Matthew Arnold, have to pass before it is possible to deliver an opinion that is not “‘only personal, but personal with passion.’”

As modified recapitulations of what already exists, reviews are inherently conservative. Space constraints inhibit speculation and dissent, which is why even elegant reviews tend to be dry, aimless, and unmotivated. Still, cramped quarters tend to strike authors as preferable to homelessness. Many aspiring and even established writers who wish to see their work in print —and to be paid for it—find non-review outlets hard to come by. The result? “A generation hid its real ideas in book reviews.”

The Los Angeles Times Review of Books responds to the charge, here.