Book reviewing

Why Criticism Matters

Rohan Maitzen3 Comments

Is it just me or do the six “accomplished critics” writing on this topic for the New York Times go on and on without saying much of interest or substance? Most of the offerings exemplify the dangers of generalizing–whether about criticism, about literature, or about good writing. Indeed, some of their generalizations make me worry none of them read much, which surely can’t be true (for instance, “the serious contemporary novel withdraws from linearity”? so much for A. S. Byatt or Hilary Mantel, to name two obvious counter-examples;  but then “its focus [is] distributed across several characters”–which sounds not so much contemporary as Victorian to me). Then there’s the oddly facile pot-shot by Stephen Burn against English professors who abandon literature to become administrators (take note, Craig!): I guess he’d rather universities all be run by business professors? Well, that seems to be what most people want these days. By and large they all conflate criticism with book reviewing, they seem quite preoccupied with evaluation as the critic’s job, and there’s a lot of talk about good writing, but not much about good reading, by which I mean reading that comes from close, patient attention and expertise. The value of academic criticism is hardly acknowledged (the only one who admits it, indirectly at least, is Batuman, and then only through references to books she read in graduate school), and though there’s a nod or two to the possibility that some of the critical writing done by ‘amateurs’ on the internet might not be stupid or strident (they all assume that bloggers are amateurs, which is sort of funny, because there are a lot of bloggers whose professional credentials and accomplishments as critics are surely equal to those of this Big Six, if often in different venues), the general tone seems to be a defensive one, the mission to prove not so much why criticism matters as an activity but why their critical practices and habits matter. Still, there are some pretty good moments. I think Sam Anderson is close to the mark, for instance, when he notes that the “membrane between criticism and art has always been permeable”:

That’s one of the exciting things that books do: they talk to other books. The critic’s job is to help amplify that conversation. We make the whispered parts of it audible; we translate the coded parts into everyday language. But critics also participate actively in that conversation. We put authors who might never have spoken in touch with each other, thereby redefining both. We add our own idiosyncratic life experiences and opinions and modes of expression — and in doing so, fundamentally change the texts themselves.

Nobody asked me why criticism matters, but if they did, I think I would just say that criticism matters because literature matters. If I were then asked to expand on that response, I would say that serious criticism (a label which excludes plenty of what passes for book reviewing on the internet and in print) matters because it takes literature seriously enough to investigate, explain, contextualize, and challenge it. It may do so in myriad ways, from formalist or aesthetic or historical or political or even, per Batuman, Freudian perspectives. Good criticism, I would add, requires expertise as well as beautiful writing–indeed, I would say that the quest for beautiful sentences (though they are certainly requisite for truly great criticism) can also be a dangerous temptation, luring critics away from rigorous analysis. And though I think it’s fair to emphasize the importance of the critic’s voice, I don’t read criticism to learn about the critic but to enrich my understanding of, my thinking about, the work of literature under examination. If criticism accomplishes that, it matters.

Now, let me ask you, accomplished readers, critics, and bloggers: why do you think criticism matters–assuming you do, and it does?

Best of ‘Novel Readings’: James Wood, How Fiction Works

Rohan Maitzen3 Comments

This review first went up in March 2008. My brooding over deep vs. broad reading has had me thinking again about Wood’s criticism, which I wrote admiringly about when I first discovered him in 2007. (This remarkably belated discovery speaks volumes, I think, of the divide between academic and public criticism.) I have also been thinking a lot about Becky Sharp, because in an essay for the July issue of Open Letters Monthly I lay out a more elaborate version of the argument I touch on here for her incidental significance to the novel in which she is so captivating a heroine. Both lines of thought led me back to take another look at this piece. I haven’t kept up with all of Wood’s reviews since, mostly because he and I often choose different books to pay attention to, but when I do (as with his recent piece on David Mitchell) I’m still struck by the elegant erudition of his language and analysis. Still, as this review shows, I have some sympathy with Lauren Elkin’s proposal that Wood is “a fine specimen of a book reviewer” but not exactly a “literary critic.” Not, as they used to say on Seinfeld, that there’s anything wrong with that.

How Fiction Works was also very ably reviewed in 2008 in Open Letters Monthly, by Dan Green of The Reading Experience.

The dust jacket describes How Fiction Works as Wood’s “first full-length book of criticism.” Anyone led by this blurb to expect sustained analysis supported by extensive research and illustration will be disappointed, as in fact How Fiction Works turns out to be essentially a ‘commonplace book,’ a collection of critical observations and insights of varying degrees of originality and sophistication, developed with varying degrees of care and detail. Wood acknowledges having set deliberate limits on his project, likening it in his introduction to Forster’s Aspects of the Novel, proposing to offer practical “writer’s anwers” to “a critic’s questions,” and admitting (though with no tone of apology) that he used only “the books at hand in [his] study.” To some extent I agree with other reviewers who consider it only fair to evaluate the book Wood wrote, rather than regretting he didn’t write another one. Yet even within the parameters Wood sets, I think there are grounds for wishing he, with his exceptional gifts and qualifications as both reader and critic, had not sold himself (or us) short in fulfilling them. Further, beginning with the invocation of Forster but going well beyond it, the book has pretensions to grandeur: for instance, also in his introduction Wood remarks that Barthes and Shklovsky “come to conclusions about the novel that seem to me interesting but wrong-headed, and this book conducts a sustained argument with them” (2). With gestures such as this, Wood claims an elevated stature for his critical contribution that is undermined by its casual construction and over-confident approach to scholarship. Though How Fiction Works provides many further proofs of Wood’s critical gifts and considerable erudition, I think it also proves that even the best practical critic flounders when working only with what he has already to hand or in mind.

Right off the bat I was irritated by the book’s structure. Wood has said that he felt liberated by using the numbered “paragraphs” or sections, but allowing yourself to skip from thought to thought in this way means letting yourself off the hook too often. Frequently in the margins of my students’ work I write “And so? Finish the thought!” One effect of crafting, first paragraphs, and then longer pieces as sustained wholes is that in working out the overall movement of your ideas and building in appropriately specific transitions, you confront both the logic and the further implications of your claims: the form pressures you to think better. Numbered bits, however, relieve that pressure: you can just stop with one topic and start the next, and as long as they are more or less related, you can claim to be producing a unified whole, even if you are only papering over gaps. In How Fiction Works, the breaks often seem unnecessary: a new number sets off what is really just the next sentence in the idea already unfolding. Most of the time, however, they are substitutes for careful transitions. They allow a certain stream-of-consciousness effect to creep in: that last bit reminds me of this exception to a general principle, or of a writer who also does that, or of another favourite excerpt, or of a time I went to a concert with my wife. Well, OK, I guess, and no doubt it would have been much more difficult to do a coherent chapter offering a theory of, say, fictional character, realism, or morality and the novel. And I suppose it’s true that non-academic readers don’t want the kind of detail and complexity such a full account of these topics would require. Even so, the numbered bits felt lazy to me. The footnotes too had an aimlessness about them. Some of them covered ideas or examples that seemed no less important to their chapter than most of the bits allowed their own numbered section (note 53 on p. 150, to give one example) while others appeared entirely unnecessary to the book (note 40 on p. 121, or note 41 on p. 124, for instance).

The TLS reviewer objects to Wood’s “grace notes”: “It is sometimes hard to distinguish a gasp of admiration for another’s skill from the contented sigh when the books in one’s study satisfy one’s own theories.” I shared this reaction, not least because “how fine that is” (139) is an expression of taste, not criticism. But Wood is a compelling reader of details, even passages. It’s when he makes broader assertions that he leaves himself more open to objections. For one thing, he has some governing assumptions about what fiction is for that he treats as universal rather than historically or theoretically specific. In his chapter on “Sympathy and Complexity,” for instance, as a footnote to his remarks on fiction as a means of extending our sympathies (the occasion for one of his shockingly few references to George Eliot!), he adds this:

We don’t read in order to benefit in this way from fiction. We read fiction because it pleases us, moves us, is beautiful, and so on,–because it is alive and we are alive. (129)

Well, maybe, but not everybody, and not all the time: for instance, most of the Victorian critics I have been editing for my Broadview anthology [now that the anthology is actually out, I wonder if Wood would like a copy–maybe I’ll send one along!] would not have recognized this highly aestheticized motive for novel reading. Is it fair, or even sensible, to say that they were simply wrong? Or to ignore how the formal developments of the Victorian novel furthered ends not adequately respected by Wood’s post-Jamesian formulations? His is in many respects a teleological account of the history of the novel. “Progress!” he exclaims after a quotation from Proust: “In Fielding and Defoe, even in the much richer Cervantes, revelation of this altering kind occurs at the level of plot” (125). But were Fielding and Defoe trying to do what Proust did and failing? How much better we might understand them if we allow them what James calls their “donnee.” “It is subtlety that matters,” he declares in his chapter on character; “subtlety of analysis, of inquiry, of concern, of felt pressure”: “I learn more about the consciousness of the soldier in Chekhov’s The Kiss than I do about the consciousness of Becky Sharpe [sic] in Vanity Fair.” But Becky Sharp’s consciousness is surely not the point of Vanity Fair; indeed, I argue in my own lectures [and now, in my essay in July’s Open Letters] that too close a focus on Becky risks diverting us from Thackeray’s grand gesture of holding the mirror up to ourselves, so that the novel becomes an opportunity for us to reflect on our own morality and mortality. “Was she guilty or not?” the narrator asks–and, remarkably, will not tell us, because ultimately she is not the point but the occasion, the device. Thackeray is not a failed Chekhov any more than Dickens is a failed Flaubert. To Wood, “the history of the novel can be told as the development of free indirect style” (58), but that history is partial and often distorting.

About the operations of free indirect discourse and the importance of knowing who ‘owns’ which words, on the other hand, Wood is typically astute. Here’s one place where examples from Middlemarch would have served him well, though at the risk of undermining his generalizations. Consider this passage from Chapter 1, for instance:

And how should Dorothea not marry? — a girl so handsome and with such prospects? Nothing could hinder it but her love of extremes, and her insistence on regulating life according to notions which might cause a wary man to hesitate before he made her an offer, or even might lead her at last to refuse all offers. A young lady of some birth and fortune, who knelt suddenly down on a brick floor by the side of a sick laborer and prayed fervidly as if she thought herself living in the time of the Apostles — who had strange whims of fasting like a Papist, and of sitting up at night to read old theological books! Such a wife might awaken you some fine morning with a new scheme for the application of her income which would interfere with political economy and the keeping of saddle-horses: a man would naturally think twice before he risked himself in such fellowship. Women were expected to have weak opinions; but the great safeguard of society and of domestic life was, that opinions were not acted on. Sane people did what their neighbors did, so that if any lunatics were at large, one might know and avoid them.

Think how much is lost on a reader who improperly identifies the source of that word “naturally”–or the last two sentences altogether!

Wood is good on the telling detail as well as the quality he calls “thisness”: “any detail that draws abstraction towards itself and seems to kill that abstraction with a puff of palpability” (54). But again, when he moves into prescription, he becomes less persuasive, as when he objects to the “layer of gratuitous detail” in 19th-century realist fiction. Again, the challenge is in defining “gratuitous” (as, clearly, Wood himself is well aware), but he can’t propose any principle except, perhaps, his idea that “insignificant” details avoid irrelevance if they are “significantly insignificant” (68). After recounting an incident in which he and his wife had “invented entirely different readings” of a violinist’s frown at a concert, he claims that a “good novelist would have let that frown alone, and would have let our revealing comments alone, too: no need to smother this little scene in explanation” (72). Again, well, maybe. I can imagine at least one “good novelist” who might have done great things with their “different readings” of that little moment, perhaps even using their “revealing comments” as a chance to reveal even more about perception and reality as well as human relationships (“these things are a parable…”). Doesn’t it depend on what your novel is about and on the formal methods you are using to realize those goals?

I’d like to return before I close to the “Sympathy and Complexity” chapter, because this is a topic close to my heart, one on which I have spent a lot of my own critical energy recently, and one I expected Wood to handle particularly well. “Perfunctory” is the best word I can think of to describe it. I’ve mentioned already his dehistoricizing assumption that “we” don’t read in order to receive moral benefits. I doubt this is true in practice, and I also question the separation he implies between moral and aesthetic readings. Here is a case in which even a little research outside “the books at hand in [his] own study” would have immeasurably enriched his discussion: Wayne Booth’s The Company We Keep, for instance, would have helped him complicate exactly that separation. And the conversation about how fiction might do “what [Bernard] Williams wanted moral philosophy to do” (135) has many participants besides Williams: Martha Nussbaum comes promptly to mind. Further, not all novels avoid providing “philosophical answers”; he replicates Nussbam’s error in generalizing about “the novel,” but as a professional novel reader, he should know better.

Here the hybrid character of How Fiction Works proves a genuine weakness, I think. This chapter is not a full, responsible, or authoritative inquiry into its subject. Of course, it does not pretend to be (remember, the book promises only “a writer’s answers” to “a critic’s questions”). But then how should we evaluate it? Doesn’t Wood do even his non-specialist audience a disservice by taking up complicated subjects on which there already exists a rich body of scholarship and offering his own fairly casual observations with the confidence of real expertise? What a much greater contribution it would be to distill that complex material and present it accessibly! To grab what’s at hand and say just what comes to mind bespeaks an enviable but also problematic degree of confidence. And while the non-expert reader is in no position to object, the expert reader is easily deflected with the excuse that she is not the intended audience…

After I read How Fiction Works I re-read some of my collection of Wood’s essays, including his reviews of Never Let Me Go, Saturday, and Brick Lane. This is really wonderful stuff, as I have remarked before; I admire it wholeheartedly for its critical acuity, its literary elegance, and its moral seriousness. But considering How Fiction Works strictly as one among many books about books (and Wood is wrong, or perhaps disingenuous, when he says “there are surprisingly few books” of this kind about fiction [1]), I think there are many better choices available. I continue to recommend David Lodge’s The Art of Fiction, for instance, which takes up many of the same topics as Wood, though under a less grandiose umbrella of prescriptive claims. I think it’s an exciting development that Wood has landed a job in Harvard’s English Department. In taking this now unconventional route from journalism to the academy, he is following in the footsteps of many eminent Victorian critics (David Masson, for instance). But considering how bitterly difficult it is for those following the established professional route to land any academic job at all, it’s frustrating to think that he may not be held to anything like the same standard of rigour as many critics far less lauded and applauded. Here’s hoping that he has more books in him as good as The Broken Estate.

(Original post cross-posted to The Valve.)

Book Reviews

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As it happens, just before I read Peter Stothard’s post about the ‘decline’ of the book review I had finished my weekly browse through the book section of the Globe and Mail and wondered aloud to my husband what it is that makes this, which should in theory be my favourite section of our “national” paper, so unengaging for me week after week. Or, to look at the question from a slightly different angle, what makes me read a review? I don’t pretend to have a theory about the big picture, but I’m a reasonably bookish person, after all. I wonder, if enough of us bookish types went through this mental exercise and wrote about it, if we might be able to provide some suggestions for those poor struggling editors!

Basically, I think there are really only two reasons I read a book review.

The short version:

  1. I’m interested in the book.
  2. I’m interested in the reviewer.

The long version:

I will pretty much always read a review of a book that’s somehow on my radar, a book I’m already interested in. This, however, is a useless principle to guide the editor of a book review section. Given just how many books are published and just how diverse individual readers’ interests and tastes are, it is impossible for a book section to cater to every reader’s idiosyncratic taste on a regular basis. Indeed, from this perspective, we should probably be more surprised when there is a review we want to read than when there isn’t! Further, while it would be nice for me, in a way, if there were a review section that perfectly reflected my existing taste and interests, on the other hand it would discourage me from challenging my taste and trying new things: my reading life would stagnate. Still, choice of books is surely an issue; I was struck by Stothard’s comment that the TLS reviews a lot of books nobody else does, and perhaps the predictable focus of so many mainstream publications on the same ‘best-selling’ titles is one of the problems. Stothard touches on debates about including ‘popular’ titles along with the more seriously (or at least aspirationally) literary; I’m too much of an outsider to the realities of publishing to know for sure, but I wonder if Dan Brown (to give just one example) is worth reviewing in the NYT, not just because, well, because, but because the vast majority of his readers surely don’t care what the NYTimes has to say about his books anyway, while the majority of NYTBR readers don’t care about Dan Brown. But here, I’m just guessing. If I had any suggestions, it would be, aim higher, not wider. If you try to be all things to all people, you become something like the horrible mish-mash that is now CBC Radio 2. People will tune in–or browse your pages–to see if there’s something they like, but they won’t love and value and (most important) fight for you if you don’t stand for anything in particular.

The second reason I’ll read a review is that it is by a reviewer who has caught my interest and earned my respect by his or her critical (or other) work. Given the impossibility (and undesirability) of a review section focusing exclusively on books I already know I want to know more about, I need the lure of good writing and good thinking: a distinct, engaging critical voice. I want a lot less plot summary than I’m usually offered, and a lot more critical reflection on the book, whether it’s providing historical or literary contexts or doing a more thematically-focused close reading. While I can be caught up in a critic’s more personal approach, I generally prefer to read criticism that does not tend towards the autobiographical (as I’ve said before here, I don’t like critical approaches that assume it’s all about the reader). In the past I have pointed to some of the early work of James Wood as exemplary. Here’s a bit of what I wrote about his review of Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go:

He also takes Ishiguro’s offering and gives it a different kind of life: the conversation is not over when the book ends, and Ishiguro’s is not the final word. Now we see something that Ishiguro has shown us, or as he has perceived it, and we can talk about it too. Ishiguro has described the novelist’s work as a way of saying “It’s like this, isn’t it? Don’t you see it this way too?” (I’m paraphrasing)–and so when he’s done talking, we see what we think, or say something back. But Wood is also interested in the novel as an art form, in how and why specific kinds of narration, for instance, create certain effects, or generate (or control) affect and emotion. The trained eye sees better, understands the alternatives better. In the mini-series “From the Earth to the Moon,” there’s a wonderful episode in which a geologist is assigned to train the astronauts to collect rock samples from the moon. The crucial step is getting them to see, not just undifferentiated rocks, but specific kinds of rocks that tell their own stories and accrue meaning and significance through their shapes, composition, and location. Critics (any experts, really) help less experienced readers in the same way, telling them some of the things they can look for and why they might be interesting. They train you in appreciation and make you excited about the aesthetic and intellectual experience of reading attentively.

A great review has the effect of bringing something into focus for you, like a microscope bringing out the details on a biologist’s slide. Mind you, this effect is most powerful in retrospect, once you have read the novel for yourself, though a compelling review also gives you a preliminary (not definitive) guide to carry with you on your first reading, a sense of what you might be looking for, or at, against which to test your own perceptions. A good review gives you a lively sense of what it is like to be involved with the book. Strong subjective opinions or idiosyncratic taste are fine– and certainly preferable to the unbearable blandness of something like the Globe and Mail‘s weekly survey of recent crime fiction, which basically tells you over and over that this book is (or, occasionally, is not) a lot like the author’s other books–provided those idiosyncracies do not simply stand as dogmatic and limiting assertions but provide the motivation for searching and self-conscious analysis (not, again, of the critic, but of the book).

As I concede the point about which books are reviewed, then, for me the success or failure of a book review section really hangs on the quality of the writing and thinking it offers. On average, I find the Globe reviews trivial and uninteresting. I wonder about the wisdom of their apparent editorial policy of inviting so many creative writers to review each other’s work. There is such a thing as expertise in criticism, and it does not necessarily coincide with the skills and experience (or interests) of novelists or poets. (On the other hand, as I’m well aware, those with the most expertise about literature, namely academics, can be woefully bad at the journalistic skills of brevity–ahem–and wit, not to mention clarity.) I wonder too if the editors sell their audience short, or if their fundamental mistake or futility is just trying to be all things to all people, trying to find that elusive ‘common reader’ with no distinctly defined tastes or preferences and no patience for the kind of (sometimes excessively) specialized coverage of the TLS.

In any case, I don’t find there is any shortage of good reviewing going on. It’s just that not much of it is going on in newspapers, from what I can tell. I read all of Adam Roberts’s reviews at The Valve, not just out of team spirit, but because even when he writes about books I’ll almost certainly never read, he’s interesting about them (see his recent comments on Wolf Hall, for instance, or on Byatt’s Booker contender The Children’s Book). I’m looking forward to Steve Donoghue’s forthcoming full-length review of Wolf Hall at Open Letters, too, not least because his brief but pithy posts on the excerpts which appeared in the New York Review of Books in the summer were what first put the book on my own radar. Both writers convey a strong sense of their own reading personalities (which are, I think, quite different) while giving me plenty of ideas about the book in question. There are all kinds of smart, interesting people writing about books informally in blogs and more formally in online publications: the downside here is the difficulty of finding the kind of informed, substantial commentary that rewards careful attention, the way the best print criticism also does. I don’t have a suggestion here, except perhaps that print editors should keep exploring online reviewing, as the rest of us do, looking for voices that are distinct and engaging and well-informed. At the very least, they could expand their blogrolls. Bookslut and Maud Newton are not the only games in town.

So, the rest of you? Any ideas about what book review sections could or should do differently? How do you feel about the review section of your local paper–if it even still has one?

Globe and Mail Book Section Goes Online

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The Toronto Globe and Mail, which fondly declares itself “Canada’s National Newspaper,” has, like many other newspapers, recently eliminated their stand-alone books section. I haven’t found the Globe‘s book section very stimulating for some time, so to me the loss is more symbolic than intellectual. (One of my theories about why the section is so often disappointing is that they ask too many authors–as opposed to, say, critics–to write their reviews.) Literary coverage will continue, but as part of the Focus section (odd, maybe, that it’s not the Review section?). At the same time, however, the paper has dramatically expanded its online books coverage. I haven’t had time to explore the site very thoroughly, but it seems to include many of the same features that the print version had as well as a range of interactive pieces, including a couple of blogs and an “Ask the Author” feature that looks like fun–P. D. James is scheduled for later this month, and she’s an author I’d like to ask a few questions myself. I see that their Blogroll so far is exclusively other Globe and Mail blogs. I wonder if they will get outside that box a bit and link to some of the wide range of other book blogs (affiliated with newspapers and not) in and out of Canada.