My governing principle as a critic is to call attention solely to books and writers that merit such attention, and to avoid wherever possible reviewing books "negatively" except in those instances in which the "negative" is countered by an admiring consideration of earlier books by the same author...How small minded we seem to ourselves in retrospect, chiding others! Much better to have passed over such disappointments in silence... In America, do we need to caution anyone against buying a book?
- Joyce Carol Oates, Uncensored: Views and (Re) Views,xii-xiii
Well, yes. Of course. Why bother praising, if there is no counter?
Yes -- why do it? Why bother?
It's not for the money. Some I even do for free; the most I've been paid was $200 for 2000 words. And there have been a lot of 5-15 dollar cheques cashed, turned around and invested in a subscription of the literary magazine I appeared in.
Is it for fame? Ha. It's the book that's under review, not me; and even if I do write brilliantly, it will be the book that should rightly be remembered. Sure, there may be controversy here and there; but, ultimately, unless one is on the TLS or NYRB rosters, one is anonymous. And I've been doing this long enough and well enough to know that I shall never crack that lineup; I'm good second-tier.
Is it easy? Well, most writing isn't, and this goes for reviews. The reviews that are praise-fests, which I don't write, are full of superlatives and quotations and excerpts. Never trust a plot summary! The book is puffed, and one is inclined less to buttress praise, to justify it. Most praise just sits on the page, lax. But say something negative, say something critical, and one is asked: what do you mean? How do you mean it? The argument must be air-tight; the author must be provided with no alibi.
Besides, most new books are bad. Take it on this authority: Orwell said, in his essay "Confessions of a Book Reviewer."
Until one has some kind of professional relationship with books one does not discover how bad the majority of them are. In much more than nine cases out of ten the only objectively truthful criticism would be "This book is worthless", while the truth about the reviewer's own reaction would probably be "This book does not interest me in any way, and I would not write about it unless I were paid to."
Like Orwell, inundated with books, with books on the floor, on the desk, as doorstoppers, on the back of the toilet, I'm disinclined to praise because there is very little to praise; and so I'm left with the hard road, the one leading off into the wilderness inhabited by a "crank" and a "goon" and a "jealous wanker," all of which I've been called. It's understandable; the Canadian literary community is small, and if one is honest one inevitably insults someone, and if the insult is cutting enough it raises the ire of the reviewee's friends, and, as I've come to learn, names are about the only thing these people are good at. Thankfully, their insults are as pedestrian as the book under review.
Names don't hurt. But being blackballed does, though. Just a little.
It might be said that I'm bitter (an epithet I get often), that I'm writing this essay as an attempt to settle scores. I'm not; I'm trying to be as honest as I can, and outline a little personal history as representative of the book reviewer who, qua Orwell, is disinclined to bow down at the mailbox when a book arrives. For some reason, people in Canada mistake strong objections for bitterness, and this mistake is a real hindrance for growth. I write passionately (I hope) about this subject because I care about the state of literary discourse in this country, not because I've suffered slings and arrows. (And, as Dale Peck says, objectivity isn't the point. Passion is.) But those slings and arrows are representative of the culture of reviewing and the reception of reviewing, both of which are subjects worthy of discussing.
Take, for example, my first wound. I used to write for a provincial arts insert, reviewing a few books a month. After a brief six months, local authors formed a cabal and demanded that I be dropped because I was "mean." (The editor there told me this, and used this exact word. Irony: how provincial a word!) Apparently the authors knew someone powerful above the head of the editor: after the cabal made their objections, the paper adopted a kind of no-fly rule for critics: henceforth only positive reviews would be published. Another irony: by writing (I thought) critically, I eventually stifled criticism.
Bewildered, I asked my editor what the point of such a policy was. She summed it up thusly: "Well, with all the negativity in the world, we want to do something positive."
"But by only publishing positive reviews you'll lose all credibility. A rave-fest will kill you."
"Well, let me put it this way. Books are published. We want people to read books. How are we going to recommend books if all we're doing is disparaging them? Why can't you tell us what you love about a book, and not what you hate about it?"
An editor I had heretofore respected, someone who was capable of critically assessing my own prose, was now going to manage a cheer squad. I mentioned that most of the best arguments are made in opposition to a piece of prose, and that the engendering prose is useful as a result; I mentioned that some books we love to hate. I mentioned that some books deserve to be called bad. I said that some of the books I have liked best are books that, ultimately, fail, and that reviewers have to have the courage to say as much. And editors have to have the courage to print as much.
I was out. Not in a negative way, of course. Instead, I was told, after the new policy was recapitulated, "I'll send you a book in the mail. It's about cats..."
Luckily, I had been diversifying my markets. I was picked up by a little magazine, and I reviewed several books for them over the years. Then I came up against a book of poetry I loathed, a detestable object. I did not categorically dismiss it; but I did write a sentence that, if memory serves, went like this: "There is not a single memorable utterance to be found in this book." And that was fair; the poet wasn't enamoured of expression, he could be found amidst a refuse pile of anecdote. The review was very, very negative. And the first response by my editor was perhaps predictable: "You need to get rid of that sentence."
I refused, saying it was true.
"It may be true, but we don't publish sentences like that. It must go."
I refused, asking why they didn't print true sentences.
"We don't print attack ads, we print reviews. Get rid of it."
I didn't get a chance to agree or disagree further. Spooked by my opposition from the outset, they rejected the commissioned review outright, explaining that they wanted to "highlight what was good in the land." They went on to say: "In the future, please send us only positive reviews. If you read a book you don't like, then don't bother reviewing it for us. Just send it back." In talking to other writers, I've learned this is a common practice. They regularly send back books they don't like.
I was out again. This is, in essence, auto-asphyxiation by the Canlit world. The conversation about a book is the fortune of a book, and in current Canada, the conversation isn't just uninformed, it's irresponsible. Hot air. I wrote a letter to the editor (never printed) that quoted Orwell and asked what color of pom-pom he was going to choose to match the new fall releases.
The battle, of course, is whether a critic should be evaluative in his criticism, or if she should be descriptive. I've fought this battle (pom-pom colour for my side: black, as in villain) with several journals over the years (you know who you are.) There are several critics out there (In the Canadian annals, Carmine Starnino comes to mind, David O'Meara is another. But two who write for the international press are Stephen Henighan and Lorna Jackson) who are able to give us what is given to them, who are able to interpret, who evaluate -- is the damn thing any good? Who cares if it 'ably describes a polar bear expedition in Alert'? -- who can be counted on to tell us their opinion, unvarnished. But there are a host more who have 'bought in' on the descriptive pyramid scheme, who can't separate the good from the bad because separation is unimportant, only documentation is important. It's a game of favours.
I mean, really. Doesn't Seamus Heaney evaluate Irish/English literature? Or James Fenton evaluate English literature? Or Clive James evaluate Australian literature? Or Martin Amis evaluate just about anything? Why does this 'positivist' attitude prevail in Canada? Having been chased from several of the dailies and little magazines, I've come to a few conclusions:
(1) We're babies. Really -- I've heard too much gossip -- and been at the centre of some -- about how a bad review offended one author or another. And then all their respective friends get involved. It's childish. When will we learn that a good negative review, a thoughtful disagreement, is more productive than puff?
(2) We're babies. We think that publishing negative reviews will somehow come back to haunt us. So there's a chill in writing the things, sure, but then there's a chill on publishing them too -- authors may complain, and grants are on the line in both cases.
(3) We're babies. We can't feel comfortable in our own skins until someone praises us to high heaven. We need constant praise, we're praise junkies, and a negative review squelches our undeserved high. (And that's unfair- where's my praise, man? Don't be a bummer- hit me!) It's insecurity, and insecurity, when called out, becomes more insecure, engendering the overwhelmingly negative reaction that negative reviews get.
Outside of writing, when one is offered feedback in the professional world, one appreciates one's weaknesses being pointed out. It prevents future mistakes. But in Canlit, because we can't take criticism, because the environment is one where criticism just isn't done, we offer only hoorahs for our first clumsy, fat steps, even if it's a step off the cliff.
Perhaps the only reason I write reviews is because I like to think, and I like to be prodded to think, and I like to articulate what I think. Not money, not notoriety, but the chance of having said, "This is why I agree or disagree," not the chance of rehashing plot (a stock technique of describers) or the chance of using the following words: "beautiful" and "pretty" and "delightful" and "gorgeous: and "muscular." Reviewing is a cri de coeur, an assertion of taste. It's why one writes: to make something that can invite criticism, to be sure, but something that can also withstand it. Criticizing puff jobs is like climbing jelatin: where to find a purchase?
Not in the Malahat Review's Fall 2003 issue on reviewing. The moderator says:
The myth that burns me most is that in Canada we write and read in a big "close-knit literary community," that fear of revenge, public humiliation or lost prizes means the ethical critic- thorough, informed, alert to bias- has too much to lose: who can be tough enough when the stakes are so high?
Well, it's not a myth. One might say that the very existence of the book, it's reason for being, consents that there is a problem, if only in perception but, as I'd argue, pressingly real. This is in an issue that purportedly talks tough, that shows the world that Canadians can take the gloves off, yet which prints the unintentionally funny essay by Jan Zwicky that admits,
[When] I was review editor for the Fiddlehead in the early nineties, I made a point of requesting that a review be written only if the reviewer was genuinely enthusiastic about the book.
Does this sound familiar? The essay then goes on to hilariously -- but dishearteningly -- justify that position. I ask: why preconceive a reviewer's enthusiasms? Why can't a reviewer be enthusiastic in his dislike?
A purchase can be found in tussle, in tumult. We desperately need evaluators. Reviewers who can put a book in context, because in reviewing, context is everything. (Lorna Jackson's dictum, channeling Zsuzi Gartner: "Context, context, context.") We need people who think, and then we need those people to write what they think, even if it means banishment from the public teat. Essentially, we need writers. Once we have the writers, we can then create a forum for them, a Canadian version of the TLS, say, which casts its black light across the industry. If the culture of writing in Canada is given the backbone of honest criticism, it won't be a pall, but a blessed revelation.
Shane Neilson is a poet and critic, writing for publications such as Canadian Notes & Queries. His first collection will be published with Biblioasis in 2009.
Canadians have an odd relationship to the U.S. We define ourselves against them, first of all. Many of us in urban centres find guns appalling, our history is closer to compromise than conflict, possibly born out of the need to accommodate both French and English, and the same need has introduced a greater love -- at least in theory -- of diversity, and a recognition diversity is a strength, not a weakness. There is a distinct Canadian identity that Canadians...continue reading
Your second collection of poems, The Cold Panes of Surfaces, is out now. Your first book, Bonfires, won the Canadian Authors Association Poetry Award in 2004. Did winning a national award for your first book bolster your artistic confidence while working on your second, or did you find it daunting, as though you had more to live up to than other poets working on a second collection?
I think it certainly gave me a boost of confidence and the permission I needed to do what I wanted to do artistically with the second book. I didn't feel any outside pressure because of winning the CAA award, or feel that I had any expectations to live up to. Winning the award was terrific, and it was good publicity, but it was also an education on how fleeting such praise can be, and how it leaves your writing life virtually...continue reading