I know the exact date I decided to become a book critic, or at least thought that a book critic might be an interesting thing to be: March 19, 1989. I was 15 years old and had recently picked up my father’s habit of reading the Chicago Tribune, which on that Sunday morning led me to Robert Olen Butler’s review of John Irving’s novel A Prayer for Owen Meany. I enjoyed that book, or felt like I should have enjoyed it — The World According to Garp was the novel that plunged me into contemporary fiction, and I liked the water fine. But here was Butler, who said he loved Garp, too, giving a compatriot both barrels: “We see contrivances everywhere,” he wrote. “In the characters, in the action, in the multitude of pseudo-prophecies that anticipate everything from the lost war in Vietnam to the moral laxity of the Reagan years to the AIDS epidemic …” He kept going, mercilessly.
I felt strangely stung on Irving’s behalf. And yet, it seemed like such an interesting thing to do, what Butler was doing — wrestling with a book, working out its themes, finding its place among others. I’m sure I didn’t think at all about what the review meant for Irving’s sales, or Butler’s standing at cocktail parties or on award juries, or even if anybody else in the greater Chicago area had read the review start to finish. (Let alone repeatedly, as I did.) I perceived a book review — still perceive it, most days — as an avocation that’s as much private as it is public. Butler was enjoying himself in a serious sort of way. His review was journalistic yet personal. It was art, kind of, for its own sake, sorta.
This public-private feeling is a common one, according to Phillipa K. Chong’s academic but engaging analysis of book reviewing, Inside the Critics’ Circle. An assistant professor of sociology at McMaster University, Chong endeavored to put some scientific rigor around the motivations of fiction reviewers by interviewing 40 of them, a random sample drawn from more than 1,000 bylines that had appeared in one of three major (but unnamed) national newspapers. What she uncovered is a lack of sense of purpose that’s distinct from criticism in other disciplines. Restaurant reviewers can make a bistro a hit; a theater reviewer can close a production on opening night; TV critics can write deep-dive episode recaps knowing there are hordes of fans eager to debate every plot point. But book reviewers, Chong explains, deny such “consecrating” powers for themselves. Many of her interviewees said they weren’t sure they “counted” as a critic, because they often don’t self-identify as one; reviewing is typically a sideline for the teachers or novelists who comprise most of her sample, and rarely a full-time profession. So critics often write less out of a sense of journalistic public service and more as a way to reinforce their professional standing elsewhere. “The overall pattern is that critics often framed their reviewing work as operating in service of their identities and practices as writers,” Chong writes.
Reviewers marginalizing themselves as critics, Chong observes, parallels their sense of marginalization by outside forces: the ever-thinning book pages at daily newspapers, the rise of user-generated reviews on websites, the general sense that book culture keeps eroding. And yet, almost schizophrenically, critics also behave as if they they wield meaningful power. Much of Inside the Critics’ Circle explores the dynamic of critics either “playing nice” (softening their criticisms of debut novels, say) or punching up (treating successful novelists as fair game for harsh criticism, as in the case of Butler vs. Irving). Perhaps critics don’t see themselves as meaningful in the broader world, but they’re mindful of the smaller ecosystem in which they operate, especially if they’re working novelists. They either fear retribution or say they’ve actually experienced it.
This “switch-role reward structure,” as Chong’s jargon puts it, will likely be seized upon by more cynical observers who believe that book reviewing is often little more than an extension of publishers’ publicity departments — blurbing literally writ large. Chong stops short of saying that critics are so calculating. No one in her sample expressed concern about what a publisher might think of a negative review. Nor does she suggest that reviewers are elevating bad books or diminishing good ones. But they do “think twice about how direct they should be when writing a negative review.”
It’s odd: The critics Chong spoke to have strong good-of-the-order feelings when it comes to novelists, but have little sense of belonging when it comes to critics. This, for better or for worse, seems a function of Chong’s methodology, which seems to skew heavily toward the novelist-critic: 35 of her 40 interviewees were people who have published books themselves, and based on the anecdotes she shares, mostly novelists. This may simply be an accurate representation of the state of play in newspaper book reviewing. But it opens a question that Chong’s sample is too small to answer: Is there a divide among novelist-critics and critic-critics, and what might be gained or lost by favoring one or the other?
It’s an important question, because reviews are meaningless without a sense of trust, a feeling that a critic has enough of a distance from their subject to consider it fairly. That distance is built-in for restaurant critics (who don’t own restaurants), theater critics (who don’t mount plays), and TV critics (who aren’t showrunners). That’s not to suggest that novelist-critics are inherently a problem, because there are dedicated novelist-critics out there who read widely and judiciously — Jane Smiley, or Roxane Gay, or James Wood. But the typical novelist-critic is typically asked to pop in to assess a thematically similar book. As one interviewee who wrote a book with an island setting told Chong: “After my first novel came out, most of the books that I was asked to review were either historical or involved women on islands.” The critic-critic, who’s more professionally obligated to cover a wider waterfront, may have a different view of the compromises Chong discusses.
(It’s perhaps worth reiterating that Chong is exclusively covering newspaper reviewers in her survey. That means she doesn’t discuss the essays novelists write for literary magazines like the New York Review of Books, London Review of Books, Bookforum, and so on. The dynamic is different there, and there’s a distinction between newspaper reviews and the essays that Lorrie Moore, Joyce Carol Oates, or Colm Toibin write for literary publications, which tend to encourage writers to follow their passions at length rather than opine on a new novel on assignment on a tight word count.)
Do I, a critic-critic, sound a little defensive or self-serving in wanting more of the critic-critic’s voice? Well, I had my shot; I’m one of the critics Chong spoke to. My Gmail record informs me that Chong and I scheduled an interview in August of 2010. I have only the foggiest recollection of the conversation, and don’t know if it had any real impact on her thesis. (Funny how vividly I can recall reading that 30-year old book review, in contrast.) But she quotes one reviewer in the book whom I’d lay decent odds on is me:
It’s always still a little Christmas-like, and even if the book sort of seems like, ‘Well maybe, this is a genre I don’t really love a whole lot,’ I always feel that every book is going to teach me something … It never feels like work that is without value.
I’ve made that Christmas-present analogy before, and even if somebody else turns out to have said it, I agree with it. I don’t want to suggest I’m wholly separate from the issues that Chong raises. I’ve felt that same instinct to go easier on a debut and let fly on a “superstar,” though I’ve never said I enjoyed a book that I didn’t; it’s just that takedown language isn’t for me. (Around the same time I was starting to read the Tribune’s book pages, I’d become a regular viewer of Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert’s weekly TV show bantering about movies. Ebert was the one I paid attention to. He was comfortable slamming a bad movie, but he never came at a movie without feeling like it was beneath him; he was always ready to root for it.) But the quote, whoever said it, reflects the point that the critic-critic swims in fiction’s waters differently than the novelist-critic.
Moreover, the critic-critic may be better positioned in the long run to advocate for the value of the book review for everybody, though this critic-critic admits not feeling too confident about it. In the book’s conclusion, Chong suggests one way critics can get around the problem of lack of belonging and support the vocation: “Have a group of freelance reviewers take it on themselves to impress on the editorial staff at a review section the importance of distributing review coverage more evenly (or perhaps to argue for giving even more attention to new writers or underrepresented authors).” A variation on this has been tried: In 2007 the National Book Critics Circle (which Chong mentions in passing, and of which I’m a member) launched a “Campaign to Save Book Reviews,” petitioning daily newspapers to preserve their standalone review sections.
Thirteen years down the line, it seems like a futile effort, at least when it comes to newspapers. But the campaign also came at a time when blogging was ascendant and has since transformed into a robust array of online-only publications, matched by legacy brands that have created their own book verticals. (One weakness of Chong’s book is the space given to grousing about bloggers, which feels like a very circa-2010 sentiment; Chong doesn’t say when she conducted her interviews, but she was writing about them as far back as 2011.) The pay is usually dispiritingly low; Chong quotes one reviewer who rightly points out that working at a 7-Eleven often pays better in terms of dollars paid to hours spent. Collective action toward editors isn’t something critics are likely to do — their perches are often so fragile that the risk of offending an editor can feel very real, and the editors’ perches aren’t so steady themselves. But there seems to be no diminishment in the supply of aspiring critic-critics eager to engage with books; I know this because for the past decade we’ve had all manner of literary websites and podcasts and Harper’s cover stories around to inform us about the imminent death of the book review.
If only the reviewers were paid what they are worth; if only more newspapers and mass-media websites were more willing to spotlight them. I’m straining to end this on a high note. I want to find an optimistic alternative, one that might properly address the critic-critic/novelist-critic morass, the financial tenuousness, the sense of a lack of social utility. But I might suggest something like this, because there’s ample evidence it’s already happening: If the book-review world refuses to feel empowered collectively, it might do more to empower itself individually. Critics can own their literary passions more intensely, commit to cultivating a broader diversity of them, and voice them more loudly to their editors; the section editors who use novelist-critics can make more use of the Butler-ish ones, those with a wider perspective and stronger stomachs for criticism. The online magazines that have emerged in the past decade have grown on the strength of strong writers who show why books, good or bad, are interesting things. Criticism will survive — has only survived — on the backs of those who still think of books as a present, and want to spread the word, good or bad, about what they’ve received.
[Published by Princeton University Press on January 14, 2020, 192 pp., $29.95 hardcover]