… the trend in book reviewing has gradually become for a critic to show off his or her erudition for most of the piece, before remembering to say something about the volume in front of them in a couple of hurried lines at the end.
Friday, June 05, 2020
A good idea …
… A Radical Proposal: Book reviews should review books | Alexander Larman | The Critic Magazine. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
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I think he's talking through his hat. The kind of review-essay he disparages, far from being a "trend," has been around as long as there have been literary journals addressed to non-specialists. I make a point of looking out for old collections of such essays; they wear well, often.
ReplyDeleteExplicit praise becomes a reviewer's duty on rare occasions: Dumas Malone's monumental biography of Jefferson, for example. But no one needs a finely calibrated assessment of every perfectly adequate and we'll enough written book. Sufficient to note that, if we want to read more about Rochester or Joseph Banks, here is a new book just published about them. The reviewer can remind us who they are, situate them for us in their time and among their circle -- can make thinking about them lively to us -- and from these things we can decide whether to take it so far as reading the book.
If Larman is peeved because he had hoped for pull-quotes to use as blurbs, well, he may take it up with his publisher's marketing department. But I wouldn't want reviewers to be in their pocket.