We’ve all seen the statistics about how little people read these days; it only follows that the reviewing of books is becoming an ever-more marginalized practice, relegated to diminutive arts sections that jostle for space with holiday recipes and advice columnists.
In the last month, however, the plight of the book reviewer has received more attention than usual. The New Republic, in a somewhat unusual move, ran "The War on Book Reviewing" as its cover story, offering a surprisingly earnest call to arms:
"The intelligent discussion of a book has the power to change its reader’s ideas about how he votes or who he loves--to furnish nothing less than a "criticism of life," in the old but still sterling phrase."
There follows a rather long and quite amusing review, by Vanity Fair’s James Wolcott of Faint Praise: The Plight of Book Reviewing in America by Gail Pool. Though he agrees with her dire assessment of this sadly diminishing trade, he rightly points out that she misses a major point: "book reviews at full billow can become cultural events. Imagine how much livelier criticism would be if novice reviewers," he continues, "availed themselves of review collections by...Kingsley Amis, Martin Amis...Philip Larkin" among others, instead of trying to be the next Malcolm Gladwell.
I could not agree more. Moaning about space constrains and low pay is largely beside the point (though, of course, not exactly irrelevant). Rather, we really have to think about why so many book reviews are either bland, embarrassingly fatuous or poorly written, and why they are so rarely the "intelligent discussion" or "cultural event" that we still occasionally stumble upon.
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