On Informed Reviewing

Mark Sarvas of The Elegant Variation has posted recently about his planned “Summer of Roth,” and on Wednesday explained himself further.

It started back when Wyatt Mason, writing at his superb new blog Sentences, mused about how much of his backlist reviewers coming to Roth’s new novel Indignation should know. As he told it, “With Roth, a reader familiar with only Goodbye Columbus and Portnoy’s Complaint will necessarily form a very different picture of the preoccupations, tendencies, and techniques of the author in question than will a reader intimate with The Counterlife and Operation Shylock (or, alternately, The Breast and “The Prague Orgy”—one can, with Roth, produce a baker’s dozen of such pairs).”

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Around the same time of the Mason post, I was offered the opportunity to review Indignation for the Barnes & Noble Review, an outlet I especially enjoy reviewing for because I’m given a bit more space to work with. I’d been looking for a “summer reading project” to take me away from the usual obligatory pile of current releases, and, inspired by Mason, I decided to use the excuse of this assignment to make this The Summer of Roth.

I had read the Sentences post and found it a very interesting question, and one hardly confined to Philip Roth (Mason also mentions “Oates, Updike, Munro, Marías, Kundera, Coetzee, McEwan, T. C. Boyle, Amis, Pynchon, DeLillo, Rushdie”—quite a list).

Now, neither I nor my readers are professional reviewers (I imagine), but I know that I still feel somewhat uncomfortable not only reviewing, but even judging, in my own mind, a single novel when I’m unfamiliar with the author, or with the tradition, or with the cultural and literary history. I may get that reviewing vibe anyway, and I may well be able to say something intelligent about the book itself, but what if I am vastly misunderstanding the aims of the author?

Of course, this will vary according to the aims of the reviewer as well. If you are concerned with reading as entertainment/relaxation, is this an issue at all? It seems to me that in this case you can judge a book pretty much strictly according to your own aesthetic of pleasure, which is certainly one useful function of a review (and I always try to include this aspect in mine). But other reviews are more akin to literary criticism, and I think the blog format lends itself well to this. We are not limited by word counts in print publications (or by the demand for mass readership), and we’re also not limited to reviewing strictly new releases. We have more ability to reflect on what the author accomplished and how that fits into a bigger picture, if we so choose, but how hard it can be to feel comfortable doing so.

Mostly, this makes me reflect on my reading patterns—reading widely versus reading deeply, how and why we choose one or the other, how we shift between the two. A recent post at Wuthering Expectations contemplated the question.

What I’m calling diminishing returns – the novel I’m reading is just like other novels I have read, the history I’m studying is mostly full of ideas I have already encountered – is actually a crucial step towards real understanding, towards specialization. Great scholars repeat themselves, circle around the a single set of facts or single author, searching for new insights. But that will never be me, so at some point, I would shift my attention to something else. I don’t plan to write about 19th century Western literature for the rest of my life, either.

Why do I say “switch” to Asian literature? Because for the Neurotic Reader, everything is a project. Lists of books, background history, modern essayists. Jonathan Spence on China, Donald Keene on Japan. Perhaps this post will serve as a goad to myself – don’t read so neurotically. Dip in, wander around, use the lists for inspiration. A certain amount of neurosis is probably necessary to actually finish a long, complex book life The Tale of Genji. But some moderation, please.

I do want to insist on the value of specialization, even for amateurs. Spending a year or two reading nothing but classical Greek literature is a different experience than scattering the books over a lifetime. Very valuable, very satisfying. But there are limits to our energy, and interest, and time.

So, for those who have made it through this long, rambling train of thought, how do you feel about the question? Do you review historical fiction when you know nothing about the time period, concerned only with whether the book made for a good read? Do you neurotically read every book by an author just to get a firm grip on where he’s coming from? I’ve even read multiple books by an author I couldn’t stand, just to see if I was missing something. I’ve concentrated on the issues involved in fiction, here, though Mason’s post touched on nonfiction as well—that may require another ramble.