WHY DO PEOPLE WRITE BOOK REVIEWS?
I used to think the whole point of this racket was to force publishers to pay attention to my own books. Editorial screeners, however, have little clout or they simply resent query letters that lead with a whiff of a tit-for-tat proposal for them to accept me as a potential supplier of literary merchandise in exchange for my support of their products.
The reviewer gig does offer some perks, like free samples; and it's usually more lucrative to write about books than to write the damn things, even when you factor in all of the time it takes to read them.
Apart from industrial considerations such as personal career advancement, there's an altruistic side to book reviewing. This ranges from the fairly innocent (I love books, therefore I write about them to spread my enthusiasm to others) to the reasonably corrupt (I love books that really matter--not the crap the NY Times thinks is important--so I aim to reward fiction that advances the art of fiction). And then, some people just like to criticize things (I love to write about what I hate).
Although most book reviews are written by freelancers for little or no money, newspapers and magazines often have staffers whose job is to review books. Beyond that, there are plenty of commercial opportunities for freelancers, even if you don't specialize in quickies of under 200 pages for cash cows who pay more than $200 for a short review. By indulging in some tricks of the trade (reading a few pages and then cobbling together your review from quotes in the press pack), anyone can turn a buck on the book beat.
After all, the stylebook standards of reviews are child's play. Basically, you dress up a plot summary with some toney opinionating (just go easy on the poststructuralist lingo), dangle a reservation or two, and close with a pick or a pan.
While some dream of being critics, nobody sets out to become a book reviewer. Primarily, reviewers are writers, editors, or professors who have or have had other lit projects more ambitious than review work.
Not that this means the reviews are slipshod knock-offs. The pros I know consider (reread, if necessary) an author's previous books as well as similar books by others, seldom review books by friends or enemies, and skip rather than slam books by unknown writers.
Editors have some influence over quality, but nothing drives reviewers as effectively as the fear of hanging their asses out in public. You can toil in painstaking obscurity, cranking out reliable and incisive reviews, but if you compare Frankenstein to Gertrude Stein, you're bound to be immortalized in a blurb.
Although experienced reviewers are better at covering their asses than beginners are, even the best ones can unwittingly look like fools. Some play the reference game. To put something in critical context, they nick so many literary luminaries that reading their reviews is like watching an arcade superstar play pinball. Others succumb to the towline effect (or its inverse, the backlash effect), where the value of the book is directly (or, inversely) proportional to the effort it took them to read and review it. Often the towline effect has a cart-pulling-the-horse dynamic (see the NY Review of Books): If the review is five times longer than it needs to be, the book must be important.
Reviewers new to the game may threaten to get personal, as they star-fuck their favorites and lay waste to their foes. This gets old fast, but generally, I think it's good for a reviewer to have a personal stake in the book under review. Who better than an entomologist to review a book about entomology, even if she just wrote a book on the same topic?
Book review assignments may deserve another article or none at all: The topic is either too mysterious or too obvious. Everybody knows that a tiny percentage of published books get reviewed, that big names and bestsellers and commercial houses hog the ink, that tons of worthy books go undiscovered. Many suspect that reviewers despise the proliferation of books, even while the reviewers themselves feed the literary lottery pot with their own hopes to overcome the astronomical odds and win fame.
Few realize, however, that nobody determines what books get reviewed as much as the reviewers do (more through whim and inertia than through any flex of power), and that the most formidable obstacle an author wanting to be reviewed can face is the neglect or incompetence of his own publisher.
And why do people read book reviews?
So they don't have to read books.
(Doug Nufer is an editor of and contributor to American Book Review. His book reviews have appeared in the Nation, the Seattle Times, the Oregonian, and the San Francisco Bay Guardian, and currently appear in the Stranger and Rain Taxi. He hated to write book reports in school.)
TOMORROW: What might really be behind the recent frey over movie content.
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