For years, I have been interested in the philosophy and underlying ethics of any work of art, of its creation, of its presentation, of its place in the universe. So in keeping with that interest, I am going to start looking at different frameworks related to that. Today's debut will be thoughts on John Updike's Rules for Reviewing. I recognize that many of my comments might be internally contradictiory, but these are guerilla observations, and I look forward to arguing about them.
UPDIKE'S RULES FOR REVIEWING
- Try to understand what the author wished to do, and do not blame him for not achieving what he did not attempt.
- Give him enough direct quotation—at least one extended passage—of the book’s prose so the review’s reader can form his own impression, can get his own taste.
- Confirm your description of the book with quotation from the book, if only phrase-long, rather than proceeding by fuzzy precis.
- Go easy on plot summary, and do not give away the ending. (How astounded and indignant was I, when innocent, to find reviewers blabbing, and with the sublime inaccuracy of drunken lords reporting on a peasants’ revolt, all the turns of my suspenseful and surpriseful narrative! Most ironically, the only readers who approach a book as the author intends, unpolluted by pre-knowledge of the plot, are the detested reviewers themselves. And then, years later, the blessed fool who picks the volume at random from a library shelf.)
- If the book is judged deficient, cite a successful example along the same lines, from the author’s ouevre or elsewhere. Try to understand the failure. Sure it’s his and not yours?
- To these concrete five might be added a vaguer sixth, having to do with maintaining a chemical purity in the reaction between product and appraiser. Do not accept for review a book you are predisposed to dislike, or committed by friendship to like. Do not imagine yourself a caretaker of any tradition, an enforcer of any party standards, a warrior in an idealogical battle, a corrections officer of any kind. Never, never (John Aldridge, Norman Podhoretz) try to put the author “in his place,” making him a pawn in a contest with other reviewers. Review the book, not the reputation. Submit to whatever spell, weak or strong, is being cast. Better to praise and share than blame and ban. The communion between reviewer and his public is based upon the presumption of certain possible joys in reading, and all our discriminations should curve toward that end.
1. Try to understand what the author wished to do, and do not blame him for not achieving what he did not attempt.
Taken on its own, this rule is ridiculous. Surely the choice of content can be just as disappointing as any technical failings within the book? After all, how many novels do we need that are written by White Male Narcissists about White Male Narcissist midlife crises? (Granted, Updike may not be the best person to ask that question of).
How many novels do we need about post-adolescence ennui? The triteness of this topic was more than enough to reduce my enjoyment of Fitzgerald's This Side of Paradise. I couldn't get past the fact that I was 24 and still reading about Holden Caulfield, slightly older but infinitely less wise. Just because it was Fitzgerald's intent to write about post-college drift, doesn't mean I have to judge it purely as a member of the genre of 'novels about post-college drift.'
If an author cannot start with subject matter that is ambitious, or at least interesting, of course that would color my review of it. Just as I couldn't help but blame The Help for being flat when it had such rich potential. Stockett set out to give voice to the black maid whose personal life she knew nothing about. She succeeded in this 100%, and failed on almost every other level. Under Updike's rule, I should ignore every other one of those levels.
To me, this rule sounds too much like saying 'don't bring your life experience and philosophy into your reading and reviewing,' which is inane as an observation, and practically impossible.
2. Give him enough direct quotation—at least one extended passage—of the book’s prose so the review’s reader can form his own impression, can get his own taste.
This rule can only serve MFA style writers. Why is that? One word: NARRATIVE. While a quote is useful to illustrate the overall style of the novel, an extended passage serves little purpose, as it gives you no idea of the scope of the narrative. A novel needs a lot more than pretty sentences to be readable (in fact, novels written with such minute focus tend to drag). So while I agree that the reviewer's job is to give the reader enough information to form his or her own impression, recording extended passages is not the best way to achieve it.
Madame Bovary may now be considered the finest novel ever written, but that's not why it became a bestseller. Everyone who read it in 18th century France saw a version of themselves or their everyday problems in the novel. So in a sense, the job of the reviewer is to convey the relevance of the book to the reader, whether that relevance is cultural, moral, educational or strictly emotional.
3. Confirm your description of the book with quotation from the book, if only phrase-long, rather than proceeding by fuzzy precis.
I had to read this five times before I could even understand what it meant. So he's saying you need to find a quote from the author's novel in order to validate your own review? What if your issue is with character, plot, setting, detail or any of those other things that influence the quality of a book? Surely a review is all about creating a fuzzy precis: you want to give a little bite, a slight taste of the novel, without giving away any of the surprises. Let's see if I can break this down by example.
Say I was reviewing Les Miserables. To put it simply (what Updike calls a fuzzy precis), I would summarize it something like follows. "Les Miserables is the story of one man's desperate attempt to find redemption after one life-changing mistake, a quest that involves challenging both the conventions of society and the strong arm of the law." Can there possibly be ONE QUOTE in the entire novel that encompasses that theme?
Granted, that's a very top-level description of the novel's themes. Let's move a little closer in. "Through the course of the novel, Valjean learns that there is no salvation for himself, only for those touched by his revolution against social norms and expectations." Again, same question.
Which brings me to my main point: how can a review that is normally 3 columns on one page provide anything more than a fuzzy precis? And more to the point, would you want it to?
4. Go easy on plot summary, and do not give away the ending. (How astounded and indignant was I, when innocent, to find reviewers blabbing, and with the sublime inaccuracy of drunken lords reporting on a peasants’ revolt, all the turns of my suspenseful and surpriseful narrative! Most ironically, the only readers who approach a book as the author intends, unpolluted by pre-knowledge of the plot, are the detested reviewers themselves. And then, years later, the blessed fool who picks the volume at random from a library shelf.)
DO NOT GIVE AWAY THE ENDING. No arguing with that.
I also tend to agree about providing too much plot summary. Honestly, when I read a review, I want a holistic appraisal of a novel's merits, its themes, and whether the narrative ties together. That said, I do not want to know about exactly how the story arrives at its conclusion, I just want assurance that it does arrive in a satisfactory (and preferably unique) manner. Some reviews read like they're giving away the magician's tricks five minutes before the show.
5. If the book is judged deficient, cite a successful example along the same lines, from the author’s ouevre or elsewhere. Try to understand the failure. Sure it’s his and not yours?
I understand the point being made here; points of reference are the quickest shorthand for readers to determine whether a novel succeeds or not without reading anything but the review. But this also reminds me of the dominant creative writing teacher attitude: "Yes it's good, it's exciting, BUT WHY DON'T YOU WRITE MORE LIKE HEMINGWAY!" In which case the fault is absolutely with the reader.
Also, this rule is predicated on the assumption that one work can be objectively cited as more or less successful than another. How do you prove this, do you nitpick at sentences? In that case, see my response to Rule 2. If not, how do you judge the totality of a work against another? My opinion of Anna Karenina was tempered because I thought it had the same plot as Madame Bovary but wasn't executed as well. But I know a hundred people who would say the exact opposite, and I think both sides can justify themselves pretty well. So if I see a sentence in a review like, "The author would have been well served to refer to the exemplar of the female adultery story, Anna Karenina," then the trust is broken between me and the reviewer. And there's no reason for that sentence to really be there except to express the reviewer's own opinion on an unrelated work and then create false equivalences.
6 (ish). To these concrete five might be added a vaguer sixth, having to do with maintaining a chemical purity in the reaction between product and appraiser. Do not accept for review a book you are predisposed to dislike, or committed by friendship to like. Do not imagine yourself a caretaker of any tradition, an enforcer of any party standards, a warrior in an idealogical battle, a corrections officer of any kind. Never, never (John Aldridge, Norman Podhoretz) try to put the author “in his place,” making him a pawn in a contest with other reviewers. Review the book, not the reputation. Submit to whatever spell, weak or strong, is being cast. Better to praise and share than blame and ban. The communion between reviewer and his public is based upon the presumption of certain possible joys in reading, and all our discriminations should curve toward that end.
Principally, I agree with this rule completely. Practically speaking though, I'm not sure how feasible it is, especially with books; so few make it to the level of societal conversation that I can imagine professional reviewers are forced to read them even if they are predisposed against them. Frankly, some books just fail to provide any joy in reading them, and if that is so, then it becomes the responsibility of the reviewer to convey that.
But I subscribe to the Nick Hornby theory of reading: if you really really don't like it, don't feel obliged to finish it, so then you don't feel resentful towards the author and the novel for taking up your time and preventing you from reading something else.
As for the point about never putting an author in his place to make an ideological point, I've already broken that in the course of this review by employing the phrase "White Male Narcissist." But in Updike's time, the majority of the literati were white men. Now, the majority of readers and writers are women. It is absolutely an ideological concern that novels about male midlife crises are considered "Great American Novels" while novels about female midlife crises are considered women's fiction, so often I am compelled to fight back against that. But should I be doing that as a reviewer? Probably not, but it's impossible to leave such concerns at the door.
I do agree that in an ideal world, you should surrender yourself to a novel free of any knowledge of its reputation, and review it on those merits. But in this era of universal media saturation, I don't always think that's possible.
CONCLUSION
What is the purpose of a review, at the end of the day? It is not the same as criticism. It serves to inform people's awareness of art that is being produced, and enable them to make their own judgment. If I were to follow Updike's rules, I don't think that I'd actually be providing enough information for a reader to make that decision, and would in fact be misleading them on multiple points. (Now off to find objective proof of this in reviews written by Updike, so I can discuss this in more than just abstract terms in a future post. I might even be proven wrong.)
Rule 1
ReplyDeleteUpdike warns us not to critique what is not being attempted. This still leaves room to comment on what an author chooses to attempt. And remember we're talking about reviewing, not criticism. A reader of techno-thrillers is probably aware that the characters are weak and the writing terse - what they want to know is, does it succeed as a techno-thriller?
Rule 2
There are lots of reasons I might like or dislike a book, and among these is the writing style. I appreciate having a representative quotation, not so I can judge how good the writing is, but so I can tell if it's the sort of thing I might like.
Rule 3
In other words, give some evidence for your judgment. I don't just want to know if I would like the book, I want to know if I can trust you as a reviewer. You can't and shouldn't accompany every statement with an illustrative quotation, but you have to give me a chance to make up my own mind.
Rule 4
Obviously.
Rule 5
Like Rule 3, this is partly about trust. As a reviewer you need to show the reader you're a competent judge of what you're reviewing. By providing a comparative example you can demonstrate that your problem is not 'I wish this historical romance was more like Hemingway', but 'this theme is explored much better in Work X.' As a fan of science fiction and fantasy this is very important to me. Some reviewers have an a priori objection to any genre fiction; if they follow this rule, their book review is still useful to me because I have some idea of what they're using as a comparison.
Rule 6
What the rules add up to is that you must assess the work on its own terms, without regard to your personal feelings about the author, genre, or the Responsibilty of the Artist. If you can't do that, don't review it. Absolute objectivity might be impossible, but you have to do your best.
Incidentally, I find the criticism 'how many novels about X do we need' very dubious, particularly in a review. If you don't like this sort of literature, don't read it. It's not the fault of the Great White Male Narcissists if they are given undue prominence by critics, many of whom are GWMNs themselves.
You're absolutely right about the review vs. criticism divide, I think I tend to like reviews that are a little bit of both (but actually it's quite irritating when they veer too much on the criticism side when you haven't actually read the book yet).
ReplyDeleteI suspect I approached this with too many perspectives. Updike, like most of his contemporary authors, only wrote reviews when he wanted to, unlike professional reviewers employed by leading publications who are usually told what they have to review. So for him, (and any authorial review, and any blogger's reviews), these rules absolutely make sense, but for professional reviewers they're impractical.
For me personally, as a discerning reader, I do want quotes, because plodding prose is a deal-breaker for me from the outset. But I don't think most readers are concerned with style as much as content.
I do see how comparisons can be useful in genre fiction, but I often find that the same comparisons don't come to mind for me as for others, so I don't necessarily find them useful. I can't tell you how many reviews compare books to Jane Austen or to Dostoevsky in some minute way or turn of phrase when the novels have nowhere near the complexity or depth of the originals. But of course that's the fault of the reviewer for turning in lazy comparisons.
But fundamentally, you're right, it's an issue of trust. The reviewers I trust do use comparisons, but they are be accurate. Their aim is to build up the art of reading, not exorcise their personal hatreds of the author or of an ideology. Most importantly, they will TELL YOU ABOUT THE BOOK ITSELF, not its place in canon (pure arrogance!), or whether its the best novel written, or any similar nonsense that is all too common of late.
(off-topic) I was reading on another site a famous example where they had Henry Kissinger review the book of a prominent critic, and the review chiefly consisted of him trashing the author personally and defending his own foreign policy decisions. WAY TO BREAK ALL THE RULES HENRY!