Closing Opening Lines
At one point, it began to get on my nerves. It struck me as a reviewer’s thoughtless means of getting an otherwise perceptive review started. And then at another point, I realised perhaps something else was going on. And yet at this point, when I�m writing about, I still don�t know what it is. Maybe you can help?
What am I talking about? Well, a particular way of beginning a book review. I’ve noticed it on a regular basis and never noted it down, but twice recently, indeed almost three times, it’s appeared again and caused enough irritation for me to reach for my writing implements. On September 13th, the much-praised novelist Ali Smith began her review of Nicola Barker’s new novel Behindlings thus: “At one point in Wide Open, the novel which [blah blah blah]“, while on October 27th, Adam Mars Jones, an otherwise original reviewer, began his review of Baudolino: “At one point in Umberto Eco’s new novel�”.
They are not isolated examples. Take a look at the Google search results for the phrase. OK, not overwhelming evidence, but variations are used too. Zachery Leader’s opening to his TLS review of Donna Tartt’s latest commodity is: “At the end of Treasure Island, the main model for � The Little Friend�”.
A forgivable tic perhaps. But I think it reveals the unease that reviewers feel when confronted with another outgrowth of “pointless” literature. It compels them to drown out the hermetic mystery of a narrative with the noise of the ephemeral point-making constituting most newspaper book review pages (that is, external reference points all the time, using certain instances in the narrative to stand for the whole and thereby somehow diminishing the whole, albeit unintentionally). Is this why reviews seem to leave out so much of what we, as readers, experience as we read?
Other SpikeMagazine.com posts of interest:
- The short and the long
- Summer reading: a book is a mirror …
- Dalrymple isn’t his real name
- Checkpoint Charlie
- Moore, Godard, no connecting thread
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