Splinters

Another reason why I don't buy newspapers, even if they talk about things that interest me: today's Observer Review discusses the politics of book reviewing (that is, reviewers talking about reviewers reviewing ? something they'd never allow anyone else to do, particularly novelists!). Stephanie Merritt uses the recent example of James Wood leaving himself open to attack by writing a novel after "the savagery of his attacks" on other writers. She also refers to The Believer's Heidi Julavits' essay on the subject in which, apparently, she calls for an end to hostile reviews. I say apparently because the piece is headed with a summary that dulls my appetite:

"Discussed: Tripe, George Orwell, The Badly Made Well Made Story, Triling [sic], Hysterical Realism, Omelets [sic], Fleas Weighers, Born Again Christians, Casual Master-Slave Metaphors, Anti-Intellectualism, Snark Bytes, Bunny Wilson, Ambition"

It's also too long to read online. Anyway, the whole thing seems to miss the important aspects of the issue. Not, "are hostile reviews justified?", or "is there an incestuous relationship between reviewers and reviewed?" (as the Observer's readers discuss), but what is being reviewed in the first place? The book, of course. Wood's "savagery" is generally justified internally; that is, he has space to contextualise his critique. He doesn't gossip and sneer. To summarise his work as Merritt does is to misrepresent (just as the same newspaper did throughout the Iraq War debate). Unfortunately, it has become the function of newspapers to do this, even those like The Observer.

Perhaps, as a guide to alternatives, we should look at Blanchot's distinction between the work and the book; the former being, crudely, the unrelenting stream of a writer's inspiration, the latter being a vesselful recovered from that stream (the link goes to one of his greatest essays, The Gaze of Orpheus). Therefore, the reviewer assesses the success of that recovery, and perhaps the possibilities of that inspiration. We could then ditch obsessions with the side issues so beloved of the gossip-mongers, and take reviewing beyond the branch of marketing that so many mistake it for.