March 29th, 2011 / 11:43 am
Snippets

Do (or should) book reviewers have any moral responsibilities? Does whether they’re getting paid or not influence this consideration?

64 Comments

  1. alexanderchee

      I do think reviewers have a moral responsibility to the reader and the writer both—to the reader, to pursue a conversation over aesthetics that matters. To the writer, to read it thoroughly, and to engage with it honestly, and without spite or bad faith. And pay shouldn’t affect it in the slightest.

  2. alexisorgera

      I think the moral responsibility of a reviewer is likely honesty–don’t say things you don’t mean. That said, I only tend to review books I really like–I’m not getting paid for or assigned to review books and, frankly, I’m not going to waste my time reading something I think sucks.

  3. M. Kitchell

      I agree with this x100, and it was actually the entire point of this post I made, but apparently my point got side-stepped by people who wanted to entertain the idea that they’re entitled to vocalize their hatred of things

  4. Roxane

      The reviewer’s only responsibility is to to be honest and accurate. Like Alexis, I primarily only review books I love because I do it on my own time, for free, and I don’t have the patience to review a book I don’t like. Theres a lot to be learned from a negative review, sure. I think they are as valuable a part of the criticism canon as positive reviews but I’ll leave that work to others for the most part.

      The pay thing doesn’t influence me one way or another save to wonder how they managed that and do they have tips on how other reviewers can make it rain.

  5. Samuel Sargent

      As has already been said, reviewers have a moral obligation to be honest. I believe they are also morally obligated to review a work for what it is, not for what the reviewer wishes it to be, which I suppose is another form of honesty. Another side of this is that the reviewer is morally obligated to give the work a fair chance. Any work can be picked apart and destroyed if you go in seeking to do just that. I could take any work from the theoretical list of greatest novels of all time and give it an honest review that shreds it to pieces.

      In a way, a book reviewer’s moral obligation isn’t only to the author and to his readers, but also to himself. Tearing apart a novel for dishonest reasons does as much a disservice to the reviewer as it does to everyone else.

  6. Samuel Sargent

      As has already been said, reviewers have a moral obligation to be honest. I believe they are also morally obligated to review a work for what it is, not for what the reviewer wishes it to be, which I suppose is another form of honesty. Another side of this is that the reviewer is morally obligated to give the work a fair chance. Any work can be picked apart and destroyed if you go in seeking to do just that. I could take any work from the theoretical list of greatest novels of all time and give it an honest review that shreds it to pieces.

      In a way, a book reviewer’s moral obligation isn’t only to the author and to his readers, but also to himself. Tearing apart a novel for dishonest reasons does as much a disservice to the reviewer as it does to everyone else.

  7. NathanH

      Everyone has moral responsibilities, but different people approach integrity differently, often depending on the time of day. But I disagree with the notion of only writing positive reviews – those are no longer reviews but articulate fan letters. A true critic (or any thoughtful reader) has the obligation to engage works they don’t care for, and while respecting the craft and dedication of the author, the reviewer can express a negative opinion in such a manner that readers who like what the critic dislikes can actually see the article as a selling point. As a writer, the worst thing isn’t readers talking poorly about your work – it’s no one bothering read or discuss your work in the first place.

  8. Anonymous

      I think reviewers have a moral responsibility to know more about books than writers know. And yes, honesty.

  9. blake butler

      approaching the book on its own terms rather than on one’s personal terms i think is one of the main things i was thinking about as a criteria. too many reviews consider books based on expectations or preferences of the reviewer rather than really trying to figure out what the book is up to, or wants to be up to, and then assessing how that plays out.

  10. Roxane

      At the same time, reading is personal so it makes sense to me that there is value in reviews that approach books on personal terms. I like both kinds of reviews–those grounded in the personal and those that deal with the book on its own terms.

  11. Anonymous

      I think the responsibility is more with the individual reader than his/her role as a reviewer. One has to be rigorous and serious in pursuit of whatever one’s pursuing. That shit yesterday with the author responding to her bad review is a great example- what a silly thing to finish and review.

  12. Samuel Sargent

      Which again comes down to honesty. There’s nothing wrong with talking about what you would have preferred the author did, but that shouldn’t be the focus of the review. It would be the equivalent of reviewing a ballet based on the fact that you would have preferred to attend a boxing match. There’s nothing wrong with a personal review when it’s made clear that that is what it is, thus allowing readers to judge the merits of the review fairly.

  13. DiTrapano

      I’ve never written a book review.

  14. DiTrapano

      I’ve never written a book review.

  15. M. Kitchell

      while I agree with this and endorse the idea of engaging with a book on its own terms, i feel like this is often a short-cut used by reviewers/critics to try to aim for some “objectivity” in assessing the quality of a work, ya know?

      & this idea of “objectivity” is probably pure bullshit, yeh.

  16. Sean

      I like to review as an extension of one of my favorite activities: discussing and trading books with others. I have several friends I trade books with in the summer, usually with a theme (last year was “gritty”–I really enjoyed giving them Firework). I read a lot of new books this way. And I get pleasure when my friends read my suggestions and we later see each other and discuss.

      So my responsibility when reviewing is to be in good faith in stating, “Here is a book you should read.” And why.

      That’s all.

  17. Lincoln Michel

      I think reviewers have a moral obligation to review a book honestly and not like write a positive review because they are getting paid under the table to do so. That’s about it. I don’t think a reviewer has an obligation to review a book if they don’t like it.

  18. Ale cniedenthal

      What are the terms of a book?

  19. NLY

      Rather than ‘honesty’ or other such useful but hazy terms, I prefer ‘accuracy’. There has to be thorough-going complex and composite accuracy, an emotional and experiential accuracy, an accuracy of description and of assessment, an accuracy of self and of others. It’s the same accuracy required to write anything, really.

  20. John Minichillo

      Honesty is relative. A reviewer may very well believe they are being honest when not reviewing a book on it’s own terms. They may feel a responsibility to their readers, and to their editor/publisher, maybe more so than to the writer of the book they are reviewing.

      There’s an overall lack of serious criticism and/or rigor in reviews. This may not be the fault of the reviewer but more a result of the diminished place of books in our culture. Often book reviews are equal to movie reviews, or reviews of reality TV shows. One would think literary tradition would require more of a reviewer, but times have changed.

      They’ve changed so much that anyone can be a reviewer. If people read their blog they can review. Or they can send the review to one of the many hundreds of literary mags. All that is required is an opinion in the form of a short essay.

      In this tightly-knit and supportive online lit. community we see plenty of reviews of the opinion variety, but since they are mostly positive, no one minds. When people outside this tightly-knit and supportive online lit. community respond with curiosity at what are often quirky or even intentionally confounding works, folks get upset. So honesty isn’t always appreciated. We write The Museum of the Book of Freaks at American Apparel and expect the mainstream cultural curators to get it too.

      I think there’s a lot less honesty, both within and without this tightly-knit online community, mostly in the direction of positive reviews. Writers will review books to bring attention to their own books, or to place themselves in a circle of similar authors. Writers are loath to say negative things about other writers, or about a press they might want to also see themselves on one day.

      Honesty is a nice idea but it takes an educated understanding of tradition and the current moment, and it also takes courage.

  21. deadgod

      Not so much pretending that a book (or movie, building, meal, etc.) is an object held at a forensically incontaminable distance, even less that a book is self-sufficient, with entirely its own ‘rules’ to the point that readers are equally objects before it – but rather meeting a book, what, within 15% either way of halfway.

      For example, a detective novel or western or spy thriller anticipates and, in turn, has imposed on it expectations – with respect to indulgence of the toolkit of cliche, say – that are simply less hostile to those indulgences than are the expectations imposed on ‘literary fiction’. (A reviewer that hates some particular genre but reviews books in that genre as though they were like books in genres the reviewer doesn’t hate – that’s the kind of dishonesty (I think) that Blake is talking about.)

      ‘Taking books as they come’ would be not so much a pretense to objectivity as an acknowledgment of its impossibility (by way of making the context of genre, say, an evaluative priority), no?

  22. Mike Meginnis

      My goal as a reviewer is to serve the reader, the writer, myself, and the community as much as possible. This might suggest an overwhelmingly positive review, and that I only review work about which I have overwhelmingly positive thoughts and feelings, but I don’t feel that way about nearly anything I read: I always have at least one or two critical reservations, and I think those are worth discussing.

      Really great work isn’t possible to describe through superlatives alone, after all: it takes risks, and where risks are taken there will be some measure of failure beside the success. The best writing incorporates its failures as a sort of flavor — a sourness, as I think of it.

      So I think careful, precise description of how a book works is the primary obligation of a reviewer. This careful description will sometimes read as praise, sometimes as criticism — sometimes even harsh criticism. But this will serve the reader, myself, and the writer by promoting a deeper understanding of the work, and it will actually serve far better as advocacy within and outside the community, will sell more books, because I refuse to buy anything on the basis of breathless, unreflective praise. It gets very dull to write, and at this point I find reading it unbearable.

  23. herocious

      on the books terms or personal terms so long as it’s anecdotal.

  24. deadgod

      I thought “Al” was being “rigorous and serious” in the way he structured his qualification: ‘if you get to the end, you’ll probably have been entertained, but if you don’t, here’s probably why’. – That, to me, seems more serious than, after having communicated to the author that ‘he’ had gotten the e-copy, not posting any reaction to the novel. He’d committed himself to responding to the book, had he not? Bending over backwards to be encouraging to her ambition was, to me, fair of him – and maybe he genuinely thought it was a pleasure to go through the story despite its lousy telling.

      ?

  25. Tim Jones-Yelvington

      Yes, this.

  26. Tim Jones-Yelvington

      I like it if folks own what’s personal and locate themselves in the review, but often they externalize it as some kind of objective criteria or received wisdom in a way that is obnoxious.

  27. Richard Thomas

      I agree with a lot of the sentiments on here. I review at The Nervous Breakdown, and I don’t get paid. The reasons I do it? To help promote authors that I love, to get more eyeballs on the voices that move me, inspire me, effect me, and it saves my budget too. I also try to support small and independent presses. I primarily only post up reviews of things I love, books that I really enjoyed. Sometimes I’ll go into a review and think “Oh, this book is going to kick ass,” and then find that I don’t love it, or struggle with it. Happens. Do I drop the review? ONLY if I really don’t like the book. Then I’ll just tell my editor it isn’t a project I want to see though, it isn’t something I can support. BUT if it’s a compelling read, something challenging, even if I don’t LOVE it, I try to find a way to get it out there, find something about the book worth talking about.

      For example, THE ORANGE EATS CREEPS. This was a very difficult book for me. BUT, like other books that I struggled with, work by Burroughs, or Erickson, in the end I found it really exciting, and something I found myself thinking about. In other words, it stayed with me, effected me. Because I had a hard time with it, and I wanted to open up a dialog about it, for TOEC, I contacted Blake and asked him if he’d have a conversation about it. That’s what went up instead of a review where I might struggle to comprehend the writing or write about it in an intelligent manner. I think, in the end, the book got more attention that way. Polarizing work needs attention too.

      The main responsibility we have is to be honest and write about the things that move us, I think.

  28. letters journal

      What about the obligation to stir shit up and keep it interesting?

  29. Anonymous

      Fair point. I don’t know if I agree that encouraging someone’s ambition is always right or good, but if ‘he’ felt ‘he’ had to say something, then sure.

      BUT!- after having read her website/comments, I’m thinking AL could have known was coming. Leading a cow to a gentle, humane slaughter still involves killing the cow.

  30. M. Kitchell

      i think it’s fully possible to stir shit up and keep it interesting in a way that doesn’t inherently devalue someone else’s work

  31. alexisorgera

      That seems to be where a lot of folks are going with workshops, too. I did summer camp with Matthew Zapruder once, and we had to stick to “really trying to figure out what the [poem] is up to, or wants to be up to, and then assessing how that plays out.” It runs counter to…maybe human nature? People want to express their own opinions versus really looking at/listening to other people, right? Look at mainstream media. Everyone’s all about proclaiming their own agendas vs. actually hearing each other. Anyway, I think you’re right. But I also want to be able to say, this book just hit me to the core BECAUSE it knows what it’s up to. I guess that’s the assessment part.

  32. lily hoang

      I don’t understand why people write scathing reviews. I don’t think it’s a reviewer’s obligation to obliterate a book they hate, just because he/she can. Honestly, I don’t have enough time to read all the books I want to read. If I start reading a book I don’t like, I stop. I don’t waste my time writing a bitter review about it.

      Then again, I guess I’ve never really been paid to review, so, what do I know? Like Alexis and Roxane, I tend to review books I love. I love books and I love reviewing. But I see no need to write a scathing review, even for the sake of “honesty.” When reviewing, I aim to be critical and honest and give due praise. After all, I know what it’s like to write a book (you know… it’s a lot of work) and publishing a book and getting that book killed in a review. So, maybe it’s empathetic honesty, or something like that.

  33. deadgod

      Yes, the writing at the site’s a mess – you can relate to the people on the thread who think the whole thing might be a hoax. – and to the people who say this headache (?) for Al is why they don’t agree to review things without some institutional filtration.

      It’s a tough call – how much to empower gatekeepers – who has the time + energy to wade through multiple books a week as one’s own gatekeeper? (It’s not easy for me to finish three books in a week.) So reviewers/teachers/friends who tell writers that they’re bad at writing might be a more-or-less humane ambition-euthanasia.

      – but! There’s plenty of writing (and film, etc.) that means a lot to me that Al, for example, might’ve weeded out. I think he was pretty respectful to the author, considering the challenges to literacy that she seems to face while writing.

  34. Amy McDaniel

      I think moral is a tricky word. I don’t think reviewing a book is a moral act, any more than writing anything else is. I’m with Oscar Wilde; the critic is making his own art: “To the critic the work of art is simply a suggestion for a new work of his own, that need not bear any obvious resemblance to the thing it criticizes.” After that, the review is either good art by some criteria, or bad art. Most of what people are calling immoral in this thread is just bad art, not immoral. Maybe I think this way because I don’t find reviews very helpful in whether I want to read a book or not. Reading a few pages, or hearing the author read, is much more helpful to me. I do, however, love reading criticism on its own merits, especially AFTER reading the book under discussion.

      The NYTBR is more or less a cheat sheet. Reading it allows you to talk about books without reading them through, since the fiction reviews summarize the plot and the nonfiction reviews pick out the most interesting facts. There are exceptions but this seems to be its main purpose. Its readers buy a lot of books reviewed, but that doesn’t mean they read them. The NYRB uses books as a kind of excuse, or framework, to talk about something or someone that the books happen to be about or by. I don’t think either of these are moral or not. I read both for different reasons.

      Unpaid reviewers who are out to promote things they love…that typically doesn’t interest me, as a reader. Seems like more of an exercise in avoiding cliche, while making up new ones. Instant cliches! Sounds like an oxymoron but it isn’t. In fact, I think it’s easier to write a dishonest positive review than a negative one. It’s harder to take something you love on its own terms. Many unpaid reviewers also have ulterior motives. They want to be liked or accepted or published or reviewed themselves or something, so they praise a book. Let them. It’s not immoral, but it doesn’t make for very interesting prose, either.

  35. Whatisinevidence

      The scathing review of ‘All Things Shining’ in the latest NYRB was one of the most entertaining essays I’ve read in a while. Of course, ‘All Things Shining’ is non-fiction, which changes things a little bit.

  36. Whatisinevidence

      The scathing review of ‘All Things Shining’ in the latest NYRB was one of the most entertaining essays I’ve read in a while. Of course, ‘All Things Shining’ is non-fiction, which changes things a little bit.

  37. c2k

      Wills’s review of All Things Shining… is an example of why a ‘critic’ might rightly choose to write a scathing review—to answer Ms. Hoang’s wondering, and to add to the general discussion here.

      Wills obviously found this book ridiculous but more importantly he viewed the accepted general critical response as even more preposterous (NYTBR, ‘Big Thinkers’). He states this at the very beginning of his review.

      Wills was clearly outraged and, always intellectually honest, felt compelled to rip the book, which he did, in a very entertaining manner, I agree.

      So to me this might be an act of responsible ‘moral’ (????) negative criticism.

  38. sm

      Agreed. There was a debut novel, reviewed in the NYT last year, and the reviewer didn’t really review the book, she reviewed the supporting materials that were part of the online promo package of the book (journals and stuff). She liked the supplemental materials more than the book and seemed to think the journals were more “realistic” than the book of fiction they inspired. What do you do with that? She didn’t review the book. And then to slam a work of fiction as not “realistic” enough seems…unhelpful at best.

  39. c2k

      Many unpaid reviewers also have ulterior motives. They want to be liked or accepted or published or reviewed themselves or something, so they praise a book. Let them. It’s not immoral…

      Are you saying that writing a “dishonest positive review” is not immoral?

  40. Amy McDaniel

      That’s exactly what I’m saying. Flattery and sycophancy are not immoral; they are simply boring, and not worth anyone’s attention. The intelligent reader can see through a dishonest review and will pay it no heed.

  41. c2k

      …I don’t find reviews very helpful in whether I want to read a book or not. Reading a few pages, or hearing the author read, is much more helpful to me

      I’ve heard other people say this. I don’t know if it’s true in your case, but I think this is often because a reader does not have a critic/reviewer he or she can trust, and this is a direct result of the decline in serious professional reviewing. Knowing a reviewer, knowing where that reviewer is coming from, helps in evaluating a review and therefore evaluating the book under review. We who read reviews, more often than not, read reviews by reviewers we’ve never heard of. I think that’s unhelpful.

  42. c2k

      Wow. Okay. I know people will often say matter-of-factly that this quid pro quo goes on and has been going on forever etc, and everyone does it, and I’m not judging people who do it, but I personally would not categorize it as not immoral, strictly.

  43. Amy McDaniel

      But this raises tricky questions. Is it immoral to write a dishonest poem? Is it immoral to decline to review a book you don’t like, because you don’t want to piss of the author or publisher? And what if you genuinely like the book, and so the review is honest, but the motive for actually taking the time to write the (honest) praise-filled review is to get people to like you, since after all you aren’t getting paid?

      I think it just gets dicey trying to assign moral value to any kind of writing. As I said before, I am of the belief that criticism is an art in its own right, and I find it difficult if not impossible to assign any moral judgments either way to the making of art. I’m not so sure anyone writes anything for entirely lofty reasons, but if good art comes from it, why should that be a bad thing?

  44. Amy McDaniel

      Perhaps. One critic I trust is David Gates, who taught me in a class. In the class, we read several books I already loved, and several that I now love, and Gates helped me to love them, and to love the ones I already loved even more. These were all old books, but he has since recommended new books to me that I have enjoyed. Later, in the NYTBR, he panned a book by Salman Rushdie. But would I have bought the book if he’d praised it? Probably not, because I can’t get into Rushdie. I would probably just mark it down as a place where our tastes diverged. If it were an author I’d never heard of, I would probably investigate further on Gates’s recommendation.

      But the fact that there aren’t many reviewers I know enough to trust doesn’t actually bother me. Gates’s review of Rushdie was very entertaining and worth reading even though I wasn’t considering whether to buy the book, because it was funny and well-written. Wills’s All Things Shining review that you linked to, and which I thus read, is similarly entertaining and thought-provoking even though I wouldn’t have bought the book anyway. So I guess my standards for reviews are overwhelmingly on the side of aesthetics and thought-value, rather than morality or even use-value, which is why I read reviews of a book primarily after I finish it.

  45. c2k

      Is it immoral to write a dishonest poem?

      No.

      Is it immoral to decline to review a book you don’t like, because you don’t want to piss of the author or publisher?

      No. A (potential) reviewer is under no obligation to act.

      And what if you genuinely like the book, and so the review is honest, but the motive for actually taking the time to write the (honest) praise-filled review is to get people to like you, since after all you aren’t getting paid?

      Not immoral. The review is honest.

      To me this is not really at all about art or writing. More so, it’s about being less than forthright about what you’re thinking in order to receive something for your intellectual dishonesty (whatever that might be—praise, notice, recognition, page views, contact(s)).

  46. c2k

      Fair enough.

      I also do not ‘get’ Rushdie.

      To be clear: More than not, I also do not read reviews through a moral lens. This is just the topic presented in this thread. Nor do I usally approach them with buy/don’t buy, read/don’t read mindset.

  47. c2k

      Looks like my typewriter might be dropping some letters.

  48. marshall

      yall postin in a troll thread

  49. Lukewarm100

      Not to get off topic, but Flatmancrooked is going out of business. At least according to Shya Scanlon. That sucks.

  50. Josephpatrickwood

      I really like Rain Taxi’s point of view on this. NO knowing the authorl why waste time shitting on things when there are so many books worthy of attention atrophying? It’s one thing to be paid by NYT; quite another to carve time to write a review for a place out of dedication for the art.

      I want to review things that teach me something I hadn’t thought of or knew that was possible. I have turned back books to the review journal I did not like.

  51. Josephpatrickwood

      I really like Rain Taxi’s point of view on this. NO knowing the authorl why waste time shitting on things when there are so many books worthy of attention atrophying? It’s one thing to be paid by NYT; quite another to carve time to write a review for a place out of dedication for the art.

      I want to review things that teach me something I hadn’t thought of or knew that was possible. I have turned back books to the review journal I did not like.

  52. T-Math

      Moral is a tricky word, but only because we make it one.

      I should start by saying that I just started reading John Gardner’s “On Moral Fiction” today, (because I recommend it, because I wanted to share my little instance of synchronicity, and because I want to be clear that I know I am not being original) and I would say that he would disagree vehemently with the idea that neither art nor the criticism that continues the communication of art are free of a distinct moral governance. This is where it gets tricky, though, because at this point, “moral” isn’t being used in reference to good or bad behavior, but is used more in line with a code a website might have for their discussion forum; like “keep the conversation moving,” or better yet “create with artistic vision instead of trying to convince somebody of an idea.” I haven’t finished the book, or spent a whole lot of time really digesting whether or not I agree wholly with Gardner, but at this point I am inclined to.

      As much as I like the idea of a critic making their own “art”, and I agree that the review doesn’t need to necessarily resemble what it is reviewing, I think that calling the review a piece of art goes a bit past criticism’s function, and loosens the definition of art (though art is, I think, a trickier word than moral). I know that I was floored when I read “How Tracy Austin Broke My Heart” by David Foster Wallace, but I wouldn’t say that it was for anything but the fact that Mr. Wallace expressed vividly something deep that I was able to follow along with and agree with at a level that created a resonance from gained understanding and mutual feeling.

      I’ll quote Gardner here: “Criticism, when most interesting and vital, tends toward art, that is…[*] making up fictions about fictions. To make the concrete abstract is inescapably to distort. It turns emotional development into logical progression, artistic vision into thesis. The trouble is that whereas the artist’s fiction is complex beyond our capacity to express it, the critic’s fictions–art cleaned up and clarified, at worst reduced to what the critic considers its main point–can easily take on the authority of Right” (14).

      The critic, especially the artful critic, has a responsibility, then, to the art they are championing through their actions; the time and effort it takes to be a critic, paid or not. If the critic has ulterior motives and wants to falsely tout an unworthy work, yeah, sure, let them, but any discerning reader will likely be able to see through it, and that critic will rightly lose luster.

      * — I removed an allusion to a previous metaphor that doesn’t make sense out of context.

  53. letters journal

      Nobody seems to complain when popular works are devalued (ie. Foer, Franzen, et cetera).

  54. letters journal

      Yes, exactly.

  55. M. Kitchell

      ok?

  56. alexisorgera

      You know, I think it’s probably a good idea as a publisher of reviews to make sure your reviewers don’t know the authors. Friend-reviews do tend to smack of nepotism. That said, I hate that! Most of my poet-friends, for instance, have become my friends because I came to love their work first. I seek people out whose work I respect, and I have a natural compulsion to write about writing that’s exciting to me. I like what Amy said about criticism being an art form in itself. Maybe I want to write in some new kind of framework, though. Writing about writing that isn’t necessarily considered criticism or review. That said, I’ve written some reviews, here even, of writing (and genres) I was unfamiliar with, and I’ve found that it’s much more intellectually rigorous work. I mean, you gotta think about that shit outside of any personal or biographical narrative framework. As Blake said, you really do have to take writing on its own terms when it’s unfamiliar territory.

  57. deadgod

      Well, it’s a balance, isn’t it? The object before one has its own material, formal, historical integrities, one understands; but part of one’s own ethical integrity is recognizing and accounting for one’s prejudices, for and against.

      It’s not that hard to be candid about one’s expectations and about the experience one had reading a book. Maybe it’s not so common that one’s experience reading a book is much interesting to other people, ha ha, but that’s a different topic from whether one can be clear about that experience itself.

  58. yrubmearbas

      My husband gets paid to write reviews for the L Mag and NY Times. He doesn’t get to chose what he reviews, which are what publicists are pushing or the editors have been handed, etc. When he reads a book he tries to find as many nice things as he can to say about it, mostly to be professional, and to avoid guilt and bad karma, but if he doesn’t mention the cons as well then he is threatening his credibility.

  59. deadgod

      I think the Foer-hate and Franzen-hate, while sometimes clothed in hipoisie I’m-not-a-member groupthink, is usually aggravated into passionate existence less by the books than by their popularity and the authors’ public holograms. People are angry/insulted/envious at/by/of popularity to the point of implacable sneer. The key in this discussion is whether Foer and Franzen, say, are damaged in their abilities to find appreciative audiences by the hate they routinely get in some forums; they seem still to be comfortably breathing.

  60. deadgod

      I’m against Oscar (and Pater, etc.) in this regard; I don’t think there is a wholly “own” art, a making that is outside of social, political-economic, and other frameworks – or webs – of responsibility.

      A critic chooses a narrower gauge than the piece she or he is reviewing: she or he has chosen this thing, and chosen to evaluate this thing. (- not that artists don’t narrow their scopes, or judge their ‘objects’, but rather that they do so with a ‘freedom’ that their critics have chosen (?) not to avail themselves of.)

      When you call “boring” a strong criterion for ‘not paying attention’, you might be indicating what other people would call a “moral” choice.

  61. deadgod

      Another example from that same NYRB of an entertaining and worth-doing scalpel-job is Bill McKibben’s, eh, critique of climate-change denial. Here’s a bit of his subtle ridicule:

      Yale University Press published a volume, The Lomborg Deception (2010), that checked every one of [Lomborg’s] footnotes [in The Skeptical Environmentalist] and found them regularly misleading. In his new book, Lomborg attempts to resuscitate his reputation, declaring that climate change is indeed at least a somewhat serious problem, and offering to show what course of action might best tackle it.

      McKibben’s skewering of Lomborg’s (and that of the makers of Cool It) fatuity and destructiveness are all the more entertaining and, I think, effective for its calm (albeit relentless) tone. There are lots of merchants who deserve vigorous debunking, though, as Whatisinevidence says, fiction is a different kind of ‘sale’.

  62. darby

      im with amy in that i think writing reviews is removed from the idea of morality. i hate the use of the word moral in this thread. you can say obligation, which i’ll still disagree with, but saying there is a moral obligation for entertainment to be talked about in some appropriate way is like saying there is a moral obligation for me to comment in this thread in some appropriate way. its on me if i lose twitter followers but no one is placing an obligation on me to maintain twitter followers, and if i was being paid to, no one is placing an obligation on me to keep my job. is writing fiction and/or about fiction and/or about anything a religion? like if we dont do it right god will smite us? is that the level that people here mean when you are saying morality? what entity are people envisioning as being the enforcer of the moral absolutes being placed on how we talk about make believe?

  63. Paternoster99

      the moral considerations of a critic should be this, and from this a bunch of other sub ‘this-es’: they must decide weather or not the book under review is worth the time of the reading public. of course, this is a stupid, subjective qualification that might be impossible to carry out when the reviewer is paid and he reviews books written by his friends. with the flood of tryuly shitty pieces of paper being peddled left and right as books now days begs the question, how;s a girl to know the difference? we (or I) as readers want (or should want) to read the best books we can get our undernourished hands on, and it is the reviewers job to help us out in this pursuit. of course, no one will ever agree with every review, but ad hominem horseshit or simple ‘it’s good, it sucks’ bullshit only muddy the waters further. reviews should be guides, not preachers of dogma, and the ethics of reviewing really just boils down to us readers’ ability to discern the glib from the sincere, and to use both as sign posts. but reviewers, to my mind, can steer an intellectual discourse far beyond what was intended in the first place into something profound. i think of sebald, in this case. corrupt reviewers (i cannot think of another word at the moment) are easy to spot. reviewing is an insightful, necessary enterprise, and the morons who use book reviews to jack off themselves or by proxy their friends are the easiest to spot and should just be ignored.

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      […] “souls who would shine”–which is, incidentally, my answer to Blake’s recent post. Answer: a critic should be critical, a problem which will be the challenge and measure of […]