Today I have been thinking about book reviews as tentacles of the book being reviewed, as an extension of the book, an addition to it. Like a book is a blog post and a review is the comment stream. Each blog post shares a symbiotic (parasitic?) relationship with its comment stream – unless, of course, you disable the comment stream, in which case you disallow the formation of direct extensions — of course someone could always do their own blog post linking to your post thereby forming an extension at their own site. In a way, thinking this way calls into question the notion of authorial sovereignty, which is to say: according to an older type of model, I write a book and therefore I am the author and I control the object — whereas in a newer type of model, if I write a book (or a blog post) the reviews (or the comment stream) can easily overtake the book (blog post) thereby pushing my role into the background and replacing it with whatever creation those extraneous appendages (comment streams) create, which is to say that my authority over the text gets taken out of my hands. But that’s not really where I want to go with this post. I don’t want to argue that a book review can somehow surpass the book being reviewed, because the whole reason I got on this mental pathway is because I have recently read a few book reviews that I thought were stand out pieces of literature in their own right – not better than the work being reviewed, but on par with it, as if the review was in some ways a productive extension of the book, a part of the book written by someone else…
Book reviews as extensions of the book: a review = a room with a door leading to the book. Perhaps some book reviews have multiple doors, one leading to the book, another leading to another review or to an interview with the author, a blog post about the book, an advertisement on a website or in a magazine, a phone conversation, a gchat, a video. The point is their interconnectivity.
Now I’m thinking about the orbit of a book. How a book is both a singular unified object and a multiplicity of objects, a fluidity, capable of being added to by criticism or praise, advertisement, word of mouth. Part of what makes a book bigger than itself is the hype surrounding it, the community surrounding it, the intensity of its collective magnitude. A book by itself is a tiny thing, a quiet, meek, emaciated, fledgling. A book with multiple reviews, that precipitates conversation, that appears on the sides of buildings in the form of stickers, that gets mentioned on a television show, that gets taught in a classroom, becomes bigger, grows larger, more massive. In this way, it’s hard to see how the review cannot be seen as part of the book, in that these extensions can help to make the book become the book. I suppose I am suggesting that in order for a book to become itself it needs to have multiple authors, multiple appendages, more voices than the one it creates.
You know the old adage: “If a tree falls in a forest…” well, this is sort of my point: if a book is written in America and no one is there to talk about it, does it make a sound? In other words, if a book is written in America and it gets no critical attention, no feedback, no buzz, no press, only silence, then is it even a book? Perhaps the very creation of a book — or, rather, the publication of a book — is the creation of the possibility of it someday becoming a book, given that someday someone somewhere may come across it and write about it, therefore triggering its full existence. But a book by itself, with no accompaniment, with no other voices attached to it, seems not like a book but more like a diary. Probably part of this train of thought arises from my own anxiety about the need for reviews, the need for buzz, the fear of failure should my own book go unnoticed. It reminds me of this really brilliant answer J.A. Tyler once gave when asked “What’s the worst thing someone has ever said about one of your artistic endeavors?” — he said:
For me, it is more about what people don’t say. You mail them a book and never hear back. You shoot them a pdf of a manuscript and no comments are returned. You ask for blurb and silence prevails. You give modest-acclaim for a press or a new novel or a publication, and no words are said back. This to me is the greatest form of devious, devilish remark. To say nothing about a literary work is, to me, to say everything negative, all at once, in the loudest voice possible. To say nothing is to say that this is bad, beyond bad, so bad that nothing in fact can be said about it. We try to tell ourselves no, don’t worry about it, the email was dropped, the mail was lost, the conversation was forgotten. It wasn’t. No no. Their silence means they hated it, they loathed it, they were disgusted by your words. Enjoy the silence is what I am saying, because it will ring in your ears forever.
Silence as the negation of existence.
Maybe it’s my cold medicine talking, or that I’m improvising here and probably all over the place, I can’t be sure. (I just finished teaching a particularly intense summer session and my brain is pretty fried.) But what I am sure of is that there are examples of book reviews that are more than book reviews, that are pleasurable to read as standalone works of literature and as extensions of the works they are reviewing. Along with Tyler Moore’s recent epistolary response to Mooney, David Rylance’s extraordinary review of Blake’s work called “The Darkest Fits of Light: on dwelling in Blake Butler’s de-compositions” is a good example. For me, Rylance’s review essay works as an extension of Blake’s books, making EVER and Scorch Atlas even bigger than they were before I read David’s addition. Does this mean Blake’s books weren’t books until David wrote his review essay? No, of course not — it had already been activated: other people had already written about those books, while interviews, advertisements, videos, etcetera had already been created as additional amplifying appendages. What David’s review essay did was add yet another room, another door, another voice to those books, making them even larger, even louder, even more powerful than they were before.
Likewise, I think the three reviews I read recently that sparked these thoughts also make the books they are covering bigger than they were before:
“Coma: The Art of Unconsciousness”
By Stephen Barber
“Through Trickery and Sheer Luck: Sasha Fletcher’s amazing escape from his inner editor”
By Ken Sparling
“Gaga A-GoGo”
By Will Cordeiro
In closing, I wonder how or if it would change a reviewer’s habits to think about their reviews as extensions of the work being reviewed. Like if I, as a reviewer, thought of myself as, in a way, co-author. Or if I, as a reviewer, felt an obligation to make my review a worthy extension. What if there was a simple shift in perspective from thinking about writing a book review of a book to writing a book review that magnifies the book, makes the book bigger, helps to actually create the book? Would this kind of interactivity lead to more book reviews? Would more people be willing or interested in writing reviews, if they felt like they were a part of the creation?
Great thoughts here. I just got Coma. I haven’t seen that review. Thanks for the link.
While this entire post is thoughtful and totally worthwhile—though I think the model you mention first, the new model, isn’t necessarily new, in that two of the oldest and best-known works of literature ever composed, The Iliad and The Odyssey, were basically perfect doses of this idea, community as author, considering they weren’t written down and instead passed orally along, leaving the identity of “Homer” pretty much a stand-in for all those who helped shape it; or not, who knows, but whether people ever realized it or not, I think that this construction has been there all along, even before reviews and media and blogs and whatnot—I particularly liked your last point asking whether the idea that a review is an extension of a work should change how the reviewer approaches his/her task.
Definitely reminds me of Steve Almond’s essay on The Rumpus recently about reviewing, where he basically says, Like a book or not, praise it or shoot it full of holes, as long as you’re approaching the work in mind of the author’s goals. I don’t know how conscious you really need to be of the author as personality when assessing a book, which, after all, is (hopefully) its own self-sustained object at least to some extent, but this does prevent the sort of attempted assassinations that basically ask, why isn’t this this book the way I want it to be? and then leave it for dead because it’s not.
Clancy Martin, in the NYTBR—just went online today, I think—did a good job of toeing this line until his last sentence, when he completely backed down from giving an opinion: you can look it up, but I remember the sentence as being along the lines of, “I don’t think that this book really succeeds as this.” Case in point of the silence speaking greater crisis than any last line he could’ve wrought.
Anyway, thanks for this. Sticking out in my mind as the best example of what you’re describing, a review that became, for me, inextricably grafted onto the aura of a book, would be Justin’s piece on Eat When You Feel Sad from HTMLGiant. One of the better reviews I’ve read.
Cool perspective, Chris. I always thought of book reviews (even negative ones) as a form of promotion, not that that’s a bad thing. I like the idea of the review being an extension of the art itself, like a deliberate reaction to the work. I like that.
I think that many reviews end conversation, as if the reviewer intends to declare a judgment on a piece so we can move on, rather than use the book as a starting point for a discussion. I understand this in the old, hierarchical model (critical authority), but when so much attention gravitates to the Internet, it frustrates me that reviews do so much to kill the mood, rather than spread it into comment boxes and trackbacks.
Interesting thoughts, Chris. The Rylance review is a fine, fine example of a book review that is more than a book review but there are so few reviewers even capable of such magnificent critical work. As a writer, part of me bristles thinking of a review of my writing as an extension of my creative work but then, isn’t that what happens when someone reads? They interpret your writing however they see fit so in some ways, they are involved in the creative process by way of the perspective they bring to the text. My other thought is that for a review to make a book bigger than it was, the book itself has to be great. There are some books that will never be more than what they are because they are mediocre or downright bad.
Whereas I’m hesitant to draw the parallel between book and blog post, review and comment stream–mainly because of time: I rarely spend more than a couple hours on a blog post or a comment; I spend much more time on reviews, even more time on a novel. There’s something powerful about that time spent, which is impossible to dismiss. I am not attached to my blog posts, sure, if someone is mean, it hurts my feelings, but it is not the same as someone ripping into a book you’ve written. With my books, I am attached, even if has been a long time since I wrote it. I can admit if something is not as good as it could be, but blog posts are dismissable. Comments are dismissable. It’s much harder to dismiss a review, good or bad. Or maybe I am too sensitive, etc.–but I think yr ideas in here are very smart. I like the concept of book/blog and review/comment, and I think there’s value in exploring the commonalities, but I’m just not quite there yet.
What I liked most about this post was the concept of dialogue, that somehow the review extends the book, pushes it, etc. Thank you.
Thanks, Michael. Glad to hear there are other Guyotat readers out there!
Thanks, K. Lincoln. I agree with you about Justin’s review, it made me take notice of a book I would not have otherwise thought to notice, which seems to be working in the way I mean above: building the book, making the book bigger.
Haven’t read that Almond essay at Rumpus, will now go looking for it — thanks!
I like your point about Homer’s work being community projects…YES!…maybe what I’m thinking about here is a kind of recuperation of that ethos.
Thanks, Chris. I’m with you re: even negative reviews are promotion — going back to J.A.’s quote, it seems like it’s better to get bad publicity than no publicity at all.
If you get the chance, Chris, let me know what you think once you read the Almond piece; you and him are riffing on some things in common, so i’m curious to hear your opinion.
Just curious though: Is the author supposed to go and comment when their books are reviewed? Isn’t it better to just shut up? Should the author get elated when praised or angry when told they are something other than a genius?
Also, literary criticsm has been around since as long as literature. It is of course a kind of extention of literature. Many of the ancient Greek plays and poems we only know of through them being quoted.
Hey Adam! I agree with you 100% — too many reviews seem aimed at either declaring a verdict or summarizing rather than building onto and out from the book, extending the book, inviting more readers to the book, more reviewers to the book, etcetera.
I wonder what specific practices you think reviewers could utilize to avoid killing the mood?
Just a follow up thought:
“if a book is written in America and it gets no critical attention, no feedback, no buzz, no press, only silence, then is it even a book?”
Why would it be less of a book? One needs to seperate the PR machine from the writing. Many very good things never get published, or get published and few people even realise it. The conversation and reviews are in large part about selling the book (capitalism). Yes, the conversation is also important and interesting, but only in so far as the reviewers bring something fresh to the chopping block. And the big review places, such as Publisher’s Weekly, are more about getting people to buy the book.
At the end time, it will not matter how much or how little buzz comes from what you write. The only thing that will matter is what has been written – published or not.
*separate
realise
British spelling
Thanks, Roxane. You’re right that Rylance is in a premier league of thinkers/writers, but part of what he’s doing is simply get’n er done. I’d venture to guess that many writers could achieve a comparable level of sophisticated interpretation and ability to expand a work of literature if they were willing to put in the time and effort.
What you say is spot on about the role of the reader as co-creator of a text by virtue of his/her role of bringing the work to life.
I disagree with your final statement, though, because I think plenty of books become bigger than they are based on the hype surrounding them rather than their original merit — two works that come directly to mind are: The Lovely Bones and 2666 — both got crazy additional amplifying appendages but in my estimation those books are downright bad.
On the flip side, I think many great works of literature never get the kind of stature they deserve because of the lack of other voices chiming in, the lack of reviews, the lack of discussion, and so on — two writers whose work come to mind are Raymond Federman and David Markson. Those guys wrote some great books, but they get/got very few additional amplifying appendages.
Plus, ultimately, the judgment of a work to be “great” or “mediocre” or “downright bad” will always be arguable, despite the fact that the magnitude of a work can sometimes convince us otherwise.
Brendan! I think….
…to exploit the enormous potential of the relocation of the omphalos of Lit into the Virt, it’s necessary to do do a few basic re-thinks, instead of lazily expecting Virt to mimic Paper Print and PP’s structures and classic maneuvers.
One of the big steps forward… ripe for the maximizing… is the Comment Thread, which shouldn’t be treated like the *good old Letters to the Editor without a door policy*. I think the Original Poster should be prepared to spend as much time in the Comment Thread as she/he did formulating the Original Post. It is now a part of the “job”.
The old dynamic of “publishing”, and then sort of standing back, is obsolete. This applies to book reviews as well as the books themselves: the writer of a novel, by stepping into a Comment Thread, is not necessarily required to dilute the book by over-explaining it or proffering too much extra-literary bio…but he/she can answer questions and talk shop and otherwise perform the equivalent of the Q and A on a book tour.
Also quite pertinent is the fact that since the “pay” scale for a professional writer is now, basically, in most cases, *nominal at best*, the line between “amateur” and “professional” is generally a matter of semantics (or, ie, lunch money).
A lot of the apparently free-floating animus to be found in Comment Threads can, in fact, be traced to a perception of retrograde arrogance in an Orig Poster who is relying a little too heavily on the obsolete model of Posting and Standing Back… or interacting on a very limited scale… with a reticence which borders on seeming like leper-fear. One of the profoundest real-world-applicable lessons of the Internet is that there are *always* people who are smarter than you are out there, and they will probably show up, drawn by Google hits, to a discussion featuring their area of expertise. Arrogance is futile. As a veteran of the Guardian Blogs (c. 2007), I can say that a sizable chunk of the more animus-animated threads were fueled by the disparity between under-informed or under-invested above-the-liners and some very sharp thread-participants (many of whom also happened to be professionals).
The New Model means the Author has to work much harder (in lieu of Editors and PR people, at the very least); it’s not really a matter of choice. The Comment Thread is a learning-curve for all involved and it should not be underestimated. I, for one, put more care into many of my comments than what goes into many of the OPs I comment on and I’ve noticed that this is increasingly the case with others: the OP is not so much the jewel deserving passive admiration but the seed around which the real jewel can form.
Eg: Silliman’s recent shutting down of his Comment Threads wasn’t the big story: the big story was the fact that the archived threads (as far as I know) were deleted. I wasn’t a commenter there, but I can see how faithful, careful and energetic commenters feel a little miffed by the arrogance of that old school model. The hierarchy it implies is artificial.
Literature is now, for the first time, on a broader scale, a conversation.
I agree with Brendan. Chris, (speaking as a fanboy) even if your book doesn’t get critical attention it still makes a sound.
Hey Lily! Good point about the time thing. Certainly a review takes more time and has more impact…I was more trying to draw a conceptual parallel between the relationships:
book/review :: blog/comment
or
book :: review ^ blog :: comment
rather than
book :: blog ^ review :: comment
If that makes sense? Sorry, I’m thinking cloudily this afternoon. The idea of pushing the boundaries of the book is really at the heart of it — the idea of thinking about the review as an arm of the book, the interview as a growth, and so on. Also the idea that other voices add to the author’s voice, making the book necessarily multivocal. Seems like rarely do we think about or talk about the multiple voices that make up the fully extended book: reviewers, commentators, interviewers, etc., but when it comes to blog posts we often times think of the post along with its comments.
Well, I just know I feel very uncomfortable commenting on reviews of my books. I like to hear what people say, but I’d rather let them figure it out for themselves. Most of them seem to get it anyhow. Talking about one’s own writing, outside of an interview, seems sort of egocentric.
“Talking about one’s own writing, outside of an interview, seems sort of egocentric.”
I think that’s just a matter of the “big name” interview/blog and the Comment Thread becoming more integrated. Which is inevitable.
Back when I still believed that Ed Champion had the potential to grow, he did a “round table” on N. Baker’s “Human Smoke”… a discussion about which involved a dozen bloggers and Baker himself (in real time). The Comment Thread was quarantined (laugh) in that case (still bits of the old prejudices lingering), but I thought it was an astonishing, and intellectually rich, glimpse of new possibilities.
PS This will seem oblique but it gets at the heart of what we’re all really talking about, which is an activity that has nothing to do with money:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc&feature=channel
Christopher — Great post. You examine a lot of the facets here of what differentiates a strong and engaging discussion of a book from something that feels like a commercialized book report.
Adam — I agree with you too. I wanted to write reviews on some tiny blogs for a long time but hated the way (I then felt) they needed to boil down to a definitive binary conclusion on the piece. I read your ideas about discussion copies of Awesome Machine titles earlier this week and think what you’re going for there is really the ideal, sending a few copies out not with the aim that someone will pass judgment but that he or she will get others thoughtfully responding to the text as well as to the text about the text.
Great thoughts here. I just got Coma. I haven’t seen that review. Thanks for the link.
While this entire post is thoughtful and totally worthwhile—though I think the model you mention first, the new model, isn’t necessarily new, in that two of the oldest and best-known works of literature ever composed, The Iliad and The Odyssey, were basically perfect doses of this idea, community as author, considering they weren’t written down and instead passed orally along, leaving the identity of “Homer” pretty much a stand-in for all those who helped shape it; or not, who knows, but whether people ever realized it or not, I think that this construction has been there all along, even before reviews and media and blogs and whatnot—I particularly liked your last point asking whether the idea that a review is an extension of a work should change how the reviewer approaches his/her task.
Definitely reminds me of Steve Almond’s essay on The Rumpus recently about reviewing, where he basically says, Like a book or not, praise it or shoot it full of holes, as long as you’re approaching the work in mind of the author’s goals. I don’t know how conscious you really need to be of the author as personality when assessing a book, which, after all, is (hopefully) its own self-sustained object at least to some extent, but this does prevent the sort of attempted assassinations that basically ask, why isn’t this this book the way I want it to be? and then leave it for dead because it’s not.
Clancy Martin, in the NYTBR—just went online today, I think—did a good job of toeing this line until his last sentence, when he completely backed down from giving an opinion: you can look it up, but I remember the sentence as being along the lines of, “I don’t think that this book really succeeds as this.” Case in point of the silence speaking greater crisis than any last line he could’ve wrought.
Anyway, thanks for this. Sticking out in my mind as the best example of what you’re describing, a review that became, for me, inextricably grafted onto the aura of a book, would be Justin’s piece on Eat When You Feel Sad from HTMLGiant. One of the better reviews I’ve read.
Reviews explore the book from one angle, the one the reviewer chooses at that time. It cracks open the geode, a review. But you could review it from all types of angles. The book can go exponential with reviews.
For me I review a book to hope the book catches a push, a wave, then someone else will read it, another wave, on and on…skimming forward, propelled.
The review as push forward. Hopefully.
Cool perspective, Chris. I always thought of book reviews (even negative ones) as a form of promotion, not that that’s a bad thing. I like the idea of the review being an extension of the art itself, like a deliberate reaction to the work. I like that.
I think that many reviews end conversation, as if the reviewer intends to declare a judgment on a piece so we can move on, rather than use the book as a starting point for a discussion. I understand this in the old, hierarchical model (critical authority), but when so much attention gravitates to the Internet, it frustrates me that reviews do so much to kill the mood, rather than spread it into comment boxes and trackbacks.
Interesting thoughts, Chris. The Rylance review is a fine, fine example of a book review that is more than a book review but there are so few reviewers even capable of such magnificent critical work. As a writer, part of me bristles thinking of a review of my writing as an extension of my creative work but then, isn’t that what happens when someone reads? They interpret your writing however they see fit so in some ways, they are involved in the creative process by way of the perspective they bring to the text. My other thought is that for a review to make a book bigger than it was, the book itself has to be great. There are some books that will never be more than what they are because they are mediocre or downright bad.
Whereas I’m hesitant to draw the parallel between book and blog post, review and comment stream–mainly because of time: I rarely spend more than a couple hours on a blog post or a comment; I spend much more time on reviews, even more time on a novel. There’s something powerful about that time spent, which is impossible to dismiss. I am not attached to my blog posts, sure, if someone is mean, it hurts my feelings, but it is not the same as someone ripping into a book you’ve written. With my books, I am attached, even if has been a long time since I wrote it. I can admit if something is not as good as it could be, but blog posts are dismissable. Comments are dismissable. It’s much harder to dismiss a review, good or bad. Or maybe I am too sensitive, etc.–but I think yr ideas in here are very smart. I like the concept of book/blog and review/comment, and I think there’s value in exploring the commonalities, but I’m just not quite there yet.
What I liked most about this post was the concept of dialogue, that somehow the review extends the book, pushes it, etc. Thank you.
Thanks, Michael. Glad to hear there are other Guyotat readers out there!
Thanks, K. Lincoln. I agree with you about Justin’s review, it made me take notice of a book I would not have otherwise thought to notice, which seems to be working in the way I mean above: building the book, making the book bigger.
Haven’t read that Almond essay at Rumpus, will now go looking for it — thanks!
I like your point about Homer’s work being community projects…YES!…maybe what I’m thinking about here is a kind of recuperation of that ethos.
Thanks, Chris. I’m with you re: even negative reviews are promotion — going back to J.A.’s quote, it seems like it’s better to get bad publicity than no publicity at all.
If you get the chance, Chris, let me know what you think once you read the Almond piece; you and him are riffing on some things in common, so i’m curious to hear your opinion.
Just curious though: Is the author supposed to go and comment when their books are reviewed? Isn’t it better to just shut up? Should the author get elated when praised or angry when told they are something other than a genius?
Also, literary criticsm has been around since as long as literature. It is of course a kind of extention of literature. Many of the ancient Greek plays and poems we only know of through them being quoted.
Hey Adam! I agree with you 100% — too many reviews seem aimed at either declaring a verdict or summarizing rather than building onto and out from the book, extending the book, inviting more readers to the book, more reviewers to the book, etcetera.
I wonder what specific practices you think reviewers could utilize to avoid killing the mood?
Chris,
You should write brain-fried more often–these some thoughts, man. I’ll toss in a few from my own. Firstly that it can be a fine line between the review that magnifies and augments and the review that supplants or displaces, and sometimes we are wary of the latter, maybe too much so. I mean, reading Guy Davenport on almost anyone is as interesting as reading the almost anyone, but I sometimes sense a built-in prejudice against the reviewer calling too much attention to him or herself, because it can seem self-aggrandizing or showy. Not that it’s a review, but close enough–is Derrida on Heidegger more about Derrida or Heidegger? Or ask the same question re: Derrida on Foucault? But Derrida on Foucault, say, is more interesting because he doesn’t necessarily read Foucault “well,” doesn’t take the time to inhabit his mindset in Madness and Civilization, but rather plows forward with his own argument, and thus continues the conversation, but in doing so tries to kill off the book he’s discussing. Yet that is what is most interesting about it, what gives it oomph, is the sense of contentiousness that drives the argument. A fairer review would have stultified the conversation, not advanced it.
The problem for me–and this comes back to haunt me whenever I try to write one–is that reviews aren’t necessarily what I am moved to write when I am moved by a book. I’m not necessarily spun into realms of critical thought and responses worth sharing. Sometimes I’m stunned into silence, a silence in which the work is assimilating, absorbing, doing its worming in the bloodstream and the marrow. Almost literally. The part of the brain that would say something worthwhile, that would distill my impressions of the book in a way that would be valuable or engaging for a reader is shut down. Or all I want to do is reread. Or run. Or all I want to do is write something–maybe similar, or maybe with the impetus of the work, where only I would sense the influence. Not a review, though.
But of course one wants the conversation to happen, for works of art to matter and move. I’m almost more interested in the translation of the work into other media than in a review, something that slips outside the circle of language. Like an adaptation, in a sense, could be a kind of review, if done well enough, if it feels like an organic extension of the work that builds off its energy.
Just a follow up thought:
“if a book is written in America and it gets no critical attention, no feedback, no buzz, no press, only silence, then is it even a book?”
Why would it be less of a book? One needs to seperate the PR machine from the writing. Many very good things never get published, or get published and few people even realise it. The conversation and reviews are in large part about selling the book (capitalism). Yes, the conversation is also important and interesting, but only in so far as the reviewers bring something fresh to the chopping block. And the big review places, such as Publisher’s Weekly, are more about getting people to buy the book.
At the end time, it will not matter how much or how little buzz comes from what you write. The only thing that will matter is what has been written – published or not.
*separate
realise
British spelling
Thanks, Roxane. You’re right that Rylance is in a premier league of thinkers/writers, but part of what he’s doing is simply get’n er done. I’d venture to guess that many writers could achieve a comparable level of sophisticated interpretation and ability to expand a work of literature if they were willing to put in the time and effort.
What you say is spot on about the role of the reader as co-creator of a text by virtue of his/her role of bringing the work to life.
I disagree with your final statement, though, because I think plenty of books become bigger than they are based on the hype surrounding them rather than their original merit — two works that come directly to mind are: The Lovely Bones and 2666 — both got crazy additional amplifying appendages but in my estimation those books are downright bad.
On the flip side, I think many great works of literature never get the kind of stature they deserve because of the lack of other voices chiming in, the lack of reviews, the lack of discussion, and so on — two writers whose work come to mind are Raymond Federman and David Markson. Those guys wrote some great books, but they get/got very few additional amplifying appendages.
Plus, ultimately, the judgment of a work to be “great” or “mediocre” or “downright bad” will always be arguable, despite the fact that the magnitude of a work can sometimes convince us otherwise.
Charles Olson’s Call Me Ishmael.
Brendan! I think….
…to exploit the enormous potential of the relocation of the omphalos of Lit into the Virt, it’s necessary to do do a few basic re-thinks, instead of lazily expecting Virt to mimic Paper Print and PP’s structures and classic maneuvers.
One of the big steps forward… ripe for the maximizing… is the Comment Thread, which shouldn’t be treated like the *good old Letters to the Editor without a door policy*. I think the Original Poster should be prepared to spend as much time in the Comment Thread as she/he did formulating the Original Post. It is now a part of the “job”.
The old dynamic of “publishing”, and then sort of standing back, is obsolete. This applies to book reviews as well as the books themselves: the writer of a novel, by stepping into a Comment Thread, is not necessarily required to dilute the book by over-explaining it or proffering too much extra-literary bio…but he/she can answer questions and talk shop and otherwise perform the equivalent of the Q and A on a book tour.
Also quite pertinent is the fact that since the “pay” scale for a professional writer is now, basically, in most cases, *nominal at best*, the line between “amateur” and “professional” is generally a matter of semantics (or, ie, lunch money).
A lot of the apparently free-floating animus to be found in Comment Threads can, in fact, be traced to a perception of retrograde arrogance in an Orig Poster who is relying a little too heavily on the obsolete model of Posting and Standing Back… or interacting on a very limited scale… with a reticence which borders on seeming like leper-fear. One of the profoundest real-world-applicable lessons of the Internet is that there are *always* people who are smarter than you are out there, and they will probably show up, drawn by Google hits, to a discussion featuring their area of expertise. Arrogance is futile. As a veteran of the Guardian Blogs (c. 2007), I can say that a sizable chunk of the more animus-animated threads were fueled by the disparity between under-informed or under-invested above-the-liners and some very sharp thread-participants (many of whom also happened to be professionals).
The New Model means the Author has to work much harder (in lieu of Editors and PR people, at the very least); it’s not really a matter of choice. The Comment Thread is a learning-curve for all involved and it should not be underestimated. I, for one, put more care into many of my comments than what goes into many of the OPs I comment on and I’ve noticed that this is increasingly the case with others: the OP is not so much the jewel deserving passive admiration but the seed around which the real jewel can form.
Eg: Silliman’s recent shutting down of his Comment Threads wasn’t the big story: the big story was the fact that the archived threads (as far as I know) were deleted. I wasn’t a commenter there, but I can see how faithful, careful and energetic commenters feel a little miffed by the arrogance of that old school model. The hierarchy it implies is artificial.
Literature is now, for the first time, on a broader scale, a conversation.
I agree with Brendan. Chris, (speaking as a fanboy) even if your book doesn’t get critical attention it still makes a sound.
Hey Lily! Good point about the time thing. Certainly a review takes more time and has more impact…I was more trying to draw a conceptual parallel between the relationships:
book/review :: blog/comment
or
book :: review ^ blog :: comment
rather than
book :: blog ^ review :: comment
If that makes sense? Sorry, I’m thinking cloudily this afternoon. The idea of pushing the boundaries of the book is really at the heart of it — the idea of thinking about the review as an arm of the book, the interview as a growth, and so on. Also the idea that other voices add to the author’s voice, making the book necessarily multivocal. Seems like rarely do we think about or talk about the multiple voices that make up the fully extended book: reviewers, commentators, interviewers, etc., but when it comes to blog posts we often times think of the post along with its comments.
Well, I just know I feel very uncomfortable commenting on reviews of my books. I like to hear what people say, but I’d rather let them figure it out for themselves. Most of them seem to get it anyhow. Talking about one’s own writing, outside of an interview, seems sort of egocentric.
“Talking about one’s own writing, outside of an interview, seems sort of egocentric.”
I think that’s just a matter of the “big name” interview/blog and the Comment Thread becoming more integrated. Which is inevitable.
Back when I still believed that Ed Champion had the potential to grow, he did a “round table” on N. Baker’s “Human Smoke”… a discussion about which involved a dozen bloggers and Baker himself (in real time). The Comment Thread was quarantined (laugh) in that case (still bits of the old prejudices lingering), but I thought it was an astonishing, and intellectually rich, glimpse of new possibilities.
PS This will seem oblique but it gets at the heart of what we’re all really talking about, which is an activity that has nothing to do with money:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc&feature=channel
Christopher — Great post. You examine a lot of the facets here of what differentiates a strong and engaging discussion of a book from something that feels like a commercialized book report.
Adam — I agree with you too. I wanted to write reviews on some tiny blogs for a long time but hated the way (I then felt) they needed to boil down to a definitive binary conclusion on the piece. I read your ideas about discussion copies of Awesome Machine titles earlier this week and think what you’re going for there is really the ideal, sending a few copies out not with the aim that someone will pass judgment but that he or she will get others thoughtfully responding to the text as well as to the text about the text.
Hey Brendan, thanks for your response.
To answer your questions, I’ll first say that what I’m proposing here is contra your assertion that “One needs to separate the PR machine from the writing.” What I’m saying is that we SHOULD NOT separate them, that they are inextricably linked, and furthermore the one needs the other to verify its status: a book needs other voices to confer that it is in fact a book. Without additional voices (what you’re calling PR) the validity of the object is suspect. A book needs other voices (reviews, interviews, buzz, videos, etc.) to activate it. Otherwise there is no difference between a book and a diary. The economic angle is irrelevant. The fact that the tentacles nourish the capitalist machine does not negative the fact that there are tentacles, that those tentacles activate the validity of the book.
When you say that what matters, in the end, is not the amount of buzz surrounding a book, but the fact that it was written, you’re speaking from the perspective of the writer, which is fine and valid, but in this post I’m not really interested in the writer of the book as much as I am interested in the other writers who add on to the book, who make the book a book. It may be super gratifying to pound out beautiful sentences in the solitude of one’s basement and then hide them away in the closet, but that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about books that have been published and how those books come to be books. Not counting self-publishing, it requires another voice to authorize publication, perhaps this is the first instance of the necessity of multiple voices. From there, in order for a book to be a book it requires recognition from other subjective positions, verification, confirmation — otherwise, what is the difference between a book and a diary? A diary does not require secondary confirmation to secure it’s validity. A diary is a feedback loop, it justifies itself. A book requires secondary input. It requires someone else to come along and recognize it as a book, validate it as a book, so that an agreement is made that yes in fact this thing you are calling a book is in fact a book. Every reader plays this activating role when he or she slides their eyes across the page. A diary, on the other hand, is for the writer’s eyes only. An audience, a secondary voice, would be anathema. Anyone who activates a diary that is not their own, by sliding their eyes across its pages, commits an offense by transforming the private diary into a public book.
Sorry, I’m getting long winded. I’ll pause there for now. Hope I’m making sense.
Hey Igor, thanks for the response. See my long-winded response to Brendan above, which sort of outlines why I don’t think a book without critical attention makes a sound.
Hey Sean, yeah exactly: “you could review it from all types of angles” — the more angles the book enjoys the greater the magnitude of the book, which is to say the more voices that contribute to the book the larger the book. I guess part of what I’m trying to articulate is a connectedness. It’s not: here’s a book, it is a solid unified object that is complete and finished; but instead, here is a book that has been enlarged by this review and this interview and those things are part of the book, extensions of the book, they aren’t separate from it even though they were written by other people. A book is never finished by the author, it is only released by the author into the world for other writers to build off of, mutate, inflate, transform.
Reviews explore the book from one angle, the one the reviewer chooses at that time. It cracks open the geode, a review. But you could review it from all types of angles. The book can go exponential with reviews.
For me I review a book to hope the book catches a push, a wave, then someone else will read it, another wave, on and on…skimming forward, propelled.
The review as push forward. Hopefully.
Chris,
You should write brain-fried more often–these some thoughts, man. I’ll toss in a few from my own. Firstly that it can be a fine line between the review that magnifies and augments and the review that supplants or displaces, and sometimes we are wary of the latter, maybe too much so. I mean, reading Guy Davenport on almost anyone is as interesting as reading the almost anyone, but I sometimes sense a built-in prejudice against the reviewer calling too much attention to him or herself, because it can seem self-aggrandizing or showy. Not that it’s a review, but close enough–is Derrida on Heidegger more about Derrida or Heidegger? Or ask the same question re: Derrida on Foucault? But Derrida on Foucault, say, is more interesting because he doesn’t necessarily read Foucault “well,” doesn’t take the time to inhabit his mindset in Madness and Civilization, but rather plows forward with his own argument, and thus continues the conversation, but in doing so tries to kill off the book he’s discussing. Yet that is what is most interesting about it, what gives it oomph, is the sense of contentiousness that drives the argument. A fairer review would have stultified the conversation, not advanced it.
The problem for me–and this comes back to haunt me whenever I try to write one–is that reviews aren’t necessarily what I am moved to write when I am moved by a book. I’m not necessarily spun into realms of critical thought and responses worth sharing. Sometimes I’m stunned into silence, a silence in which the work is assimilating, absorbing, doing its worming in the bloodstream and the marrow. Almost literally. The part of the brain that would say something worthwhile, that would distill my impressions of the book in a way that would be valuable or engaging for a reader is shut down. Or all I want to do is reread. Or run. Or all I want to do is write something–maybe similar, or maybe with the impetus of the work, where only I would sense the influence. Not a review, though.
But of course one wants the conversation to happen, for works of art to matter and move. I’m almost more interested in the translation of the work into other media than in a review, something that slips outside the circle of language. Like an adaptation, in a sense, could be a kind of review, if done well enough, if it feels like an organic extension of the work that builds off its energy.
Charles Olson’s Call Me Ishmael.
Hey Brendan, thanks for your response.
To answer your questions, I’ll first say that what I’m proposing here is contra your assertion that “One needs to separate the PR machine from the writing.” What I’m saying is that we SHOULD NOT separate them, that they are inextricably linked, and furthermore the one needs the other to verify its status: a book needs other voices to confer that it is in fact a book. Without additional voices (what you’re calling PR) the validity of the object is suspect. A book needs other voices (reviews, interviews, buzz, videos, etc.) to activate it. Otherwise there is no difference between a book and a diary. The economic angle is irrelevant. The fact that the tentacles nourish the capitalist machine does not negative the fact that there are tentacles, that those tentacles activate the validity of the book.
When you say that what matters, in the end, is not the amount of buzz surrounding a book, but the fact that it was written, you’re speaking from the perspective of the writer, which is fine and valid, but in this post I’m not really interested in the writer of the book as much as I am interested in the other writers who add on to the book, who make the book a book. It may be super gratifying to pound out beautiful sentences in the solitude of one’s basement and then hide them away in the closet, but that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about books that have been published and how those books come to be books. Not counting self-publishing, it requires another voice to authorize publication, perhaps this is the first instance of the necessity of multiple voices. From there, in order for a book to be a book it requires recognition from other subjective positions, verification, confirmation — otherwise, what is the difference between a book and a diary? A diary does not require secondary confirmation to secure it’s validity. A diary is a feedback loop, it justifies itself. A book requires secondary input. It requires someone else to come along and recognize it as a book, validate it as a book, so that an agreement is made that yes in fact this thing you are calling a book is in fact a book. Every reader plays this activating role when he or she slides their eyes across the page. A diary, on the other hand, is for the writer’s eyes only. An audience, a secondary voice, would be anathema. Anyone who activates a diary that is not their own, by sliding their eyes across its pages, commits an offense by transforming the private diary into a public book.
Sorry, I’m getting long winded. I’ll pause there for now. Hope I’m making sense.
Hey Igor, thanks for the response. See my long-winded response to Brendan above, which sort of outlines why I don’t think a book without critical attention makes a sound.
Hey Sean, yeah exactly: “you could review it from all types of angles” — the more angles the book enjoys the greater the magnitude of the book, which is to say the more voices that contribute to the book the larger the book. I guess part of what I’m trying to articulate is a connectedness. It’s not: here’s a book, it is a solid unified object that is complete and finished; but instead, here is a book that has been enlarged by this review and this interview and those things are part of the book, extensions of the book, they aren’t separate from it even though they were written by other people. A book is never finished by the author, it is only released by the author into the world for other writers to build off of, mutate, inflate, transform.
Thanks Tim! Yeah, you got it. Why make grand pronouncements? Except, I don’t even think people need to be thoughtful! Some of the best discussions start mindlessly. I think they should begin with no “work,” just play. First thought, best thought. Say it without worry, let the discussion bear out a claim’s value. Yeah. I hope you’re on the Awesome Machine list.
Specific practices to avoid: if you don’t like a book, don’t say it’s a good book, it’s a good book, then highlight a critical problem, then say but no, it’s a good book. Don’t say it’s good or bad, because unless you’ve also said something really incisive in the review, who would care about your opinion? Don’t be florid. Summarizing is good.
Sorry for the “you” language. Of course I’m not talking to you specifically.
Hi Chris,
Thanks for your thoughtful response. I do understand the point you are trying to make. I just feel that it is dangerous – not just for the writer, but the reader as well.
It is the assumption that art = recognition. Human recognition. This is to assume that actions done without humans looking on and praising or condemning or not actions. But they are. If I murder another man, in private, with no one discovering it, I have still murdered him. Gods and demons see it. Birds peck at his dead body so I bury him. A tree comes up out of the ground.
A review might be an arm of a book, but first the book has to have legs. To have legs we assume it can walk on its own, without the help of blogs or reviews. It might not walk down 5th Avenue, but around lakes and over mountains.
Sorry if this all sounds too romantic, but this is what I sincerely believe.
If what we write depends for its truth on an audience, then we are all doomed. Fortunately I don’t think it does.
Hey Tim, thanks for this great comment. You’re right that sometimes a review is more about the reviewer than the book being reviewed…makes me wonder if there’s a way in which a reviewer reviewing is not only adding onto the book under review but also to the reviewer’s body of work. Your example of Derrida on Foucault is a good one. Madness and Civilization is certainly a bigger book because of Derrida’s seeming dismissal of it — for one thing, it created quite a buzz about the book and also created that huge rift between them — but it also gave magnitude to Derrida’s work, whether positive or negative. Now I’m beginning to think about the book review as a site for alliance building, a la Bruno Latour.
I hear what you’re saying about the book review not being the thing you’re moved to write after reading a book. I wonder if it’s a matter of the associations we have with the phrase or concept “book review”? After I read something, I usually try to sit down at the computer and pound out some notes…I go back through the text and transcribe any of the lines I underlined or put asterisks by, then I type up some thoughts about patterns of repetition I noticed, significant stylistic moves, and so on. I don’t think of it so much as a book review but as notes, to help me remember the book better and also help me process it more thoroughly.
I really really like your idea of translating or adapting the book as a kind of “review” of the book. That kind of review sounds really interesting. Rabbit Light Movies is sort of like that: http://www.rabbitlightmovies.com/
would be cool to see move review sites doing stuff like translating/adapting.
Not Rabbit Light Movies, sorry, I meant Home Video Review of Books:
http://thehomevideoreviewofbooks.blogspot.com/
Chris, thanks for the really kind take on my essay on Blake. You certainly understood a very critical element of what I was wanting to do in writing it – more than simply assessing it, something like thinking in its terms through the terms that I think – which was really heartening. I also agree that book reviewers could stand more generally to be far greater rhetoricians of the books they review: less enamoured with their own witty apercus and pyramidal arrangement of judgments and more adventurous in terms of actually speaking the language of the brainwaves – or the thudding lack thereof – that a book gives them. The only real problem that arises in calling for a more elaborative or connected relation to a book in reviewing it is that it really entails a relation that is closer to study than review per se – sort of something like medieval manuscript transcription, or border illumination of a page. It takes time, it causes hand cramps, mistakes creep in to the transliteration that tint its original mistakeable reality, and in a way it’s all ultimately muca labour of something much more than love, an obsession of a more involuted kind, really, kind of a reality divination, and I guess assessing a book’s values mostly don’t take place on that plane because it overimposes, it exhausts and because mostly we don’t believe in divination, let alone in reality.
Thanks Tim! Yeah, you got it. Why make grand pronouncements? Except, I don’t even think people need to be thoughtful! Some of the best discussions start mindlessly. I think they should begin with no “work,” just play. First thought, best thought. Say it without worry, let the discussion bear out a claim’s value. Yeah. I hope you’re on the Awesome Machine list.
Specific practices to avoid: if you don’t like a book, don’t say it’s a good book, it’s a good book, then highlight a critical problem, then say but no, it’s a good book. Don’t say it’s good or bad, because unless you’ve also said something really incisive in the review, who would care about your opinion? Don’t be florid. Summarizing is good.
Sorry for the “you” language. Of course I’m not talking to you specifically.
Hi Chris,
Thanks for your thoughtful response. I do understand the point you are trying to make. I just feel that it is dangerous – not just for the writer, but the reader as well.
It is the assumption that art = recognition. Human recognition. This is to assume that actions done without humans looking on and praising or condemning or not actions. But they are. If I murder another man, in private, with no one discovering it, I have still murdered him. Gods and demons see it. Birds peck at his dead body so I bury him. A tree comes up out of the ground.
A review might be an arm of a book, but first the book has to have legs. To have legs we assume it can walk on its own, without the help of blogs or reviews. It might not walk down 5th Avenue, but around lakes and over mountains.
Sorry if this all sounds too romantic, but this is what I sincerely believe.
If what we write depends for its truth on an audience, then we are all doomed. Fortunately I don’t think it does.
Hey Tim, thanks for this great comment. You’re right that sometimes a review is more about the reviewer than the book being reviewed…makes me wonder if there’s a way in which a reviewer reviewing is not only adding onto the book under review but also to the reviewer’s body of work. Your example of Derrida on Foucault is a good one. Madness and Civilization is certainly a bigger book because of Derrida’s seeming dismissal of it — for one thing, it created quite a buzz about the book and also created that huge rift between them — but it also gave magnitude to Derrida’s work, whether positive or negative. Now I’m beginning to think about the book review as a site for alliance building, a la Bruno Latour.
I hear what you’re saying about the book review not being the thing you’re moved to write after reading a book. I wonder if it’s a matter of the associations we have with the phrase or concept “book review”? After I read something, I usually try to sit down at the computer and pound out some notes…I go back through the text and transcribe any of the lines I underlined or put asterisks by, then I type up some thoughts about patterns of repetition I noticed, significant stylistic moves, and so on. I don’t think of it so much as a book review but as notes, to help me remember the book better and also help me process it more thoroughly.
I really really like your idea of translating or adapting the book as a kind of “review” of the book. That kind of review sounds really interesting. Rabbit Light Movies is sort of like that: http://www.rabbitlightmovies.com/
would be cool to see move review sites doing stuff like translating/adapting.
Not Rabbit Light Movies, sorry, I meant Home Video Review of Books:
http://thehomevideoreviewofbooks.blogspot.com/
Chris, thanks for the really kind take on my essay on Blake. You certainly understood a very critical element of what I was wanting to do in writing it – more than simply assessing it, something like thinking in its terms through the terms that I think – which was really heartening. I also agree that book reviewers could stand more generally to be far greater rhetoricians of the books they review: less enamoured with their own witty apercus and pyramidal arrangement of judgments and more adventurous in terms of actually speaking the language of the brainwaves – or the thudding lack thereof – that a book gives them. The only real problem that arises in calling for a more elaborative or connected relation to a book in reviewing it is that it really entails a relation that is closer to study than review per se – sort of something like medieval manuscript transcription, or border illumination of a page. It takes time, it causes hand cramps, mistakes creep in to the transliteration that tint its original mistakeable reality, and in a way it’s all ultimately muca labour of something much more than love, an obsession of a more involuted kind, really, kind of a reality divination, and I guess assessing a book’s values mostly don’t take place on that plane because it overimposes, it exhausts and because mostly we don’t believe in divination, let alone in reality.
“Sometimes I’m stunned into silence, a silence in which the work is assimilating, absorbing, doing its worming in the bloodstream and the marrow. Almost literally. The part of the brain that would say something worthwhile, that would distill my impressions of the book in a way that would be valuable or engaging for a reader is shut down”
yes.
“Sometimes I’m stunned into silence, a silence in which the work is assimilating, absorbing, doing its worming in the bloodstream and the marrow. Almost literally. The part of the brain that would say something worthwhile, that would distill my impressions of the book in a way that would be valuable or engaging for a reader is shut down”
yes.
[…] HTMLGIANT / Some Thoughts On Book Reviews […]
[…] Links: Comment Thread Posted on August 13, 2010 by Mark Athitakis “Book reviews as extensions of the book: a review = a room with a door leading to the book. Perhaps some book reviews have multiple doors, one leading to the book, another leading to another review or to an interview with the author, a blog post about the book, an advertisement on a website or in a magazine, a phone conversation, a gchat, a video. The point is their interconnectivity.” […]
[…] –Adam Robinson, Aug 6. […]