Review of a review of the reviewers

Contingency and precarity
Phillipa K. Chong’s Inside the Critics’ Circle gives us a snapshot of contemporary
reviewing from the perspective of a sociologist. Unlike a lot of “state of culture”
interventions, the book is not a polemic or a jeremiad, but a dispassionate inquiry into the
world of editors and reviewers in the USA based on some forty interviews.
Inside the Critics’ Circle is about critics as journalistic reviewers, a category she
distinguishes from literary essayists and literary academics, both a little further along the
chain in the process of “consecration” through which an author is deemed significant
enough to enter the literary canon. What emerges is a tale of contingency, precarity and
uncertainty, from the moment books get selected for review all the way to the future
prospects of newspaper critics and criticism.
While the book is US (indeed New York) focussed, there are surely lessons here for
Australia. The same precarity afflicts reviewing culture here, with the dwindling of onstaff
critics in most newspapers and the need to compete for online attention.
There are still prominent book reviewers who are not themselves novelists (Geordie
Williamson, chief reviewer for The Australian comes to mind). But the circuits of book
festivals and dinner parties are small, with an even greater potential for coteries and backscratching.
But in some ways the everyday little accidents of fate are the most chilling. How many
major new novels, for example, get overlooked because the editor cannot think of a
suitable reviewer on one particular day? Chong’s interest here is exclusively on fiction
reviewing and one of the distinctive and consequential features she highlights is that, in
the US at any rate, there is currently a tendency to ask novelists to review novels.
And why wouldn’t they, you might ask (and so might they). Novelists understand the
form, having practised it themselves and are, therefore, qualified to evaluate their fellows.
True, we don’t expect films to be reviewed by directors or restaurants to be reviewed by
chefs, but then novelists and critics both seem to be using the same material – the written
word. And now, since most newspapers have far fewer if any on-staff critics than they
used to, and most reviewing is done on a freelance basis, many fiction writers are only too
happy to have a bit of extra income, especially when the gig might also increase their
visibility.
Yet there are some drawbacks to this arrangement. I don’t want to open the Romantic can
of worms between the “creative” and the “critical” sensibility, but let’s just say that one
does not guarantee the other. Sure, there are examples of great novelist-critics. But there
are also (looking at you, Susan Sontag) those whose criticism overwhelmingly outclasses
their attempts at fiction.
I’m reminded of that scalding quip by the Cambridge critic Eric Griffiths on A.S. Byatt’s
Possession (1990): “the kind of novel I’d write if I didn’t know I couldn’t write novels”.
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