Review of a review of the reviewers

Code switching
5/6
So what is the good of book reviewing? How do we – or more pointedly how do the paid
reviewers themselves – justify the existence of newspaper critics in an age of Yelp,
TripAdvisor and Goodreads? A world in which, in other words, it often feels everyone is
reviewing everything all the time?
The critics interviewed here, maybe understandably in the current precarious
circumstances, are a little bit too ready with their elbows when it comes to asserting their
own worth and purpose. They insist that they fill a vital niche between the amateurs on
the one hand, the mere enthusiasts that populate the blogosphere, and the academics who
are too arcane, specialised and out of touch.
“I do sometimes think that bloggers are kind of dumb, as a general rule,” confesses one
charmer.
Allegedly, the amateurs on the internet treat books as mere entertainment and the serious
business of self-improvement needs the paid reviewers in the newspapers. But they
themselves must not get too high falutin’, lest they become as abstruse and naval-gazing
as the academics. Yes, there is porousness between the three categories and it is not
uncommon for academics, for instance, to review for newspapers.
But they “code-switch” when they do so successfully, adjusting the register for a wider
audience. One reviewer quoted by Chong, himself an academic, criticised another
reviewing academic for being “too pretentious in his intellectual outlook” and for “being
so far above his own readers that in the end, rather than doing a service he does a
disservice to the book that he is reviewing”.
As for literary theory, predictably and very unoriginally it evokes the greatest populist
swagger from the literary journalists. “Outside invading small countries, the worst thing
that men do is to invent literary theories,” proclaims one respondent, possibly a
recovering academic, who has a PhD in English.