Review of a review of the reviewers

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Ronan McDonald
So what is the good of book reviewing? A review of a
review of the reviewers
theconversation.com/so-what-is-the-good-of-book-reviewing-a-review-of-a-review-of-the-reviewers-176667
Imagine you’re the literary editor for a major US newspaper, like The New York Times or
The Washington Post. You know that getting a good notice in your paper can launch the
career of a young writer and you’re far from indifferent to the fate of literary culture. You
majored in English and once nurtured dreams of being a novelist yourself. But tens of
thousands of fiction titles are published each year and it sometimes feels like most of
them are piled up on your desk.
So, what are you to do? How do you decide what gets
covered and what ignored? Spoiler alert: it’s not
meritocratic.
You are to some degree condemned to judge books by their covers. You quickly get quite
good at it. Anything by a Big Name author, a new title by Margaret Atwood or Jonathan
Franzen, is a publishing event and of course needs to be reviewed by one of your go-to
writers. That piece will go the front of the section with a large author photo.
As to the others? Some genres don’t stand a chance. Romance fiction? No way. Sci-fi,
fantasy, thrillers? No, no, no. In general, that which seems like “literary fiction” will
attract your eye and it’s not hard to pick those out from the pile, based on the blurb or the
publisher. Occasionally, you might do a round up of recent crime writing.
But remember, you’re working for a newspaper, so it helps if the book treats a story that is
topical or in some way relatable to current events. Every so often you can cover a suite of
books under an eye-catching theme, and make it into a longer piece about fiction’s
response to Climate Change or the #MeToo movement, a phenomenon that a recent n+1
editorial about the dismal state of criticism has derisively dubbed CRT – the
“Contemporary Themed Review”.
These pieces might risk coercive homogeneity,
ironing out differences in tone, theme, structure or
style, in order to intervene in the Zeitgeist, but with any luck these will get a bit of reaction
on Twitter, which is the name of the game.
“Books of the year” and “best of” lists are other ways you can get into the slipstream of
social media. It is fandom, not analysis, that gets most attention, spiced up with the
occasional eye-catching takedown or hatchet job.
We are a long way from critics as the arbiters of taste, the gatekeepers of culture who
might introduce readers to vital and new literary forms and thereby provide an antidote to
the algorithmic conformity and banality that hangs over contemporary book culture.
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