Last week, I reviewed Paul Auster’s new novel. You can read that review here, if you want.
Now, I’m sure this won’t come as a surprise to anyone, but reviewing is no easy job. Not if you understand the enormous responsibility that is engaging with someone else’s art. And not if you have a conscience.
Back in the ’90s and aughts, there was some notoriety associated with reviewing a book poorly, especially if you savaged it. Some of you will recall the very public feuding among authors who reviewed each other badly and the reviews themselves, which were nasty.
I’ve always wondered about what purpose a nasty review serves. Does the writer think they are protecting an innocent readership from some kind of fatal exposure? Are they protecting the culture? Art itself? Do they think a “bad?” book is a threat? These are the most generous reasons I can devise for why you’d slaughter a book on delivery. I’m sure you can imagine several less generous reasons having to do with bitterness, resentment, jealousy, etc.
Today, I’d like to think things are different, though perhaps for reasons that themselves are not good, for instance: a fear of being cancelled. Folks on TikTok often rail against today’s reviews as these stupid academic exercises that never say anything; they don’t pan or praise. This may be true of the more anodyne reviews out there, but I think a really excellent review can and does say quite a bit without telling readers whether to buy the book or not. This may sound counterintuitive, but a really good review’s job is to engage with a novel’s polemics, strategies, and ambitions and not spend a whole lot of time on whether the book is “good” or not. I may be getting paid to arbitrate this question, but because I think this question is stupid, I’m not gonna do it.
This is why people will read a review I’ve written and say, cautiously, that they cannot tell if I liked the book or not. Which is fine by me.
Look, there are novels out there that I have not enjoyed in the least, though they are best sellers and award winners. Which means someone is enjoying them. Which means, to me, that enjoyment is besides the point when thinking through how to write about a novel for the purpose of introducing that novel to the world.
I’d much rather tell you what the book’s up to and why. How it goes about its business. And where it fits into the conversations we’re all having today.
Look, any novel is an ambitious novel if it sets for itself a challenge to move people, to educate them, to hold up a mirror and say: this is you, now do better. Why would you set out to write a book without these goals in mind? Which is why books continue to matter. They can still do what our political discourse—especially in this moment—fails to do. So I want to be honoring that in every review I write. And then hope I get to keep doing it.