Collected Miscellany

Interesting discussion on the aim and function of book reviews, and whether novelists make good reviewers, at Sarah’s and Dan’s.

Jumping off a criticism of a review in the Washington Post, Sara has this to say:

The bigger problem, and why I keep bitching about it here and elsewhere, is that too often an assigned review goes off on a particular tangent, caters to a specific agenda or has to do with everything else other than the book in question. All that should matter is whether the book has merit, and whether readers should buy it. There are all sorts of tricks used to fill up the space — I’m as guilty of this as anyone else — but they should be in service of that final judgment call: buy the book, or not?

Dan Green begs to differ:

Reviewers should feel they have an obligation to literature. The standards being used ought to be of the sort first of all grounded in a familiarity with the practices generally associated with the “literary,” and the final measure of a given book is whether it illuminates or extends those practices in some interesting way. If this sounds too pretentious, then the reviewer should at least feel a responsibility to the ideal of good writing (opinions about this can vary, of course), and, if the book in question is genre fiction, to the standards established by the writers, readers, and critics of that genre. More is at stake than just the particular book under review.

The last thing a reviewer should think about (sorry, Sarah), is whether he/she has provided good consumer guidance. In my opinion, it’s this practice that has corrupted mainstream book reviewing in the first place.

I actually think they are both right, in a sense. I think they are talking about different things. Sarah’s point I think it well taken when it comes to book reviews. By book reviews I mean the kind you find in the local paper and other popular publications. These reviews do have a consumer component that Dan rejects. Although the reader might not actually purchase the book, the review should inform the readers choice about whether to pick the book up or not. This is similar to a movie review; it should help you decide if you want to see it or not.

I think what Dan is talking about is a different form of “review.” I would label this as criticism. Criticism takes the process a little deeper and has a different perspective. This is where concern for and judgments about “literature” come into play. Often these type of reviews engage the work at a deeper level and the result is more of an essay than a review. Criticism is for people who have already read the work and have a background with which to judge more broadly. There is no attempt to leave plot twists or unique characters unexplored. Criticism seeks to unpack a work, judge its effectiveness, and place it within the larger body of the author’s work and within the larger scope of literature.

The type of book reviews I think Sarah is talking about don’t have this complexity. They are written for people who haven’t read the work in question; and they usually avoid giving too much away. They are usually quite simple: what is the book about, what does it do well, where does it come up short, why you might enjoy it, why you might not enjoy it, etc. In a world now flooded with books, readers are looking for help in choosing their next read; this isn’t consumerism so much as it is intelligent choice.

It is worth noting that reviews can fall in between these two poles; falling anywhere between pure academic paper and breezy blurb. The point is, different goals mean different tools. Dan’s criticism seems ill suited to deciding whether or not to buy the latest Elmore Leonard and Sarah’s standard for reviewing isn’t much help in studying why Nabokov matters.

The Friday review is a day early; the novel is Charles Fleming’s After Havana. The book was published by Picador.

Set in Cuba in the 1950s, After Havana has the feel of an old-fashioned novel of intrigue, a literary antecedent to the modern day thriller. A violent dictatorship in its final days of power fits the tradition prefectly; Fidel Castro’s revolution is gaining strength in the verdant hills. The mob controlled casinos and beachfront hotels are jammed with tourists, hustlers, gamblers, and the ever present security police.

The story opens with a car crash. A late night joy ride ends badly when a vintage Cadillac slams into a fountain; three Americans are killed instantly. The driver survives only to be executed by a member of the security police. The shooting is witnessed by a mysterious woman on a balcony; she’s traveling with a wealthy American named Calloway. That same night a boat approaches Cuba; its cargo includes a key figure in the revolution, a man known as El Gato.

The protagonist is Sloan, a horn player on the run from Las Vegas; as the story unfolds, it becomes clear that the woman on the balcony is Sloan’s lost love. When she’s kidnapped by the rebels, Sloan goes after her in the scenes that bring the point of view characters together for the story’s climax.

After Havana steps around the politics of the day, presenting Castro’s revolution as an event, not historical watershed. Some of the book’s best scenes occur in the mountains and towns under rebel control; because we follow so many characters on both sides of the war their stories humanize the conflict. With some familiar icons of the era…Meyer Lansky, for example, the novel feels stunted in places, confined by the work that preceded it. In the end it resolves in the way film noir blackens the screen; the noir elements are present from the opening. The author blends the intrigue and the conventions of his genre with just the right amount of tension, atmosphere, death, and despair. He uses a journalist’s eye to recreate Havana on the verge of collapse; it’s a polished read and a compelling story.

Maud Newton posts a report by Nick Kocz on a JS Foer reading and book-signing. Kocz says,

Jonathan Safran Foer may very well be our first post-literate novelist. Not that he is illiterate but that he’s writing for a world that has lost faith in the primacy of the written word. . . .

Foer’s work is very threatening. While others have used images and drawings to supplement their texts (Barthelme, Thurber and Haddon come quickly to mind), Foer’s images are used to replace words. The anxiety this causes among those who love words has got to be what’s fueling a lot of the negative reviews he’s been getting.

I just finished Charles Fleming’s After Havana from Picador. It’s set in Cuba before the fall of Batista; I’ll get a full review on Friday because, as we all know, it’s bad luck to review on Wednesday.

“Tota Gallia im tres partes divisa est.” It’s a great opening line to Caesar’s Conquests subtitled I need more money if we’re going to subjugate these people. Back in Rome the talking heads were squabbling about the necessity for vanquishing the Gauls; after all, the Romans didn’t need Gaul. Caesar held the office of dictator, a job created to facilitate decision making as the days of the Republic waned. The opening line means that Gaul is divided into three parts; it isn’t clear if Julius was info-dumping or setting the stage for funding increases.

Novels are divided into three parts as well. Post-modern efforts have blurred the classic dimensions of beginning, middle, and end into something resembling all three. Let’s say if Caesar had been a postmodernist his invasion of Gaul might’ve been a dream sequence or an existentialist comtemplation…”the woods, the woods, so different yet so much the same.”

Julius knew his audience. A paean to the trees would’ve been savagely critiqued, poorly received, subjected to scorn and ridicule. Even the French…the object of his conquest…have downgraded Sartre in their Pantheon of philosophers. Jean-Paul failed to make their Top One Hundred list. That’s the door slamming closed on decades of languid prose, striking poses, dark distractions. Like the inventor of the mood ring, his genius is now reviled in the cold light of history. The novel can once again be divided into three parts…

So, this former husband of Danielle Steele, Tom Perkins, a billionaire or something, comes up with an idea for a romance novel. He gives it Ms. Steele (or the former Mrs. Perkins or whatever her name would be) and she says, “Only a man could write this!” And what does he do? He writes it himself. Like he’s got nothing else to do. (Newsweek: scroll for it)

Okay, you know how people are all crazy over The Da Vinci Code, right? Well, Dan Brown calls his popularity a circus. He said people wanted his autograph all-of-the-time. Some even ask him to sign a throw-up bag. I think if I see him, I’m going to ask him to sign a Tom Clancy novel.

And you know what Kate Mulgrew reads? Ian McEwan. She says he’s a “wonderful writer,” but easy. “Novels are like chocolate,” she says and she “prefers biography, autobiography.” Calls herself a very disciplined reader.

So, Will Duquette is like an amazing reader, okay? He can read a whole book before I get through the first chapter, and like he reads all kinds of stuff, like stuff that would make me use the bag before I had Dan Brown sign it, you know? But he doesn’t get Lemony Snicket. The other day, he got to the end of The Bad Beginning with his sons, telling them he hated the book every time he picked it up. The writer “talks down” to the readers, he says, and everything is depressing.

And you remember The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo? Well, there’s a new book coming out by the same author! Yeah, yeah, he’s still dead; but this researcher found a serialized novel in old French newspapers. It’s called The Knight of Saint-Hermine and will be out in June.

And did you hear about Mark Levin’s book on the Supreme Court? It’s called Men in Black. No, I don’t know if Will Smith did a forward to it. But it’s a best-seller and the Washington Post quotes a law professor saying, “The fascinating thing is that it’s a bestseller on a subject where 100 percent of us who present ourselves as experts haven’t read it.” The publisher says his readers have been screaming for a book on the Supreme Court. I wonder if they were climbing over each other for Phyllis Schlafly’s book about it.

I read the Sherlock Holmes’ case “The Five Orange Pips” recently, and it struck me that a reader could view the conclusion as a success or failure according to his worldview. The story itself is a bit of a disappointment. The client appears with a dramatic story. Holmes talks through his initial observations, and the next day, he discusses some conclusions. The story occurs almost entirely within his apartment. The final words describe what Watson could ascertain about the suspected criminals at sea.

Once Holmes does the office work to pinpoint some likely suspects, he mails a letter to them and one to the American authorities in order to apprehend them for murder charges in Britain; but all they ever heard was “that somewhere far out in the Atlantic a shattered stern-post of the boat was seen swinging in the trough of a wave, with the letters ‘L. S.’ carved upon it.” Watson could only assume the ship with the suspects was destroyed in the violent storms that day.

How does that strike you? Did the criminals escape justice through an accident which could have killed anyone? Did Holmes fail because he could see the murderers prosecuted? Or did a divine judge execute his own sentence on them through the storm?

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