Making a Dunce of Yourself

[jsburbidge]

 There is a pattern I've seen in several contexts regarding book reviews. I'm going to take two examples (one extreme, one less so) and then discuss the general thing.

 

First:

 

There is really no actual debate among those who have read it for over three centuries that Swift's Tale of a Tub is a work of genius; even Swift looked back on his younger self enviously. As a satire on the "moderns", the Dunces of Pope's later terminology, it operates at every level at a high level of brilliance, generating chaos as an effect of its progress. It uses a mechanism which, watered down somewhat, eventually gives us Lemuel Gulliver.

 

LibraryThing presents us with a set of one or two star reviews by readers who couldn't get it.

 

When you are reviewing a book which three centuries have declared a work of genius, assigning it a rating of two stars (or, actually, anything less than five) reflects negatively on you and not the book. It's like complaining that Virgil should have written in simple modern English: the major problem (in the context of the existence of modern readers who still find delight in the work) is that the reader did not equip him or herself to deal with the disconnection of three centuries of cultural drift. The work is objectively a five star work, and the most you can say is that this age, if it produces fewer people who can read it as well-equipped readers, may be failing somewhere in its education.

 

This isn't just about time, although time enhances the disconnect. Some great books are more difficult than others from the beginning (Virgil being the literally classic example). It's folly to try to assess The Cantos if you have no grasp of cultural history.

 

But this doesn't apply only to actually great works, or only to older works.

 

Second:

 

I will take an author and work who will be nameless for this purpose: what you need to know is that the work in question is (a) recent; (b) full of detail; (c) fairly widely acclaimed by readers and reviewers, not as a masterpiece, but as an enjoyable, well-written work with decent style and interesting characters. My own observation is that it's the sort of work that's driven by an accumulation of realistic details (some reflecting the author's personal experience) which drive the overall narrative but do require an effort to hold the whole thing in your head while reading it. I turned to it immediately after reading another popular work, hailed as "utterly brilliant" in a published review which was part of my feed this morning, by a successful author whose work has different virtues, and kept being surprised by how effective the accumulation of concrete details was by contrast.

 

There are several reviews by people who assign one star and a DNF rating because they either didn't like the characterization, or had no interest at all in the details that knit it together.

 

It's less obvious here than in the case of Swift, because there isn't the witness of centuries staring you down, but posting this sort of assessment is a negative evaluation of yourself rather than anything else.

 

It's fine for the reviewer - especially the professional reviewer, who gets assigned books to review - to say of a given work "Those who like this sort of thing will like this", admitting their own lack of sympathy with the matter at hand. But note that this goes along with an acknowledgement of an incapacity to write a fair review. (Unless the reviewer makes their own taste the arbiter of all things; in which case we are getting perilously close to the parody version of F.R. Leavis pilloried by F. C. Crews as Simon Lacerous.)

 

Nobody likes everything. I dislike the literary tradition descending from Jane Eyre and would not review a work in that tradition unless I found unexpectedly positive things to say about it.

 

This isn't, note, about popularity. There are bestsellers which are trash, and any brief analysis will show why. Dan Brown and the Left Behind series are reminders that sometimes there's no there there behind a vastly popular work other than an ability to pile up incidents in such a way as to keep the reader turning the page with their critical faculties turned off.

 

Negative reviews have a place. This is especially true of reviews of non-fiction books which get fundamental things wrong, or avoid inconvenient facts. And letting people know what The Da Vinci Code is like to save them the cost - if only in energy - of finding out is a public service, though even there that amounts to categorizing it as a known type of bestseller. 

 

But where argument comes down to the type of text, and where the reviewer clearly has an antipathy to a type of text which is accepted by equally-critically-equipped reviewers with different tastes, maybe it's better just to keep quiet and let those who appreciate a text talk about it. De gustibus non est disputandum.

Comments

[graydon]

There are several reviews by people who assign one star and a DNF rating because they either didn't like the characterization, or had no interest at all in the details that knit it together.

I think there are a lot of people for whom the basic agreement between author and reader is much more specific than "these are instructions for constructing a story", and they're quite sincere in thinking anything outside their construction of proper story is defective.

That I should wish this otherwise isn't going to have much effect.

Which is not to say I don't think you're correct about this; I very much do. But those narrower constructions of story seem to me to have broad causes.