Book Reviews and the Internet

Could the Internet Save Book Reviews?

Even as print publications are getting rid of reviewers, websites and podcasts offer new ways of approaching literature.

AP Images In his 1946 essay "Confessions of a Book Reviewer," George Orwell outlined the changes he'd make to the standard, 600-word format of the book review. He wrote that the best practice "would be simply to ignore the great majority of books and to give very long reviews—1,000 words is a bare minimum—to the few that seem to matter." He then suggested notices "of a line or two" for the majority of titles less worthy of mention. Although Orwell considered book reviewing "an exceptionally thankless, irritating and exhausting job" and once likened it to "pouring his immortal spirit down the drain, half a pint at a time," he's often evoked as the patron saint of book reviewers. Orwell reviewed over 100 books in 1940 alone and "Confessions of a Book Reviewer" is a testament to the problems he saw in journalistic literary criticism, including the fact that reviewing involved "praising trash" and "constantly inventing reactions towards books about which one has no spontaneous feelings whatever.". His idea to review only the best books didn't spark a revolution in 1946 and probably won't start one any time soon, but the essay points to the fact that book reviews haven't changed very much in the past 65 years—until now.

The digital age has transformed the physical act of reading and will alter journalistic literary criticism as well. According to a Pew Research study published in 2010, over half of all Americans obtain news and information—including book reviews—on digital platforms: online editions of newspapers like the New York Times, email, Twitter, RSS feeds, etc. (The number is even higher among people with post-graduate degrees and those who are in their 20s and 30s.) The full effect of these changes will have on book reviews isn't clear, but they're already shifting in ways that would both please and alarm Orwell.

First, the bad news: If Orwell was displeased by the number of mediocre books reviewed in print in 1946, then the customer reviews and ratings on Amazon and other bookseller websites would have made him dyspeptic. The idea, of course, is that every book is reviewed, regardless of quality, and that "the people" get to have their say. In theory, customer reviews are quick, easy, egalitarian, and make the "consumer" (as opposed to the reader) feel in control of his or her reading choices. But there's a difference between a recommendation and a review. Customer reviews are heavy on opinion and light on insight. They're reactionary. Fiction customer reviews typically contain "I-loved-it" or "I-hated-it" declarations based on an affinity for or dislike of the characters and discuss them as if they were real people. Customer reviews rarely include plot summaries--even dull ones. They tend to consider books in terms of whether or not they were worth the money and need not pertain to the book at all. One Amazon reviewer gave F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby a single star because the Kindle edition cost more than the hardcover. Another panned Ralph Ellison's Invisible Manbecause the paperback she received had coffee stains on it.

But there are also signs of hope from pioneers like Nancy Pearl, the Seattle librarian behind "Book Lust." Pearl tends to recommend rather than review but does so with the expertise that only a librarian or someone who works in an independent bookstore has. (She was also the inspiration for the first librarian action figure.) Like Pearl, Jessa Crispin of Bookslut.com recommends rather than reviews but where Pearl is earnest Crispin is irreverent and sometimes vulgar. She's a savvy, hipster reviewer whose site is a haphazard array of literary gossip, sound bites, and reviews. Goodreads is a social network for book reviews, but it's modeled on a book-club model rather than a journalistic one. For now, Goodreads is basically Facebook with books, but if enough contributors set the bar high with creative, funny, and smart reviews it might become a force of its own. These recommenders offer a vision for Orwell's hope that there be short reviews of less-worthy titles.





Book Reviews: A Tortured History The future of book reviewing isn't confined to the written word: Podcasts could reinvent or ruin journalistic literary criticism. There currently exist only three podcasts that truly review books: Nancy Pearl's Book Lust podcast, which also airs on NPR's Morning Edition,Maureen Corrigan's reviews on Fresh Air, andTom Lutz's Los Angeles Review of Books podcasts on KCRW—all of which are smart, valuable resources. Out magazine's "Outsider" podcast airs once every couple of months and reviews film and visual art as well. The panel of guests for the show often includes Dale Peck, a writer who reached book-reviewer superstardom (if there is such a thing) with Hatchet Jobs, a collection of his reviews for The New Republic, in 2004. He's best known for his review of Rick Moody's memoir The Black Veil, which opened with the lede, "Rick Moody is the worst writer of his generation." But as a reviewer, Peck was more than just a show-boater who stirred up controversy; he was a whipsmart critic with a fabulous sense of humor.

Unfortunately, Peck embarrassed himself in 2011 when he included an anti-Semitic tagline that was meant to be funny in an article published in The Daily Beast. (The editors removed the tagline within an hour of the article being online.) To say that Peck screwed up is an understatement, yet his signature wit and irreverence can still be heard on the "Outsider" podcast. Other "book-review" podcasts, such as the Washington Post Book World Podcast and the New York Review of Books Podcast, include author interviews or literary gossip. Even theBook Review by the New York Times Podcast, hosted by Sam Tanenhaus, uses interviews with authors to attract listeners—which is not the same as a book review. A book review combines personal judgments with analysis, historical contextualization, and an understanding of the inner workings of the book—from an outsider's perspective. It centers on the experience of reading a novel or a collection of poetry. Interviewing the author rather than the reviewer lessens the importance of book reviews and can give an impression of toadyism.

Video podcasts are another untapped medium for book reviews and hopefully won't go the route that too many podcasts have gone. At present, the only book-review videocast that's widely available is the Washington Post's The Totally Hip Video Book Review featuring Ron Charles. Charles, the regular fiction critic ofPost, writes sincere, uninspiring reviews. The success of the videocast is Charles's ability to laugh at himself. The episodes are, of course, totally unhip but charming nonetheless.

A final hope for book reviews is "creative criticism," a revitalized discipline that Orwell didn't practice but might have embraced had it not been so closely tied to the New Criticism. Orwell called for a more aesthetic approach to criticism in his 1946 essay but would never have called it "creative criticism," a term coined by J.E. Spingarn in the early in 1910. For Spingarn, "creative criticism" was replete with "flashes of insight" on par with the artistic genius of the works under review. Orwell was more interested in politics than close reading and by the 1940s Spingarn was considered one of the originators of the New Criticism, a term he also originated. Spingarn's conception of creative criticism echoed sentiments articulated by Johann Wolfgang Goethe during the German Romantic period and Thomas Carlyle during the early Victorian period and was intended as a refutation of the stuffy, moralistic academic criticism that dominated the early 20th century.

The Pitch for Very Short Novels

I've never met a reader who doesn't like short novels. Most people don't buy books by weight. If you do, you're reading the wrong article.

You will have to glean background, context from the few details you're given. You will not be able to doze and watch the scenery go by, or eavesdrop on extended conversations.For me, the opportunity to sit somewhere for two hours and read a book from start to finish–to submerge myself in it–is a thrilling experience. A short novel makes a straightforward demand: give me this time. There's no room for phone calls, feeding the cat, helping kids with homework. You, the reader, are expected to do some work.

There's no room for digression. No room for passenger writing. Every word is doing a job. So pay attention. A short novel is an event, not a trip.

What a short novel asks is that you commit, in one sitting, the same amount of time to reading as you frequently commit to a film, or a football match. Make that commitment and, in many cases, the pay off outweighs the investment.

The Old Man and the Sea, They Shoot Horses Don't They?, The Fox, A Meal in Winter, Animal Farm, Breakfast at Tiffany's, Bonjour Tristesse, Utz, Metamorphosis, The Fall, A Month in the Country, So The Wind Won't Blow It All Away... Jekyll and Hyde (a “sparsely-printed little shilling volume” as The Timeshad it, in 1886).

You'll already be adding others. But I wasn't thinking too hard, just throwing a few out there. In case you didn't believe me about that pay off.

Great short novels stay in the mind as objects, whereas, often, novels are ornate boxes with objects inside. Equally valid, but a different thing altogether, with a different mechanism of engagement. Simply put, with different rules.

It's a common mistake to believe creativity is about freedom. It isn't. It's about freedom within a given form. Rules are vital in focussing creativity into effectiveness, and generally the story itself sets them. A strong story will know whether it wants to be a long book, microfiction, a short story, a poem–even if it takes the writer some time to recognise it–and it won't let you make it into anything else.

Which can be a problem when the industry is obsessed with tagging books a certain way.

The Dig, for example, was the second part of a longer book for some while until it became clear it shouldn't be. It's around 28,000 words. Initially, the whole thing was 90,000 odd. I pretty much cut 60,000 words away in one feel swoop.

The reason it was 90,000 in the first place was because of considerable pressure to "write a longer book." For years after my first short novel The Long Dry came out, and even though it worked, length was the chief reservation from publishers. They wanted a "full length novel."

Well, as Beckett said, in response to criticism that his play Breath was short: “All of my works are full length, some are just longer than others.” It's extraordinary that the term "full length novel" still abounds.

If the novella exists, purely based on length, then the novellissimo must exist. The Count of Monte Cristo, Moby-Dick, War and Peace. Anything that will hold a heavy door open should be a novellissimo; anything that can be used to right a wobbly table, a novella.

And if we're breaking everything down into categories, then there should also be a distinction between a short novel and novella. Is it that the "la" at the end suggests frivolity, a lackadaisical, la-di-dah thing? Or is it that, in it's grammatical nature, novella is a diminishment? Whatever it is, I find it utterly impossible to refer to Heart of Darkness as "a novella." John Fante's 1933 Was a Bad Year, on the other hand, might be.

The nature of the term novella suggests something experimental, playful perhaps, travelling away from the narrative mores of a "novel"; the term short novel, in contrast, braces the reader for the narrative experience associated with structured history, emotional delivery, and–ironically–weight.

In the introduction to her brilliant "Year with Short Novels" at Open Letters Monthly, Ingrid Norton agrees:

“Fitzgerald's anxiety that Gatsby had been too short [“Remember this. Never write a book under sixty thousand words”] symbolizes everything that is tiresome in conversations about short novels (a term I favour over the more rarefied 'novella,' which implies a too-clear break between itself and the novel and thus invites vexing categorical hair-splitting). Too often discussions of length are concerned with publishers and awards, not with aesthetic merit.”

When it comes to the act of writing itself, you just have to forget labels exist and listen to the demands of the story. A good writer knows instinctively what they are doing, but are then required to explain it. That, I think, accounts for many of the laboured pigeon-holing terms, the vague attempts at category and so on.

Think of Steinbeck's self-determined "novel play" Of Mice and Men, (quickly termed by critics a play-novellette); or Dylan Thomas's Rebecca's Daughters, a film script that could be shot directly from the page–a slim piece of writing, in his own words, “ready for shooting, which would give the ordinary reader an absolute impression of the film in words and could be published as a new form of literature.”

What, exactly, are they? Other than exactly right for what they are.

Novel, novella, short novel? Ultimately it simply shouldn't matter. The only thing to be taken into account should be the impact a piece of writing has.