Soft Porn in the Book Review!

As anyone involved in the thankless task will tell you, there are several kinds of book reviews. There shouldn’t be; they should all be voiced with and motivated by the exact same tone and tenor of honest inquiry, regardless of their subject matter or their author’s fame. But that would only happen in a dream-world where, say, the fiction editor of a literary journal wrote his own reviews – otherwise, all book reviewers have to deal with editors, and whereas the ideal book reviewer has only one motivation for writing a review (I read this book, here’s what I think is important about it), an editor can have several kinds of motivations for running one. Is the author a big name, making the book something your journal can’t simply ignore without looking foolishly provincial? Is the author a friendly person (or even a friend) whose therapy bills will skyrocket if some earnest tyro parses his every typo? Is the author’s publishing house one from which the editor in question wants a long and fruitful relationship (perhaps for future publication of the editor’s own book? Who knows – the poor schmuck writer certainly doesn’t)? Will a savaging of some new book get you dropped from that publisher’s list of future books (a calamity, since if an editor had to buy even a single book, ever, the world would come screeching to a halt)?

Editors tend to accommodate these various intervening factors by developing several kinds of book reviews. There’s the standard straight-up rave, where the only real challenge is to clutch some small strand of dignity to the dancing and cheering of the piece; there’s the roundhouse slam of a once-popular author’s latest, usually done when a) the publisher in question is too big to stop all its galley copies, and b) the author is somehow perceived has having it coming (we don’t beat up on saintly elderly Japanese writers, for instance, even though they’re all completely untalented, but a snotty young white American is fair game – Nick McDonnell won’t be able to breathe easy until he’s collecting Social Security); there’s the undisguised placeholder review, where the book in question is too ‘big’ or ‘buzzworthy’ to ignore but the only reviewer who could deliver a piece in time was an incompetent nincompoop who does nothing more than summarize the plot; and then there’s the ever-popular ‘soft pan’ review, in which the reviewer seems to have mightily disliked the book but is being charmingly coy about it.

I admit, that last kind really bothers me – because the only possible motivation for such a reviewer to obscure what he thinks is naked self-interest: I can’t bash this book because I might meet its author at an Upper West Side literary soiree, or I might want to sleep with its author, or I might want a favor from its author for my own forthcoming collection of elegiac interconnected short stories. It’s perfectly fine to watch out for such eventualities, but not in a full-length essay that’s supposed to be a review of a book. Facebook instead, I always want to shout.

In any given week, you’ll find good examples of all of these various book review types in that bête noir of all serious readers, the New York Times Book Review. That’s why I love it so: every issue gives you a little survey course in the natural history of book reviewing.

Take today’s issue, for example. You can see the political statement right away: the cover is given to a debut novel by Adam Ross rather than to Imperial Bedrooms by Bret Easton Ellis (and if you don’t think the cover spot is a coveted status symbol, you’ve been listening to too many lyingly self-deprecating authors). The review is by a woolgathering Scott Turow, and it’s mostly plot summary and vapid boilerplate (“Mr. Peanut is most harrowing in its bleakly convincing portrayal of the eternal contest that often passes for a marriage”), with a few nonsense-mysticisms thrown in (“The novel is shape-shifting, inhabiting several planes of reality”). The point of the piece isn’t to review the book (I’ve read Mr. Peanut, and trust me: it only inhabits the reality-plane of puerile crapola) but to anoint the author, a benediction the Book Review is better situated than anybody to bestow.

(By contrast, the Ellis review was handed to the literary editor of the OTHER Times, Erica Wagner, who pays proper acknoweldgement to the cultural landmark-status of Less Than Zero and then proceeds to pulverize its new sequel, Imperial Bedrooms, ending with a school-mistress admonition of a type only the Brits can pull off: “’History repeats the old conceits, the glib replies, the same defeats,’ runs one of this novel’s epigraphs, a line from Elvis Costello. So it may, but fiction doesn’t have to: that’s the point. Let’s hope Ellis figures that out.” Hee.)



But the type of review most prominently on display this time around is the aforementioned ‘soft pan.’ This would be annoying enough in the Book Review under any circumstances, but two of the times it happens today really irk. First, David Carr turns in a full-length review of Bill Clegg’s new memoir Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man and resolutely stops short of slamming a book he obviously disliked. Clegg’s memoir details his descent from cutie-patootie hotshot literary agent to slightly unkempt crack addict, and you might think the reason Carr goes soft on it is because he has high hopes for a similar book of his own – but no: he already wrote that book, Night of the Gun, and it’s considerably, comfortably better than Clegg’s book. And yet, everywhere in his review he stops just short of calling Clegg narcissist pedaling a third-rate survivor’s tale, and it becomes so noticeable it starts to beg for explanation. My best guess is that Carr is a nice guy who didn’t want to beat up on a fellow recovering drug addict. For which, if true, I say again: Facebook, not the New York Times Book Review.

The second ‘soft pan’ is mercifully shorter – Mike Peed’s seven-paragraph notice of Justin Cronin’s 700-page new novel The Passage. For the privilege of getting to watch an author sell his soul in public, the entertainment industry has showered The Passage with the kind of adoration usually reserved for incarnations of the Buddha (although I’m going to hope there was an element of irony in Stephen King’s “The best book EVER WRITTEN! The best book that ever CAN be written!”), and Peed clearly knows this (“If there’s a class at Iowa on exploiting publishing crazes, Cronin surely aced it”). And yet, his seven paragraphs condemn nothing about the book. Instead, all is gentle plot summary (no spoilers!) and guarded pretension (“The Passage, then, is fundamentally an investigation into the creation and destruction of a flawed race”). To put it mildly, a book that was written for the sole purpose of getting its author piles of money deserves rougher handling. And the reason it doesn’t get such handling here is likely connected to the ad revenues generated for the Times by Ballantine Books in promoting The Passage. Plus, you don’t want to be the only person who didn’t like such a hot, hot book, do you? You won’t get invited to any of its parties!

Still, the Book Review this time around ends with a fun piece about how boring, watery Borges loved fantastic, vital Robert Louis Stevenson – if that piece prompts even one of Borges’ pretentious name-dropping fans to try Stevenson, some good will come out of this issue after all.