Why I Write The Kinds of Book Reviews I Write or, What Happened To Book Reviews Of Contemporary Literature?

In my writing lifetime, I’ve published probably maybe 100, maybe 200 reviews of contemporary literature of various lengths and in different contexts. And of those reviews, maybe at most ten of them have been more negative than positive, maybe because I mostly prefer to write about books I mostly like.

As might be expected, those ten more negative reviews received much more attention than any of the others and made people angry, usually not the writer, but sometimes, and more often friends of the writer or professional editors. In at least one case I can think of, I seem to have inadvertently made a permanent enemy of one editor who rejected me for all further work for the journal, not that I cared that much really.

It was around the time that I learned how much that one editor hated me (a person I’ve never met) that I stopped trying to place reviews in publications and turned to reviewing books only on my blog or sometimes in publications at the request of others. But I’ve never again queried anyone about accepting a book review. Maybe I was tired of it, didn’t feel a need to do it anymore. I still do publish quite a few reviews or mentions of other books though, but I don’t ask for publication permission anymore. That part just doesn’t seem worth it.

But the thing I also realized was that the world of professional book reviewing of contemporary literature didn’t have much use for even minimal levels of honesty. Book reviews are most of the time no more than promotions for a book, except in the hands of a very small number of reviewers who keep their role as professional haters, a position I didn’t want either. I’m not asserting the value of “objectivity” in reviewing because I know there’s no such thing. But there’s just not much opportunity for independence of thought.

I say all this because sometimes, these days, people will ask what happened to book reviews of contemporary literature? Reviews still exist, obviously, but there aren’t nearly as many as some writers might like. But along with the problem of finding an audience for reading reviews, the literary field is too closed in on itself, too small and threatened in its very existence, to have more than a few options for thoughtful, honest, independent reviews. Most reviews are reviews of books written by people who know the writer, or know friends of the writer, or are known as enemies of the writer.

So what, really, is in it for the book reviewer of the work of literature by a living author? It doesn’t improve your own position as a writer in the world, most of the time, to talk about somebody else’s book. It gets you a few murmurs of thanks if you say something positive and some significant hostility if you don’t. Maybe if you do something for somebody, they’ll do something for you; that’s about the best aspect of it.

Oh well. I’m still going to write about books when I feel like it, which is sometimes. But if you’re looking for one reason (among several) why book reviewing in contemporary literature has faded, look no further than the desires for success with which the field is saturated, and which no one in the field stands in any clear space outside.

Honey Mine (Collected Stories) by Camille Roy

 

There’s a lot of brilliant writing in this book. Camille Roy has a remarkable style: crisp, vivid, energetic. Although the subtitle of Honey Mine is Collected Stories, this is a profoundly hybrid collection. Short stories, memoir, poetry, essays, all of these ways of writing weave in and out through individual pieces and the text as a whole so that genre categories never remain stable.

One of the key themes of this book is that underground and alternative communities, whether based in sexual identity or identities and politics of other kinds, can form genuine and meaningful alternative values. And if Roy wants readers to understand that those communities and values sometimes thrive by being opaque to the rest of the world, everything in Honey Mine communicates powerfully, even when it chooses what not to speak of.

The NIght Before The Day On Which, by Jean Day

 

This is the first book of hers in which Jean Day’s work finally “kicked in” for me at a higher level of connection and understanding. Her poems have always been evocative, disruptive, oddly bent, never going where I imagine them going, Ashbery-like in their elusiveness. But somehow The Night Before The Day On Which is the one in which I could feel all the writing in the book gathering together into something that felt cohesive, a vast yet tight pattern, however much any given line turned away from a previous line.

A twisting and twisted Americana.

There’s something about the accumulation of one detail after another, of metaphors that jump away from each other, that add up to a world view that I can feel as connected, a strange mesh of identifiable context. It’s a context that reaches far into the past, that branches out into speculation and query, and and yet still always has a firm, even harsh, critique of the limits that people and their values impose on each other, now, here, and in other times and places: Inside the kernel’s a tiny game.

You can hear a Timex pound fifty feet away

It’s not music

not even microscopic

but plain speeches of the fish and branches

of LaCrosse, Wisconsin

midway across the Miss.

from a circus of fleas

to flat-out wilderness

Our foes

don’t want us in their schools “No worries.”

God has decided to withdraw his tiny hands (p. 54) There’s a incisive take on politics and culture throughout the book, especially if you can imagine what it might feel like to be a nested doll stuck inside another nested doll, layer after layer, none of us ever getting free, each one of us brilliantly done up for a festival of the freedom of lights that is often promised but never arrives. In the poems, I feel myself present in many contexts of struggling to understand, of not always knowing what I don’t know or what I might know, of not becoming what I might. In a way, these are tragic poems, but not of the obvious kind, sort of like a tragedy you didn’t know was a tragedy until long after it happened. There’s a lot of space out there in the world, both inside and outside the human, but the openness that one might imagine from it feels, in this powerful book, almost endlessly deferred.

Doppelgänger by Daša Drndić

 

I’m not opposed to “depressing” books. When people complain that a book is depressing, I usually like to say that one of the key things about literature is that it can explore the full range of human experience, and some human experiences are very sad.

That said: wow, Doppelgänger is a depressing book. It combines two novellas focusing on several central characters struggling with age, bodily collapse, and suicidal impulses. They’ve been mistreated by others, including often enough their families. They’ve been abused by the Nazis or post-WWII Eastern European communists or (lucky people) both. They live in cold places and in various degrees poor and sometimes disgusting environments among broken things that don’t work. They’re not even good people really, although they do helpful things a few times maybe among many other unhelpful things. There are going to be some moments of hopes and dreams and glimmers of possibility in each tale, but not many. 

What made it possible for me to read this book was the humor (no kidding; it’s frequently hilarious), the tight, high energy sentences, and many of the genuinely brilliant and compassionate (if often enough unbearable) insights into human behavior and the failing of the human body. What made it full of surprises were the clearly experimental, avant context-jumping and formal oddities. There’s an amazing long section that comes from who knows where (but belongs perfectly) about Foucault and Althusser, and a long list-like conversation about artists and suicide. There’s not a huge amount of narrative tension to take anybody’s mind off the relentless trouble of the characters, not much dramatic conflict (though there’s plenty of conflict as such) to take readers away from the cold facts. You can put up with it or put it down. When reading it I often couldn’t stop, it was that compelling. But when I would stop, I often wasn’t sure I wanted to start again.

The author Daša Drndić, a Croatian who died in 2018, called it her “ugly little book.” It is truly almost unremittingly ugly. But not entirely ugly somehow, as trying to tell the truth can never be an entirely ugly desire, and because laughing at or with the worst things possible makes them more possible to bear. I can’t say I would recommend Doppelgänger to anybody who isn’t prepared for what they’re going to read. But I can’t say I’m going to forget it, either. There are a lot of books that are more easily enjoyable that I barely remember at all.