ninme

It’s book season again.

The Times - Lit Crit Sit
Literary critics, reviewers, and the incestuous art of logrolling

Presenting the Man Booker Prize last night, Howard Davies referred to a curious habit of literary critics. Their curious habit is to review each other’s books fulsomely. Author X selects Author Y’s novel as her Book of the Year. Author Y reciprocates by reviewing Author X’s novel as the most ripping yarn since Rudyard Kipled and Haggard Rode. In London’s literary tent, everybody is related to, or in love with, or in debt to, or has expectations from, everybody else. Literary hacks have editors upon their backs to bite ’em. And literary editors have publishers’ publicists, and so ad infinitum.

Logrolling used to describe the way that pioneers helped their neighbours to build their cabins. Today it describes the cronyism of Bookmanism. One can see why it happens. I have a book coming out. You may review it. He shares the same publisher. Why waste space on asseverating that a book is not worth the paper? Nothing new in logrolling. Dickens bloviated. Anthony Burgess was fired from the Yorkshire Post for reviewing his own novel. James Joyce wrote a review of Finnegans Wake. Walt Whitman published three anonymous reviews of Leaves of Grass – “an American bard at last!” – and quoted his own review in the preface to the second edition.

(Actually, that sounds like something someone I could name would do)

However, we remember bad reviews. Dorothy Parker: “This is not a book to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force.” But the internet has democratised the craft. Anybody can review nowadays, and most of them do. Most of their reviews are tosh. But then so are many of the books that are published. Caveat lector. Select your reviewers (and books) with care.

Harrumph.