Intermingling
Sam Anderson proclaims that:
To me, book reviewing has never been hack work, or grunt work, or community service for those of us who’ve committed the unpardonable crime of not being novelists, or some kind of sad little way-station on the road to big literary success-I see it as a self-sufficient art. In fact, it’s one of my very favorite literary forms, and the form in which a lot of my favorite writers have done their best work.
Further:
As book critics, our writing is a writing on writing. We respond to an author’s metaphors with counter-metaphors; we critique or praise a story by telling a story about it. My favorite work is always that which allows itself to imaginatively intermingle with its source-text: it can be imitative, competitive, or collaborative; it can mimic or counteract the tone of the source. It can be subtle or overt. But it will always have this unique, doubled-over,creative quality-and that’s what keeps book criticism vital, and why it will survive.
Presumably by describing criticism as writing that “imaginatively intermingle[s] with its source-text,” Anderson especially has in mind something like his own idiotic review of Richard Price’s Lush Life, which presents itself as a “book review procedural” mimicking Price’s latest crime novel:
Stanny looking around the squad room, the Quality of Literature task force: Mayo, Sanchez, Hsu—three clip-on ties at a faux-oak table; their mantra: Quote, summarize, condemn; their motto: Judge every book by its cover. Sanchez hunched in the back, between the dictionary stands and broken typewriters, tugging on his soul patch, working up nerve, a whole shelf overpiled with advance copies ready to tip over behind him. Hsu scribbling his V-Ball. Excerpts from Lush Life dangle-tacked all over the walnut-paneled walls, ceiling to floor, easy reference; in front of each Aeron an inch-thick dossier, lists of major characters, themes, frags of description, more themes, page refs, key passages, color-coded maps, little bio of Richard Price. . . .
After reading this “review,” I was torn between thinking I’d never give Price’s fiction another chance if this is the sort of commentary it inspires and that perhaps I should read one of these procedural novels in which Price now seems to specialize because no writer should be judged by the inanity of a reviewer who can’t find something more useful to do than concoct such a pathetic piece of gibberish. (Cont….)
