| Blog Entry - Tuesday, April 11th, 2006 | Add / Read (1) |
Interesting article in Slate today about a NYT book critic who is more about the thumbs up or thumbs down judgement -- using all those adjectives and superlatives that don't really mean much -- than she is about telling you something about the book.
"But the sour-grapes sniping from spurned authors should not obscure the fact that Kakutani is a profoundly uninteresting critic. Her main weakness is her evaluation fixation. This may seem an odd complaint—the job is called critic, after all—but in fact, whether a work is good or bad is just one of the many things to be said about it, and usually far from the most important or compelling...One has the sense of her deciding roughly at Page 2 whether or not a book is worthy; reading the rest of it to gather evidence for her case; spending some quality time with the Thesaurus; and then taking a large blunt hammer and pounding the message home."
As I write more essays about books, plays, memoirs, and movies, I recognize that my opinion on whether the work is good or bad is only a small part of what is to be said about it. Comparing the work to other works in its subgenre is sometimes interesting, but more to see what's similar or different, than to say which one is best.
"The core question is how the current piece fits into the oeuvre, and we expect reflective reviews to address it. In this case, I'd be curious to see a critic consider Hornby's oft-stated and almost obsessive pledge to write books that are entertaining and ultimately uplifting—and how such a project could be expected eventually to encounter artistic and philosophical difficulties.
You'd want this Platonic critic to touch on other stuff,
too. He or she could share some insights about the nature of novels written
in dramatic monologues, or novels about suicide, or novels, or art, or
life. Kakutani's refusal ever to take her eyes off the thumbs up/thumbs
down prize, or to lay any of her own prejudices, tastes, or tangentially
relevant observations on the table, is dispiriting."
The most prolific reviewer in our
midst, Duffbert,
I think does a good job of always telling you what's in the book and why
it might be useful to a particular reader or audience. I'm still working
to find my voice as a reviewer, but you can be certain, I'll take this
article to heart.
Author: Libby
Posted at: 10:09:45 AM
