the complete review Quarterly
Volume VI, Issue 3/4   --   November, 2005


The Year in Reviews
An overview of the most-discussed review-events of the year
(November 2004 - October 2005)

Anonymous reviewing
Marianne Wiggins reviews John Irving
Side by side reviews of Here's Where I Stand
Books: Until I find You - Incendiary - Saturday - Slow Man - Shalimar the Clown
Foreign coverage: US v. UK
Review coverage
Reviewing in general



Anonymous reviewing

       Not widely practised any longer -- even the TLS gave it up a quarter of a century ago -- anonymous book reviews can still be found in a few (occasionally prominent) quarters, such as The Economist. This year it was Kirkus that repeatedly got bashed for hiding the identities of its reviewers, making for some entertaining debates on the subject.
       James Bowman's OpinionJournal-piece, Oh Yeah ? Says Who ? (14 January) argued: No more anonymous reviews, please. Interestingly, what set Bowman off was a review of George Weigel's The Cube and the Cathedral -- a book that easily ranked among the worst we've covered all year. The Kirkus review was not even that bad, but it did highlight the politics of the author (and it is this that particularly upset Bowman). Certainly, Bowman could hardly have chosen a better book for that particular debate (the politics one, not the anonymous one). We found the book failed long before one took the politics into consideration, but most of the notices (in what is popularly termed the right wing press -- National Review, The Washington Times, etc.) chose not to see or point to its obvious flaws. (The one very negative review, in the San Francisco Chronicle, is, of course, from the 'liberal' media.)
       Sometime anonymous reviewer Ron Hogan also discussed Bowman's piece -- and the anonymous problem -- at Beatrice.
       It didn't stop there: disgruntled writer Quinn Dalton was moved by -- you guessed it -- a Kirkus review for his Bulletproof Girl to offer Anonymous Reviewing: A Review at MediaBistro.
       Oddly, nobody who received a good anonymous review seems to have complained, which suggests that it's not so much that people find it troubling that the reviews are anonymous as much as that they are negative .....

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Marianne Wiggins reviews John Irving

       John Irving's Until I Find You got quite a few bad reviews. Irving didn't complain about any anonymous ones, but he did take issue with Marianne Wiggins having her say (10 July).
       Wiggins was married to Salman Rushdie who is friends with Irving. Apparently they socialized way back when, and because of the personal connexions Irving thought it inappropriate that she got the review-assignment. The Washington Post agreed -- and apologised. Official policy -- which they failed to follow -- should have precluded her from covering it. Still, once again, one wonders if he would have gotten into quite such a huff if the review had been a glowing one .....

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Side by side reviews of Here's Where I Stand

       As reported in From "Senator No" to Senator N&lO, Jesse Helms' Here's Where I Stand got two reviews in the News & Observer in his home state -- and it looks like one was printed solely to blunt the impact of the other.
       Timothy B. Tyson's review was highly critical (for example: "As a literary work, Here's Where I Stand: A Memoir never fails to disappoint"), while R. Emmett Tyrrell jr.'s review wasn't particularly critical about anything in the book.
       While there's something to be said for presenting different opinions about a book, this was surely not the way to go about it.

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Books: Until I find You - Incendiary - Saturday - Slow Man - Shalimar the Clown

       Divvided opinion seemed even more common this year than most, with little critical consensus regarding several prominent books.
       New books by a trio of former Man Booker winning authors failed to make the shortlist this year, and all three -- Ian McEwan's Saturday, J.M.Coetzee's Slow Man, and Salman Rushdie's Shalimar the Clown -- got reviews that ranged from the ecstatic to the completely dismissive.
       John Irving's massive Until I Find You found some fans, but also received an impressive number of bad reviews.
       Chris Cleave's debut, the terrible Incendiary, was overshadowed by the coincidence that the terrorist-themed book was launched in the UK on the day of the terrorist attacks on the public transportation system in London. This fact was mentioned in practically all the reviews that followed, and coloured many of them. It also garnered the book much more coverage -- review and otherwise -- than it could possibly have gotten otherwise. Opinions on it were also very mixed. One might wonder whether it will eventually be possible to read it without that distortion, but it's such a poor book that it really hardly matters.

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Foreign coverage: US v. UK

       Under Sam Tanenhaus' watch The New York Times Book Review has managed to purge almost all coverage of books originally written in foreign languages from its pages, and much of the reviewing establishment in the US seems to have followed suit. There are exceptions, even in the print media, but by and large the situation is bleak.
       A typical example is a second-tier title such as Yamada Taichi's Strangers -- not a particularly good book, and not by anyone well-known, but of some interest. It was published by Vertical in the US, and then Faber followed with a UK edition (which also tells you something about the types of publishers in these countries willing to take on this sort of thing).
       The American publication was reviewed by many worthies, but they tended to be the likes of us: relatively small-circulation and Internet based: besides us there was Agony Column, Bookslut, etc. The print media ? Pretty much ignored it.
       In the UK, on the other hand, it was reviewed by most of the major dailies: The Guardian, The Observer, Scotland on Sunday, The Telegraph (here and here), as well as the Times Literary Supplement.
       In other words: in the UK it was reviewed almost everywhere that matters, while in the US it was reviewed nowhere that matters (or at least nowhere that matters too much, much as we'd like to think of ourselves as a leading review-site ...). The well-known Faber imprint probably helped some (books are judged by their covers and the imprint on their spines, and Vertical is a pretty new shop), but the difference is still striking.
       Getting foreign language titles published in the US is already difficult enough -- though 2005 seems to have been a pretty good year, with a surge of activity -- but if they aren't covered by the press it makes it that much more difficult to find an audience (and might well lead publishers to once again abandon their efforts, since they can't get any attention -- or buyers -- for this sort of book).

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Review coverage

       There was quite a bit of 'review of reviews' coverage in 2005, notably at literary weblogs, such as The Elegant Variation's LATBR-thumbnails and the Return of the Reluctant's Tanenhaus brownie-watch. Enthusiasm to keep these up seems to have dimmed some towards the end of the year, but one hopes this trend will gain momentum again.
       The most promising such endeavour, Ron Hogan's Beatrix unfortunately petered out pretty quickly. Surprisingly, despite the proliferation of literary weblogs, there aren't any dedicated primarily to reviewing the reviews (and reviewers).

       Availability of reviews online has again improved as notably The Los Angeles Times broke down its registration wall (though reviews tend to remain available for only a limited time). Elsewhere print-media sources continue to tinker with what they make available (and how easily).
       Among the major losses this year was the excellent archive of The Independent: their redesign seems to have cut off access to all older reviews. Even more disappointingly, the Neue Zürcher Zeitung has also rendered their archive essentially inaccessible.
       A welcome addition on the review-scene is the monthly supplement from Al-Ahram Weekly, the Cairo Review of Books, offering much-needed coverage of books from and about the Arab world.

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Reviewing in general

       As always, numerous articles on reviewing in general have appeared over the past year. See, for example:

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© 2005 the complete review Quarterly
© 2005 the complete review