Happily spelunking around the internet yesterday, I came across John Updike’s guidelines for writing book reviews, from the introduction to Picked Up Pieces. My favorite, and perhaps most controversial, is the sixth guideline–which carries these qualifiers:
Do not imagine yourself a caretaker of any tradition, an enforcer of any party standards, a warrior in an idealogical battle, a corrections officer of any kind. Never, never (John Aldridge, Norman Podhoretz) try to put the author “in his place,” making him a pawn in a contest with other reviewers. Review the book, not the reputation. Submit to whatever spell, weak or strong, is being cast. Better to praise and share than blame and ban. The communion between reviewer and his public is based upon the presumption of certain possible joys in reading, and all our discriminations should curve toward that end.
It is the “better to praise and share than blame and ban” that strikes me as so revealing at first blush–are we to condescend to weak praise if something is worthy of worse? What sort of mediocrity is Updike suggesting for a critical status quo? Isn’t this really advertising then and not reviewing?
Reflecting, though, one sees Updike’s point–a circulated review might bring more people to a book than may otherwise find it. What is better–to name a dog as being a dog, or to encourage a dog to read a book? Either way, the discerning reader will recognize his or her dislikes quickly–and will better know his or her pleasures. Of the method described by Updike above and its opposite, one reviewing method seems egotistical and short-sighted, subjective and so, honest; the other egalitarian and more concerned with the common good (whatever that exactly is–I realize I’m on shaky ground here, presuming the “good” to be a maximum number of readers. It’s easy to see a different type of “good.”) So what gives? Which is better?
I like to think that the first take–to name a book’s failings and ultimate unworthiness–is to take for granted the spirit in which it was produced. I’m not claiming to know what possessed Joyce, or Dickinson, or Anne Carson or James Tate, or any of the writers who find a home between the covers of the Kenyon Review, to finally pick up a pen and do what they did. But I’m socks-pulled-up glad that they did, and I don’t suspect for a minute that it was to pander to critical tastes, or score a good review in a newspaper.
(Maybe economics, but one could fault the writer on his or her poor choice and absence of savvy.)
Rather, in the books that I love–and maybe I’m romancing the work of writing–I find myself wanting to believe that the impulse to create was more viscerally animal and less results-oriented. Auden calls pleasure “by no means an infallible critical guide, but it is the least fallible.” I think he’s right for the writer, too; that pleasure can be the most reliable generating force of his or her writing.
Which helps me understand more of where Updike was coming from, with his “better to praise” sensibilities. (It is worth noting the dust on the excerpt–Updike published it more than thirty years ago. His thoughts may have changed entirely.) Though I’m not able to stand loyally behind all that is gentlemanly in it.
But better to err on the side of praise.