Americans may be reading less, but you’d never know it by browsing through the reviews on Amazon.com. There’s been a lot of justified hand-wringing recently in the literary community about the disappearance of book reviews as major daily newspapers in Atlanta, Dallas, Raleigh, Orlando, Cleveland, and even such major markets as Chicago, San Diego, and Los Angeles, have either fired their book reviewers or cut the space allotted to reviews, merging them into the least read sections of their weekend editions. You may have watched Salman Rushdie talk about the crisis in book reviewing on The Colbert Report or signed one of the petitions circulated by the National Book Critics Circle. If you haven’t read it yet, check out Steve Wasserman’s essay on the subject in Columbia Journalism Review, where the former editor of the L.A. Times Book Review puts the situation into historical perspective and offers some answers.
But if the newspaper book review may be dying, the culture of criticism is alive and well. As many of you know, serious book reviews can be found online at many of the literary blogs, although the reviews we find online can be uneven, in the “thoughts, musings, and ramblings” mode, or just charmingly eccentric, as in this site by a reader with “the odd habits of smelling the pages of published books and collecting the bookmarks to match.” And as Steven Colbert observed, “these days book critics don’t need newspapers; they just need Amazon accounts.” It’s a funny line, especially in the context of Colbert’s character, who stands up for the small-minded against the “literazis” and declares, “Nation, we are winning the war against reading!” But the death of the book review isn’t simply a matter of ad revenues and the cost of newsprint: we’ve entered the age of the citizen critic, when average consumers can post their own reviews of any product or service, from massage chairs to heart surgeons, teachers to roof repair. We have to take this idea seriously, if only because it reflects our culture’s changing relationship to intellectual authority; the market literally speaks, so why do we need the critic? That may seem like an easy question to answer, or dismiss, on a literary blog, but I found myself getting curious about its implications. So what do we find when we look at the reader reviews on Amazon?
First, let’s be clear: what Amazon and sites like it offer aren’t book reviews; they’re ratings: 5 stars to books you admire, 1 star to those that made you angry. Any commentary you offer simply justifies that choice. Book buyers, I would guess, largely ignore these ratings. Consumer reviews make sense when they warn you about flaws in a product or when they rave about great customer service, but on matters of taste, they become meaningless. A critic earns our trust by writing thoughtfully about a book, not simply responding with enthusiasm or aversion. Where these ratings get interesting, at least for me, is not in the reviews of new books, but in readers’ responses to classics. Take a book like Lord Jim. Amazon gives us 69 reader reviews: 35 readers give it 5 stars, affirming its “literary power,” while 6 readers dismiss it with 1 star as “too wordy,” or call it some variation on dull, dry, and confusing. “I am a Sophomore being forced to read this difficult and virtually impossible book for class,” complains one review. “It’s downright dull and far too difficult for me to comprehend.” Another tells us “I read this for a research paper on imperialism and hated it. Never before did I need to use Cliff Notes. I had to have them so I could understand the chapters as I went along. Only read any of Conrad’s work if you really enjoy long, dull, winding, and pointless stories.” Both are anonymous reviews (“A Customer”) by students who resent having to struggle with the book’s complex story and style.
Toni Morrison’s Beloved gets almost exactly the same treatment: 68 reviews, including 35 readers who give it 5 stars (“beguiling,” “powerful,” “lyrical,” “unflinching”) and 10 who give it only 1 star (“overdone, overused, overwritten, overhyped,” “not a single person in class liked this”). Positive reviews are, not surprisingly, more thoughtful in tone: the typical 5-star review averages three paragraphs, while 1-star reviews tend to dismiss a book in a few angry sentences. And that’s the key to understanding the system: those 1-star readers are angry. They didn’t choose to read this novel; they were forced to read it by teachers who assured them that Beloved is a great novel. They’re frustrated by the story, the style, and the simple fact that they don’t get it. “The hype and hyperbole over Morrison is a perfect example of literary snobbism,” one enraged culture warrior thunders. “This book is incomprehensible, therefore, that small group that either understands it [or pretends to] struts and preens and deem themselves to be the arbiters of taste for American literature.” And this anger doesn’t fade: several of these reviewers note that they “had to read it in college.” The past tense is significant: they’ve taken the time to post this scathing review months, or even years, after they tossed the book aside. It’s a chance to get even, anonymously, with the novelist, the teacher, and the “snobbish” literary culture that forced them to confront the limits of their own understanding. That impulse reflects a deep cultural ambivalence about both literature and education: great novels and great teachers bring us to this confrontation with the limits of our understanding, but if we approach them only as consumers, we feel frustrated by the demands placed on us and so miss the opportunity for self-transcendence. In fact, one definition of a great work of literature is that it makes demands on us for which we were unequipped before we read it: a great novel teaches us how to make sense of it, and so expands our experience of both the novel as a genre and our own consciousness. These readers are angry with the book for exactly the qualities that make others treasure it: it’s not an easy read, and it stretches us.
Then there are the middle-lane drivers, those readers who actually agree with the criticisms leveled by the angry readers in their 1-star ratings, but who also recognize the books’ cultural importance and can’t bring themselves to dismiss it completely. Yes, the style was frustrating and the story was confusing, but everyone says it’s important. If you stripped away the ratings, you could still identify this reader by the platitude that concludes the review: “All aside, Toni Morrison does an excellent job at her craft, yet will confound an inexperienced reader such as myself.” “Overall Beloved is an interesting story with twists and turns which could take you on an unforgettable journey.” “Regardless of whether you think you might enjoy the story, the message behind it makes it worth the effort.” It’s the book report school of reviewing, in which the reader tries to strike a balanced tone (“Overall, it wasn’t so bad I guess”), arriving at a conclusion so bland that no one could possibly agree or disagree. It’s a matter of taste, right? This might make sense as a strategy for a student who’s forced to report on his reading of a book he doesn’t understand, but why take the time to add your voice so blandly to the reviews available to potential readers of this book? One interesting feature in the Amazon system is the chance every reader gets to review the reviewers: at the bottom of each review is a link that asks “Was this review helpful to you?” Typically, the more thoughtful the review, the higher the rating, which means that the lengthy 5-star reviews of Beloved tend to be ranked by readers as most useful, while one reviewer who dismisses Lord Jim under the title “Do NOT Read This Book!!!” adds a postscript complaining that “As of 1-15-07 I see that I have ZERO ???yes’ votes for my review. That’s ???mean’. I’m just giving my honest reaction. You don’t have to agree with me but why not give me a break for spending the time and energy just to write my thoughts—-thoughts which MIGHT help someone….maybe not you….but someone.” (As of 11-26-07, he now has 15 of 43 readers who agree that his review is helpful, so perhaps plaintive appeals work. Sadly, Conrad didn’t include one.)
One ideal of the internet is that everyone gets to play, and no single voice of authority can drown out the chorus. But it’s obvious that rankings and anonymous rants give us little help in assessing the value of a complex work. In his CJR essay, Steve Wasserman recounts that when he was preparing to take over the Los Angeles Times Book Review, Joan Didion gave him this piece of advice: “Only review the good books.” What she meant was don’t waste your time or ours with reviews of mediocre books. But the reverse is also true: negative reviews don’t actually tell us much about a work, only about the expectations, assumptions, and taste of the reviewer. A scathing review can do wonders for a reviewer’s career, establishing his reputation as a tart voice of discernment, and it might occasionally save us from spending money on a much-hyped product of the commercial publishing machine. But the real value of a critic is in calling our attention to good books that might have escaped our attention. Wasserman is right in saying that much of what passes for literary criticism in daily newspapers is mediocre at best, but a positive review in a local newspaper can help to call casual readers’ attention to a writer or her work. Who will play that role when those reviewers are gone? The internet is the obvious place for book reviews, since they can be both timely and enduring: an online review can appear at the time of a book’s publication but remain easily available in a searchable archive for later readers. The Kenyon Review plans to expand its online book reviews and provide links to other review sites to help fill the gap left by the disappearance of newspaper book sections, and readers can easily get reviews online from a range of other sources, including The New York Times Book Review, The New York Review of Books, The London Review of Books, and the Times Literary Supplement. You can also find “a daily dose of book reviews from around the world” at Critical Compendium. But as terrific as these sites are, relying on them as the source of literary reviews means accepting the idea of literature as a niche market, where those who already know the value of literature can see that value affirmed. The rankings on Amazon and similar sites may be fundamentally unsatisfying as reviews, but at least they open a conversation between readers out there in the marketplace. My only suggestion to readers posting reviews, if anyone asked, would be to echo Didion’s advice to Wasserman: don’t waste our time with books you think are bad; tell us what you love and why you love it. Open our eyes, as the book opened yours. That’s what a well-written review can do for us, and it’s something worth sharing.