Reviewing the Book Review – The New York Times

The opposite of “dangle and sneer” isn’t “genuflect and revere.” It’s the work of vigorous reading, of research, curiosity, the capacity for surprise — criticism, in short. In a 2006 interview, Maxine Hong Kingston pined for “better criticism” — not kinder reviews: “I don’t mean they praise my work more, I mean that they understand what the work is about and there is more willingness now to read a book by a minority person and to criticize it as literature and not just see it as anthropology.”

In time, one begins to see calls for this kind of coverage in the Book Review itself. The section becomes self-reflective, critiquing a literary culture it had a powerful hand in creating. We see Bharati Mukherjee’s 1988 front-page essay on immigrant fiction, in which she questioned the racial underpinnings of the fashion for literary minimalism. Meg Wolitzer’s 2012 essay “The Second Shelf” asked why women’s literary fiction is taken less seriously than men’s, why women are derided for the narrowness of their subjects but punished if they take risks. If “a woman writes a doorstop filled with free associations about life and love and childbirth and war, and jokes and recipes and maybe even a novel-within-a-novel,” Wolitzer wrote, “she risks being labeled undisciplined and self-indulgent.”

A ghostly feeling settled over me as I read this essay. I’d seen the reviews Wolitzer was referring to — not just of her contemporaries but of generations past, that long, ignoble lineage. The contributor who, in 1905, sniffed that the woman writer would always paint on a small canvas, ask the small questions; his descendant in 2001 who berated a novelist for squandering ambitious experimental techniques on the deeply undeserving subject of a young girl’s coming-of-age story. Another prickly feeling followed — that I’ve been reading writers who’d produced the very book Wolitzer imagined, as if they’d absorbed her piece. I think of Lucy Ellmann, who also contributed to the Book Review around that time. In 2019, she published “Ducks, Newburyport,” a thousand-page doorstop — all in one sentence, no less — about “life and love and childbirth and war, and jokes and recipes” (and a mountain lion). The novel won awards, raves; no one that I recall accused it of indulgence. The review or essay written in protest doesn’t merely seed the work of the future; it can clear a path for its reception, creating the vocabulary and terms by which it will be received.

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My copy of “Lolita” is all foxed pages and spindly spine, battered and beloved. It’s my mother’s old copy and still bears traces of her cigarette ash. Looking at the passage again now, I understand for the first time, shame-facedly, its irony. Humbert boasts of all he has seen, but what does it amount to but a few squalid motel rooms, variations in bathroom tile? “Nous connûmes” nothing. It’s the very story of the novel — all that Humbert refuses to see about the girl he calls Lolita, about himself.

To look at the past is to look, for the most part, at what can be seen, what can be assessed. The number of women reviewed in an issue, the cruel jokes. I’m haunted by what cannot be quantified, what cannot be known — the long legacies of the language in the reviews, and how they creep into the present. How “reckonings” pass for restitution. I’m haunted by the notion of jettisoned novels and aborted careers — of novelists but also would-be reviewers. See, I know something of how language can be used to thwart and intimidate, about worlds so closed they awaken the great, self-preserving question: Why bother?