The Reviewers Reviewed

...The most turgid of such reviews introduce the author and then run out the clock with a plot summary...

...A first novel that might look flabby and sloppy to T. Coraghessan Boyle looks like a harbinger of genius to someone who's just put out a similarly flabby effort...

...From "harvested fields silvered by moonlight" to Morgan's overdecorated grave, which appears as "a too bright boat on a green sea" to a porch light in the dark that suddenly reminds Holly of "summer nights she'd played outside until her mother called her in," West of Venus is graced by images of both loss and renewal...

...Those who like Irish writers will find young ones like Colm Toibin who compare favorably to early 20th-century ones like Sean O'Faolain...

...Take the opening of this review of Ann Beattie's My Life, Starring Dara Falcon, by the short-story writer Jim Shepard: "Vladimir Nabokov—now there's a name you want to see at the beginning of any review of your work—once remarked that Anton Chekhov 'wrote sad books for humorous people.' . . . The same could be said of the best of Ann Beattie's work...

...Specifically, "Powers rarely writes a sentence that doesn't contain something bright and arresting: 'The smell of the vine struck me like a dropped hammer.'" Kalfus does not say what it is that makes this pedestrian sentence more "bright and arresting" than, say, The dame had a pair of gams on her that just wouldn't quit...

...O'Brien writes orgy prose, dripping and rich and fantastic...

...Once a critic takes into account whether his writings will cause an author to lose money or suffer hurt feelings, he's moved from criticism to something else altogether With certain exceptions, the NYTBR fiction-reviewers are answering the question of who they think they are in a much more equivocal way than did Frank Rich...

...loath to admit it...

...He's trying...

...Kelman's brilliant fictive universe...

...Whenever people make big sacrifices for art, serious, honest, uneuphemistic talk about what the arts mean and what art should do— criticism, in other words—becomes a matter of desperate importance...

...Or to warn readers that time wasted with Chris Offutt makes it less and less likely that you'll get to read War and Peace...

...In Betts's novel, a woman who's supposed to get married ditches her fiance to visit Donner (named after the cannibals) Lake...

...The success of these A-list reviews shows more than just that better writers write better articles...

...Well, if you can't say anything nice about the writing, say something nice about the marketing potential...

...The NYTBR has a rigidly applied class system under which big novelists review big novelists (e.g., Martin Amis on Don DeLillo), medium ones medium ones (Patrick McGrath on John Banville), and little ones little ones (David Freeman on Leslie Epstein...

...While poorly emphasized characters are "a troublesome flaw" in Berne's view, she nonetheless praises the book as "an otherwise engaging novel," concluding that Bohjalian "has also landed on a hot topic for baby boomers—the whole question of when alternatives to traditional medicine are beneficial, and when they become dangerous...

...It's best not to dwell too much on these questions, not if you care about fiction...

...But after the quibble paragraph, can the "however" clause be far behind...

...Either literature matters or it doesn't...

...There's almost a socialist realism to this effort to praise a book simply because it has a strong woman in it...

...This sounds like one of the most heavy-handed novels you could buy, but Chernoff closes her review with this summation: "In Luna Stone, Betts offers her readers a contemporary woman who struggles to combine what is best in her history with an ever-sharper awareness of the flexibility and resourcefulness required to survive in the modern world...

...Positive reviews in the NYTBR outnumber negative reviews roughly two-to-one...

...Jo Ann Kiser's review of Chris Offutt's The Good Brother is a classic of the genre...

...A corona blazed on the ball's circumference, etching a ring on Willy's retina that would blind-spot the rest of the point...

...Throughout the 1980s, the New York Times theater critic (now columnist) Frank Rich was excoriated by the New York theater world for his consistently negative reviews...

...What's new is that fiction writers, a traditionally jealous lot, are Christopher Caldwell is senior writer at The WWeekly Standard...

...Without even catching her breath, Kiser continues, "But this is a minor complaint...

...Then a final, blurb-ready paragraph (usually beginning with "However" or "And yet") that tells why, despite the mediocrity the review has amply displayed, this is a spectacular book...

...These are so common that they've even come to follow a predictable four-part structure: one paragraph of biographical info on the author, then an 800-word plot summary...

...But even where reviewers correctly diagnose serious flaws in a novel or stories, that's no guarantee of a negative review...

...Then there's Tom Drury, author of the novel The End of Vandalism and reliable rave-writer, reviewing Judy Troy's West of Venus, which finds praise for every manner of platitude: A reader will credit Ms...

...And a look at the New York Times Book Review over the last six months offers an explanation: It's not that fiction's poorly written but that it's poorly reviewed...

...What we're viewing here is rather the over-charitable, morally hazardous impulses of the writers' workshop...

...These are the most curious of the NYTBR book reviews: the doublethink reviews, those glowing accounts of books that the reviews themselves show to be stinkers...

...Take Ken Kalfus, identified as "an American writer living in Moscow," on Charles T. Powers's novel In the Memory of the Forest...

...Unlike Tamsen Donner, Luna will not allow herself to be marooned with only her old loyalties and grievances...

...Sometimes, happily, the veil slips...

...Well, he thought he was a critic, actually, that species of writer that tends to be found when—and only when—people are serious about the arts...

...Still, the perverse result of this pairing of reviewers and writers by status is an almost infinite forgiveness...

...Take Maxine Chernoff on Doris Betts's The Sharp Teeth of Love...

...that's an indication that Kelman should find a new line of work...

...it's just that—amidst the record thousands of self-indulgent and rubbishy novels rushed into print each year—the good ones are impossible to find...

...Then a penultimate paragraph to identify the book's manifold problems (the reviewer usually refers to his bill of particulars as "quibbles...

...Mewshaw himself has written a "tennis novel," and to his mind this passage in Shriver is the style to which we should all aspire: "The serve was into the sun, which at its apex the tennis ball perfectly eclipsed...

...That's a mission worth a very high price in thwarted careers and bruised egos...

...The top guns are much braver and write more interesting reviews...

...Rather, it's the bit between dashes, which makes it clear that the audience Shepard has in mind as he writes, the "reader over his shoulder," is Beattie herself...

...Or take Suzanne Berne on Chris Bohjalian's Midwives...

...Prose has found her way to the very central problem with fiction-reviewing today, one that is exemplified by the New York Times Book Review...

...So preponderant was the influence of the New York Times, producers complained, that Rich's pans could doom a show that had a fighting chance for a long run...

...The short-story writer Richard Burgin has this to say about James Kelman's story collection Busted Scotch: "There isn't much action or character development in the conventional sense in these stories...

...Or take Michael Mewshaw on Lionel Shriver's novel of tennis, Double Fault...

...In a September masterpiece on Larry Baker's lazy novel The Flamingo Rising, Prose analyzes not only a book but a way of life: There's not one cynical thing about this book—at least not on the part of its author—and you want to like this harmless, well-meaning novel...

...Yet Busted Scotch," Burgin continues, "is filled with strong stories, and the best of them are fiercely beautiful...

...Talk about enigmatic...

...But the very same people sometimes ask: How can fiction be dying if I've read a half-dozen new novels in the past five years that I hope my children will read someday...

...Whether or not the reviewers are writers'-workshop writers, most have absorbed the writers' workshop ethos: "Say something nice...

...Don't be hard on him...

...Whether it's due to writers' workshops, to a zeitgeist that values niceness above all, to a boom in blurb-writing, to a nascent class solidarity among declasse fictioneers, or to mere self-interested back-scratching, novelists and short-story writers seem congenitally disinclined to knock one another's work...

...Her ironies are crushing, not piercing, and the seriousness and dignity of her undertaking is marred by a solemnity that sometimes trips her...

...Do we imagine readers so hungry for a feel-good, upbeat book about life and death, Romeo and Juliet, drive-ins and a kinder, gentler American past that they will readily overlook the spectacle of an author slinging language around in the hope of hitting something...

...Is this just log-rolling...

...Most fiction is—and has always been— bad...

...Indeed, of all the first novels that can't hold our interest, this is one of the finest...

...Hang down your head, Tom Drury...

...She meets some drifters who help her emerge from her "emotional wilderness...

...No way...

...But McCullough-type reviews are rare, and often even a diagnosis of catastrophic flaws is accompanied by an outright rave...

...Fiction writers mostly follow the rule that if you can't say anything nice about a book, don't say anything at all...

...Heaven forbid he should say something to offend her...

...But no matter how you try to sustain these warm feelings, The Flamingo Rising keeps dampening them with the sponginess, the sloppiness of its prose—and with the fact that no one seems to have cared enough to attend to its problems...

...T. Coraghes-san Boyle's treatment of Thomas Pynchon's Mason & Dixon, a great essay that places the new book within the uneven Pynchon ceuvre, is very specific about the strengths and weaknesses of the book's historical-parody style, and does its own entertaining with apergus and gags...

...Really good books are thus reviewed on a different good-bad spectrum from really bad books...

...Hilary Mantel's piece on Edna O'Brien's Down by the River sums up many of the author's strengths over her career and deftly shows how they work against her latest novel, a highly politicized one on abortion: "Mrs...

...Don't quibble...

...That is, much of the review section is given over to any-port-in-a-storm efforts to think well of a piece, even if this means resorting to non-literary considerations in order to praise books of slender literary merit...

...In addition to its role of separating the wheat from the chaff, it has taken on certain secondary—and directly conflicting—roles: as carnival barker for the arts and self-esteem builder for fledgling writers...

...The New York Times Book Review assigns the vast majority of its fiction reviews to fellow fiction writers...

...It should ideally be about one-to-ten...

...Kiser, a reviewer for the Mountain Eagle in Whitesburg, Ky., is not yet published as a novelist, but she is dazzling in her nonjudgmental magnanimity: "Offutt's inexperience as a novelist emerges once he departs from his native terrain...

...Rich, the complaint continued, was posing a threat to the very existence of New York theater...

...Have we lost faith in the intelligence of our audience...

...Not only does Mewshaw praise this jumble of possessives without antecedents, of verbed nouns, of awkward periphrasis, he invokes Nabokov, Hemingway, Mark Harris, and John Irving to do it...

...Patrick McGrath's treatment of John Banville's The Untouchable educes a great deal from Banville's restrained style and conducts a deeply considered argument on what drove a certain type of English aesthete (such as Anthony Blunt, on whom Banville's protagonist is based) to communism...

...That's not a quibble...

...Do writers and editors no longer care about precision, clarity, the most basic rules of grammar...

...Does Shepard expect that Beattie may wind up sitting on the jury when he's up for the National Book Award (another big misuse of fiction writers, but that's another article) or simply reviewing his big novel at some point...

...Martin Amis's The Information bears comparison to any of his father's darker works...

...The upshot is an irrationality in matters of taste, a dangerous relativity in critical standards, and an offensive grade inflation that pollutes the whole book section...

...Creative-writing teacher Elizabeth Benedict, reviewing Susan Thames's I'll be Home Late Tonight, acknowledges that "in certain key scenes, her descriptions seem not only dramatically limiting but psychologically incomplete...

...Much bad reviewing, then, is a simple function of bad taste...

...It's not the first time the Times has faced this problem...

...Kalfus calls the book "remarkable for the acuity of its moral vision and the vivacity of its language...

...There's also little sense of women as individuals—they're more like a force that men fear as much as they desire...

...After a desultory mix of plot summary and general observations about romans a clef, David Willis McCul-lough ends his review of Ward Just's Echo House with one dismissive sentence: "This is a portrait of Washington at once so knowing and so cynical that only a Washingtonian could truly love it...

...The Good Brother is a fine first novel by a fierce writer...

...Paul Theroux's many recent novels are not his best, but they all stand up...

...Here is the time-honored Basic Instinct review: ten minutes of lovemaking, followed by five seconds of gouging the author's eye out with an ice pick...

...End of review...

...It's not the comparison of Beat-tie and Chekhov that's most bothersome here...

...One problem is that a lot of writers are just lousy critics, adducing the wrong stuff to convey the wrong things...

...In reviews by fiction writers, that ratio rises to three-to-one...

...It's not that good fiction is impossible to write...

...It shows that writers with big ambitions are engaged in a qualitatively different enterprise from writers whose work is defiantly small-scale...

...However time-honored the practice of throwing review work to "artists" in order to help them keep body and soul together, the dominance of fiction writers in fiction reviewing has become an enormous problem...

...What's more, you want to protect it, just as you want to shelter and encourage all first novels and first novelists, those brave, romantic creatures still scribbling down their dreams, even though we hear that fewer and fewer first novels are being published these days...

...Most of the fiction writers who review for it, whether through log-rolling or a misapplication of the Golden Rule to literary matters, are unwilling to take the heavy responsibility of passing judgment...

...This poses a big problem, and not just for the New York Times Book Review...

...But in a recent issue of Smithsonian, former NYTBR editor Rebecca Pepper Sinkler convincingly described a rigorous system that is in place for avoiding the most direct of conflicts of interest...

...In a world where time is short and the market flooded with loopy novels, that ratio ought to be at least reversed...

...But if it does matter, then, with novels continuing to proliferate, it's more imperative than ever to steer people away from such tripe as Busted Scotch and towards life-enriching books like (in my opinion) Mason & Dixon...

...This, of course, is no quibble but a fatal flaw, and one assumes Kiser would warn the reader not to touch The Good Brother with a barge pole...

...Among the fiction writers who review for NYTBR, Francine Prose is the most acute, honest, and intelligent critic and also the only one of the elite reviewers who slums it occasionally by reviewing promising youngsters and low-profile novelists...

...60 Minutes did a segment that portrayed him as a menace, and the Village Voice regularly ran headlines like "Who Does Frank Rich Think He Is...

...This tendency to rave about demonstrably bad books is most marked in reviews of first novels and unknown writers...

...Still," Benedict says, "Susan Thames can also be an eloquent observer of family life...

...He can't hold our interest in the lives and motivations of his Montana characters...

...For fans of Indian novels, the half-dozen serious novelists working in the subcontinent today are a half-dozen more than we had 30 years ago...

...Troy's spare but lyrical evocation of the Midwestern prairie...

...An] unexpected feeling of connection with others introduces an element of hope into some of the stories in Busted Scotch and helps to balance, if only intermittently, the bitterness of Mr...

...And the male characters are often quite similar in their thoughts and tone of voice...

...If literature doesn't matter, then our newspaper of record is wasting a lot of resources devoting so much space to it in the first place...

...Penelope Fitzgerald's review of Muriel Spark's recent Reality and Dreams does little more than inform us that Spark often discusses good and evil from a theological perspective, then closes by saying, "Dame Muriel is as enigmatic in this novel, as distinct, as relentlessly observant of human habits and unguarded moments as she has ever been...

...Perhaps...