Rejoice! Believe! Be Strong and Read Hard!

George Orwell, in his essay “Confessions of a Book Reviewer,” postulates a Sisyphean vision of the average book critic, a pouchy-eyed and preternaturally geriatric fiction writer clad in grubby robe and slippers, cowering behind a vertical thatch of cigarette butts and gazing at a mail packet of five novels, about which he’s meant to write an 800 word review by noon the following day. This coal laborer of the intellectual set has made his living turning “tripe” into cultural fossil fuels, he has sacrificed his standards for “a glass of inferior sherry,” and the effects, Orwell warns, are dismally incapacitating. Finally, as the shadow of the deadline darkens his study door, the despondent reviewer plods to action, dragging from his weary critical arsenal phrases such as “a book that no one should miss” and “something memorable on every page”—and types the concluding period just as the new packet of books thumps onto his doormat.

At the moment, I share vague similarities with Orwell’s reviewer. I am wearing pajamas (clean ones), I am a fiction writer, I prefer Brooklyn Lager to sherry, and that thumping sound? I suspect it’s the woman next door who beats her cat. Finally, what I lack in moral despondence I make up for in vacillation. For the past few months I’ve been trying to write an essay about reviewing that does not cast stones or bestow accolades, which is measured and polite and avoids value assignation, but the result felt like one long exercise in avoidance. If I were to write an essay about reviewing, it would make sense to admit that I have biases; I have opinions; I have some assertions to make about the current state of affairs. This is decidedly dodgy business, given that, as a general career operating principle, I try not to piss people off. Yet I need only look toward Washington, and the cringing Democrats, to see the fruitless results of this career operating principle. Such duck-and-cover amenability starts to appear cowardly, not to mention self-defeating; rather than guaranteeing a tepid longevity, it ensures an inevitable, and ignoble, extinction. And according to Orwell, horrors of the more existential variety await the timid person who prances around her subject for fear of saying something disagreeable. To write a dull, safe essay might be to risk slipping, intellectually, into his tattered landscape of hoary bathrobes and cigarette ruins.

Before I start outright lamenting, I’d prefer to take a sober look at the way we use book reviews, and how this use has changed as the book’s cultural status has diminished. I’m from the generation that grew up with the idea of “service,” one based less on a religious model than a business...