More Comments on Book Reviews

Michelle Latiolais adds:

I think serious writers of poetry and prose should be asked to review more often, and I think they should take up this task as a responsibility. Most of the smartest response to writing comes from writers showing us something about the writing, and kind of showing us from the inside. Carol Muske Dukes wrote a column for several years for the Los Angeles Times just because she felt the responsibility to create a forum for poetry if she could. Ron Carlson--my colleague at UC Irvine--just wrote a marvelous review of Peter Mattiessen's Shadow Country that was published in the Los Angeles Times. It was a writer writing about the craft he perceived in another writer's work.

One aspect of so much reviewing today that I find startling is the inability of the reviewer to enter into the world of the book. Instead, the book is flogged with some measure of reality that the reviewer perceives as not only operable, but exclusive of all other realities. You've heard these criticisms ad nauseam. They go something like "this is not believable," or "no mother would do . . . ." I'm always startled. John Updike does it in a recent review of Andrew Sean Greer's new novel that was published in The New Yorker. It seems to me that the one itty bitty thing someone might have observed along the way is that all manner of behavior is not only possible, but present in the human condition.