Gotham Diary:
Presentation
17 February 2014

Regular readers will be astonished to learn that I did go to Jazz at Lincoln Center on Friday night, accompanying my dear wife to a Valentine’s Day recital by Dianne Reeves in the Rose Theatre. And I’m glad that I went, but only for Kathleen’s sake. Had I known what the event would be like, I think I’d have stayed away.

The Rose is a great venue for jazz musicians, but there is much to be learned about microphones and amplification. I believe that sound engineers ought to ratchet down the volume with which popular music is conventionally performed, and to try more closely to approximate the output of a chamber ensemble (where there is no sound enhancement beyond the hall’s acoustics). Instead, they’re taking it in the direction of stadium rock. After more than an hour of rumbling throbs, I can’t take it any more; the music, whatever else might be said of it, becomes annoying. This is not the complaint of an old man, by the way; after two or three rock concerts in the prime of my youth, I decided that such events were essentially unmusical, and I stayed away ever thereafter. I don’t mean to single out Dianne Reeves and her Beautiful Life band; the problem is in the Rose.

What I do fault Ms Reeves for is a certain confusion. Is she a jazz musician or a showcased singer? Is she a colleague, as everyone in a jazz ensemble must be, or a diva? The question wouldn’t come up if the Beautiful Life musicians weren’t the virtuosos they are, or if the audience didn’t appreciate their solos (which, man, they did), because Ms Reeves spends most of her onstage time on the diva side of the line. There weren’t many solos on Friday night. Dianne Reeves has a great big beautiful voice — it’s a wonder of the world, really, like Old Faithful or Niagara Falls — and that, together with what appear to be her temperamental inclinations, lead me to conclude that she would be more successfully herself if she were backed by a well-charted orchestra of the Nelson Riddle grade. She might no longer belong in the House of Jazz, but her concerts would be more satisfying. Less embarrassing, anyway: no one would fault her for not being generous to her fellow musicians. Peter Martin, Peter Sprague, Sean Jones, Tia Fuller, Raymond Angry, Reginald Veal and Terreon Gully at least ought to have had a jam for themselves. And the backup girls were so tamped down by the sound desk that they were audible only because they were visible.

Dianne Reeves’s CDs were on sale at a table in the lobby. I bought two, the new one (Beautiful Life) and and old one that I had missed. I expect to enjoy them a lot. Also: if I were planning a trip to Brasil, I’d try to time it to coincide with one of Ms Reeves’s visits. They must go crazy down there.

***

On the Bookends page of the Book Review this week, Francine Prose and Zoë Heller argue in favor of the negative book review. Their arguments must be dealt with.

Prose begins by pointing out something for which I admired her: for a long time, she refused to write negative reviews. In Reading Like a Writer, she collected so many lovely passages from books that meant a lot to her that the very existence of inferior fiction dropped out of sight. I regarded Prose as an ally on the bad-review front until recently, when I came across a review under her byline that displayed a dismaying number of the irritating characteristics common to bad reviews that don’t set out to be funny. (I ought to have made a note of it, but I didn’t, and now I can’t find it.) So I was not entirely surprised to read what she had to say at Bookends.

Prose gives two reasons for writing an unfavorable review. (1) “It depresses me to see talented writers figuring out they can phone it in, and that no one will know the difference.” (2) “I also tend to react when something about a book strikes me as indicative of an unfortunate trend.”

Zoë Heller’s piece is a response to some recent verbiage on the Internet, by Lee Siegel and Isaac Fitzgerald, that urged reviewers to be nice and to bear in mind that authors have feelings, too. Why Heller takes such spongy, sub-literary vaporizing seriously enough to debate is beyond me. She seems to think that (3) Siegel and Fitzgerald are infantilizing writers, who, in Heller’s view, have more than feelings at stake: they want to provoke reactions. Above all, they are adults; they can take it.

Yet they accept with varying degrees of resignation that they are not kindergartners bringing home their first potato prints for the admiration of their parents, but grown-ups who have chosen to present their work in the public arena.

Heller also claims that a signed unfavorable review “seems an altogether fairer way of dealing with a book one deems “bad” than banishing it.” This is not a fourth argument in favor of unfavorable reviews, but a recapitulation of Prose’s first argument.

Regular readers of long standing will recall that, for five or six years, I “reviewed” the Book Review every week. Whatever else this undertaking accomplished, it taught me the limitations of book-review form. Good reviews — by which I mean well-written and -thought-out reviews, not necessarily favorable ones (although, as I learned, good reviews were almost always favorable) — were uncommon. Bad reviews proliferated, and while there were many ways of writing a bad review, the one thing most bad reviews had in common was a focus on the reviewer. Most of all, I learned to ask what book reviews were for, anyway.

More precisely, what is the purpose of a Book Review book review? We must admit that, for many readers, the book reviews are gossip. They retail “book talk,” functioning as indiscreet baseball cards. They provide cheat sheets for the reader who doesn’t intend to read the book but who might want to mention it at a cocktail party. We cannot imagine, however, that supplying gossip is the purpose of the New York Times Book Review. Never!

Nor is the Book Review intended to weigh and consider matters of political and social importance as they are reflected in new books. Almost every other source of book reviews — the New York Review of Books, the London Review of Books, The New Yorker, Harper’s, and Atlantic — does a much better job of that. Every now and then, an “important” topic gets front-page coverage in the Book Review, as often as not in the form of two reviews, printed side-by-side, of two different books. This week, Al Gore, no less, reviews Elizabeth Kolbert’s The Sixth Extinction. Or, should I say, no more?

The Book Review also publishes reviews of books for children, and here we find the purpose of the Book Review unsullied by the blandishments of gossip. The purpose of the children’s-book reviews is to alert readers to new titles so that they may buy them for their children.

To say that the purpose of Book Review is to sell books is not to imply corruption. No, corruption is quite another matter, a matter of deceitful reviews. We must take it on faith that the Book Review‘s editors keep deceit to a minimum. It’s in their interest to do so, because propaganda will out.

The purpose of a Book Review book review is to present a book to as many potential buyers — readers who will enjoy the book — as possible. People who won’t buy the book, who wouldn’t like it, are of no account. I can think of no instance in which the Book Review ever published a piece in which, clearly, few-to-none readers would take an interest. Indeed, a good many unfavorable reviews are infused with the kinds of resentment, spurred by the very success of allegedly dodgy books, to which Prose confesses in both of her arguments. No, the Book Review assumes that the titles that it covers are out there and selling. Not best-selling, of course; the Book Review doesn’t review best-sellers either. There would be no point. The readers of best-sellers don’t need the kind of help that the Book Review, at its best, has to offer.

The good reviewer begins by liking the book. (This is what the editor is for.) Liking may not be love, but a favorable breeze of some strength will inspire the reviewer to present the qualities of the book as attractively as possible, thus drawing in more readers. I want to stress the note of presentation: the good reviewer is genial and more or less transparent. The good reviewer also knows how to warn readers who probably wouldn’t like the book to stay away. Cleverness is required.

I am not going to talk about the bad reviewer; instead, I am going to propose that the unfavorable review is not a presentation, but rather a kind of personal essay. It is about the presenter. The author of an unfavorable review may tell you that she didn’t really get the book, or he may complain (at length), that the author of the book ought to have written a different book — a book that the reviewer would have liked (is there any purer way of talking about oneself?). The reviewer might, as Prose would, charge the book with meretriciousness, making a culturally-rooted moral argument outside the scope of a platform like the Book Review. Or, again like Prose, the reviewer might regret a “trend.” This, too, would be outside the scope of the Book Review, because writing about trends takes up a lot of column inches, and necessarily addresses more than one book.

Is there a place for personal essays of this kind? I certainly think so. But the Book Review isn’t it.

Heller’s argument justifies the unfavorable review that scolds an author for something worse than “phoning it in.” If you follow the link at the bottom of this entry, you will be directed to Rick Pearlstein’s essay in the current issue of The Nation, “From & Friends,” an engrossing takedown of Al From’s self-puffing book about the Democratic Leadership Council. It is not a personal essay, but a summation of recent political history, written as a corrective to From’s party line. As book reviews go, it is strongly unfavorable. But it appears in The Nation, not the Book Review. Just as the Book Review ought to show us things that we might like, The Nation warns us about things that are bad. That is why we read The Nation if we do.

Having said all of this, I’m almost too weary to observe that the newspaper’s daily “Books of the Times” column, for which three or four professional critics write most of the contributions, does a much better job of reviewing books. Could it be that the Book Review really is all about the gossip, paid for by ads for books that are never, in its pages, reviewed?

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