Few Extra Bucks

Book critic Joe Queenan begains a NYTBR humor piece with this admission:

Freelance writers are always looking for ways to scare up a few extra bucks, so recently I tried my hand at writing some of those “Questions for Discussion” that appear at the back of many paperbacks. I got the idea after reading Andrei Makine’s novel “The Crime of Olga Arbyelina,” the hard-luck saga of a Russian émigré with a hemophiliac son who pops up in France after World War II, hoping to put her life back together.

This kinda gets at one big problem I see with current "professional" reviewing--namely that the critics are freelancers who need to do stuff like write supplementary questions to earn a living.

Not that there's anything wrong with freelance writing assignments. But when a critic is scrambling around for income, I have to believe that this impingement on her time and resources begins to detract from the quality of her reviews.

For me, the bottom line is this: There's way more qualified reviewers than could possibly fit into our current allotment of Sunday book sections. With that in mind, it makes no sense to me to use, week in and week out, the same, somewhat burnt-out people who are writing review X in between a bunch of other freelance assignments. Broadening the field would give everyone a rest and give more critics the opportunity to spend an adequate amount of time with a book under review.

Comments

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The lack of supportive examples deflates your thesis. Which critics would you identify as "burnt-out?" While I agree that too much work in any vocation can have the capacity to tire out an individual in any line of work, on the critical front, some folks out there can maintain a pretty steady batting average. Anthony Burgess was one of the most prolific literary critics of the 20th century and his work, collected in QWERTY UIOP, is thoughtful and especially entertaining. Edmund Wilson was likewise prolific. Currently, Sam Anderson is a prolific literary monkey and, when he isn't trying to emulate Richard Price's prose, he's a not bad emerging critic.

By this standard, I suppose that we should "broaden the field" of litbloggers rather than read the same ol' same ol'. Which would be a pity. Because then I'd have to take this site off my RSS feeds.