Pro Close Reading
The blogosphere is fun for lots and lots of reasons. But one of the best is that occasionally, by virtue of some monkey-pounding-typewriter law of probability, you will encounter two posts on the same day that are almost perfect complements.
Thus, Wyatt Mason opines (quite correctly):
Criticism that doesn’t read closely isn’t literary criticism. If it’s
anything, it’s personal essay—a perfectly admirable category of thing,
and a perfectly reasonable form in which a writer can write about
reading as an experience—but not literary criticism.
And the the Literary Saloon rages (equally correctly):
We like our reviews to be ... well, reviews of the books ostensibly under review. Too often, however, in certain periodicals, they tend not to be, especially when they are 'reviews' of non-fiction titles. In fact, it's pretty common practise, so perhaps it's unfair to pick on a specific example (pretty much any edition of The New York Review of Books would yield several ...), but Anthony Gottlieb's ... review of The House of Wittgenstein by Alexander Waugh (see our review-overview) in The New Yorker really annoyed us. Gottlieb offers his take on the subject matter, rather than on how Waugh deals with it and presents it, leaving the reader none the wiser whether or not Waugh's book has anything to it to recommend it. . . .
Rather than Gottlieb's alternate/condensed version of Wittgenstein-history we would have preferred a review of the book.
Rather than Gottlieb's alternate/condensed version of Wittgenstein-history we would have preferred a review of the book.
To all this I can only add my affirmation and my great hopes that reviewers, no matter if they're writing for the local paper or The New Yorker, actually practice the art of reviewing in their reviews.
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