Do I Really Need to Read Book Reviews?

When reviewers compete with the authors they review, critiquing gives way to criticising.

“Brilliant”, “hideous and beautiful” or is it a “fascinating mess”?

Opinions are divided. Arundhati Roy’s latest novel ‘The Ministry of Utmost Happiness’ has set the book-review industry into hectic motion, with a steady belting out of reviews of different shapes and sizes: all catering to their pre-identified consumers.

Not only this, there are reviews of these reviews. The initial reviews are being labelled as an ‘exercise in self-indulgence’ that are ‘pretentious and self-involved think pieces’ which were trying to be ‘too clever, or too circumspect’.

Critiquing or Criticising?

What is a book review? Isn’t it defined ‘as a form of criticism in which a book is analysed based on content, language, style, and merit’?

Are the reviewers not supposed to give us the literary insight of what the book is all about – good or bad? Or are they itching to showcase their own stupendous writing skills? Skills that appear to compete with the authors being reviewed or maybe to even show them up.

Patronising and opinionated, some reviews cause one to wonder if these critics have a few axes to grind  or are grandstanding their criticisms ponderously to cover up their own foibles. An inbuilt sense of insecurity, perhaps, as Bernard Shaw famously wrote, “he who can, does; he who can not, teaches.” The critic assumes the role of a teacher. Or maybe it is the innate sense of ‘I could do better’.

With oddly convoluted sentences, implausible  phrases, and strange comparisons that are almost absurd, most reviews by highbrow writers could well send you scurrying to Google or the Oxford. They also come across as inadequate reviews of literary ‘content, style and merit’.

The Critic Lingo

Harking back to Roy’s current offering, ‘The Ministry of Utmost Happiness’ is “all too obvious. Booker winner’s polemical instinct is far more developed than her art,” according to Eileen Battersby’s review in the Irish Times. Ouch! Ms Battersby didn’t like it. Fair enough. But she says in conclusion:

...reading it is comparable to spending years knitting a giant sweater only to discover that it actually has three sleeves.

Honestly, ‘a giant three-sleeved sweater’?

Another reviewer is kinder but the comparative take on Tharoor leaves you more flummoxed than wiser.

…Both a smart historical satire, and a pastiche of the ancient epics, his witty effort mocked all claims to final authority in fiction – even as it coyly tried them on for size.

Hurtling further down the highway of this review will have you reaching out for your lexicons.

These shifts of shape and focus … has captured the fissiparous tumult of India today… A raucous, polyphonic meander through post-modern Delhi narrows and sharpens into a war story, and a love story, with a broad political canvas but a tight emotional core.

Yet another reviewer goes lyrical.

… retains the metaphorical music that she used to fair rapture ... The descriptions, spring to live with her subtle touch, and she, almost, looks to have done that effortlessly.

One more for the count insists:

Manichaean dualities prevail: innocence (embodied by puppies, kittens, little girls) versus evil (torture, torturers, soldiers, shopping malls).

One has no dispute with reviews that show up the reviewer’s personal preferences or style of writing and the probable impact of the book, but most reviews fall short of being a piece of straightforward literary writing that analyses the characters, the plot, the language and the style. They almost always land up expressing lofty comparative ideas and parallels in complicated, even flowery prose. Some will have us searching for the dots to connect, yet others will indulge their passion for the language, reading like a PhD thesis.

Forgetting the Basic Function

Virtually all reviews, in language fair or foul, will leave you wondering whether the critics believe that they could have – in the literary stakes – done it better.

Critiquing someone else does give you the moral right to pull out all stops and not confine it merely to, as Gillian Flynn in ‘Gone Girl’ says ‘…as if that were all to say about a book. It's good or it's bad, I liked it or I didn't. No discussions of the writing, the themes, the nuances, the structure. Just good or bad - like a hot dog.’

All the same, why book reviews should read like long paras that need to be précis written or parsed is beyond comprehension.

As David Cecil says:

Many critics do not realise their function.  They aim not to appreciate, but to judge; they seek first to draw lines about literature and then bully readers into accepting these laws.

Sreelata Menon is a freelance writer. The opinions expressed in this piece are her own.