Critics Wanted Ray Robertson

rian Wilson knew he wasn't Beethoven. Just like he knew "Little Deuce Coupe" w a s n " t the "Moonlight Sonata." He also knew that to do a small thing well is preferable to doing a large thing poorly o r - - w o r s e - - p a s s a b l y . "In My Room" is timeless; Infinite Jest is not. Even though we should encourage writers to attempt something fresh, adventurous, or weighty every time out, it doesn't follow that we're obligated to applaud the result. Art is wonderfully elitist--what works, we honor; what doesn't, we ignore. And what could be more negligible than a weekend edition book review? As J. J. O'Molloy, failed lawyer and would-be wit in Ulysess, puts it, "Sufficient unto the day is the newspaper thereof." And, of course, there's Cyril Connolly's wellknown denunciation in The Unquiet Grave:

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All excursions into journalism.., however grandiose are doomed to disappointment. To put of our best into these forms is another folly, since thereby we condemn good ideas as well as bad to oblivion. It is the nature of such work not to last, so it should never be undertaken. Writers engrossed in any literary activity which is not their attempt at a masterpiece are their own dupes. Most contemporary fiction writers, poets, and dramatists in North America, and particularly in Canada, evidently agree. In the United States, only a few names of the really first-rate--Cynthia Ozick, Joan Didion, and, of course, the utterly dissimilar but equally astonishingly still-fecund John Updike and Gore Vidal--come immediately to mind as dual artists/critics. Here in Canada the cupboard is even barer. In fact, since the death of Mordecai Richler, it's downright empty. (Margaret Atwood does write reviews--and good ones--but, curiously for a self-defined Canadian nationalist, only for foreign publications, particularly the New York Review of Books.) Instead, we have academics, something called "literary journalists," and the occasional slumming author eager to collect a check and get their name and the title of their latest book in the newspaper. Connolly, one would presume, is smiling somewhere unquietly. Yet, it is a bit odd. One doesn't usually ask a lawyer to look under the hood of one's smoking and snorting car, just as a mechanic isn't the first person to consult when you're looking to sue. Novelists, it would seem, are the best people to judge novels, just as poets, poetry and dramatists, drama. If it's true that it takes one to know one, it's as equally true that it takes one who does to know how it's done. Granted, there are any numbers of professional book-reviewers across the country willing and more than able to deliver The Three P's of Canadian Book Reviewing Address for correspondence: Ray Robertson, 1189 Golden Avenue, Toronto, Ontario M6R 2J3, Canada.

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(plot, paraphrase, platitude). And, sure, with the aid of a detailed dust jacket and a plump press kit, university professors are very capable of noting all the many, many layers of profundity buried within this season's oh-so-serious novel even if they do tend to have a hard time seeing certain other things, things that someone whose profession isn't playing pin-the-tail-on-the-literary-symbol might see. Things like a book being boring. Or being badly overwritten. Or the characters being static, didactic, and laughably unconvincing. Things, in other words, you can't test students on or write a doctoral dissertation about. Of course, even if this is true, Connolly's contention might still be valid: Great-read Richler to see if Book X is any good, either buy the book or don't buy the book, and don't forget to put the newspaper the review was printed on the floor by the door because the puppy hasn't quite gotten the concept of outdoor plumbing yet. Looked at this way, a good book review is like an accurate weather report: handy, but hardly worth keeping around. Except, just like superior fiction, poems, and plays, a well-written book review isn't nearly so much what it says as how it says it. One re-reads Cocksure, for example, not because one has forgotten how Mortimer makes out by novel's end, but, instead, to once again cackle embarrassingly at the author's humor, to feel the burn of his satire, to feed on his graceful way with a sentence. Richler himself acknowledged as much, saying, "The style is me, it's there. That's really what you have to offer as a writer. Whether you write fiction or non-fiction, if somebody else could write it the same way there's not much point in doing it." Pick up Hunting Tigers Under Glass or Shovelling Trouble or Broadsides or any other of Richler's collections of reviews and essays and start reading anywhere. Chances are you'll hear the same inimitable Richler voice--funny, smart, and acerbically observant-that powers the novels. Why, then, don't more North American writers--particularly its better k n o w n - consider book reviewing the authentic, if minor, art form it plainly is? In virtually every other part of the literate world it's not at all unusual for a country's leading persons of letters to regularly appear between newsprint appraising this novel or biography, answering so-and-so's egregious charge of literary this or that, and generally feeding the fragile flame of cultural heat. Of the recent past, Graham Greene, Anthony Powell, V. S. Pritchet, Anthony Burgess, Philip Larkin, and Kingsley Amis, to name only a few, were equally adept at their respective artistic passions and parttime critical vocations, while, more recently, David Lodge, A. S. Byatt, Salman Rushdie, and Martin Amis carry on the same British tradition of happily walking both sides of Dr. Johnson's Grub Street. In the U.S., the university is the modem patron of the creative writer, not only usually providing more money in one academic year than he or she will make in a lifetime of writing (and therefore eliminating the economic necessity of book reviewing), but also often contaminating the novelist or poet or dramatist with the same dangerous sense of detachment he or she shares with his or her scholarly colleagues. Snug within the cerebrally cozy walls of higher learning, how can one possibly get worked up about the surely ephemeral scribbling the little people outside the tower are diverting themselves with this season (one's own most recent

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masterpiece excepted, of course)? Of the making of fiction, poems, and plays there is no end; you can look it up. In Canada, where the proliferation of creative writing programs hasn't happened yet, a similar sense of intellectual sanctuary is, if not as easily attained, certainly as aspired toward. Cop a fat grant, teach a few weeks at Banff, and then kick back in Victoria for the summer and do what all great artists have always done: drink, dream, have an unhappy love affair (it's all material, you know), and, on good days when the muse is smiling your way, commit a b o n mot or two to your journal. And if you're one of the really big boys or girls on the scene, win a few prizes, sell a movie option, and do your aesthetic ruminating in Greece or Spain or Italy. Anyway, be above the fray. You're an artist, after all. Admittedly, it's not bad work if you can get it (especially the part about drinking and Victoria in the summer). Still, if for no other reason than pure egoism--something no writer l a c k s - - a t least the idea of book reviewing should appeal to any writer hoping to not only be read but also understood. Amis ills: "For certain selfinterested reasons, you want to keep standards up so that when your next book comes out, it's more likely that people will get the hang of it." At its most basic, good literary criticism is nothing less than attempting to teach people how to be better readers. When Richler's novels were seen by many in Canada in the 1960s as, because funny, not serious, he felt compelled to instruct his countrymen on the nature of satire as understood in the tradition of Swift and Waugh. He did this primarily through book reviews. Writers have a responsibility to help maintain the mental hygiene of their time. Richler put it simply: "I do think a critic's j o b fundamentally is to praise good books and bring them to the public's attention, and to excoriate bad books, to preserve standards." Good writers get excited about good writing, are bothered by bad writing, and feel a need to share the news with the world. In the p r o c e s s - - i f they're real writers with real voices and a real s t y l e - - w e ' r e left with one more record of their unique way of seeing, saying, being. In the same chapter of U l y s e s s that J. J. O'Molloy foredooms all journalism to the garbage dump of time, Myles Crawford, the local newspaper editor, exhorts Stephen Dedaulus to write something for his paper, to, in his words, "Give them something with bite in it. Put us all into it, damn its soul. Father, Son and Holy Ghost and Jakes M'Carthy." Stephen, impudent young punk that he was, surely did just that. And with what was left over, he probably put into a book review. The article is based on text that first appeared in the column "The Last Word" of the March 2003 issue and is printed with permission of Quill & Quire, Markham, Ontario, Canada. Ray Robertson is the author of the novels Home Movies (1997), Heroes (2000), and Moody Food (2002), which was voted a Best Book of 2002 by both the Globe and Mail and the Vancouver Sun. His most recent book is a collection of non-fiction, Mental Hygiene: Essays on Writers and Writing (April, 2003).