Djelloul Marbrook

Obituaries for newspaper book review sections have generally failed to note that they were always akin to those front-of-the-store displays in bookstore chains that are paid for by marketers. You couldn’t ignore advertisers and ambitious reviewers took note.

I regularly aggravated my newspaper bosses by arguing that bestseller lists, whether local or syndicated, belonged on business pages, not arts and culture pages, because they were marketing gauges, not measures of literary excellence. I was touching a nerve because, in spite of their protestations, newspapers are primarily about business.

There has always been a measure of prestidigitation in editorial decision-making, and now that the wall between newsrooms and business offices has completely crumbled there is no use pretending that there were good old days when the wall was never breached. It always had cracks. Everything depended on a measure of idealism in owners, and as mega corporations took over the industry there was precious little of that.

My impossible stance as an editor was that negative reviews should be short, if not sweet. I loathed twenty-one inch movie and book reviews in which the reviewer paraded his or her snideness. As a book editor I encouraged long favorable reviews and discouraged reviewing truly bad books.

The trouble with my prejudice was that a reviewer had to invest time to decide whether a book was bad, and so it was bad personnel policy to deprive a reviewer of a byline because he hadn’t liked a book. The newspaper had to have something for its time and money.

It wasn’t an easy job. I was expected to know a little about a book before I assigned it for review, but at the same time I was expected to exercise discretion that had not been hopelessly biased by other reviewers and industry gossip. There really isn’t any way to insulate yourself completely from the grapevine.

There was pressure from marketers, sometimes from the newspaper’s own advertising sales people, from industry media that were themselves subject to various pressures, and from my own desire to uphold values in the torrent of meretricious work. And of course there was the inevitable bias in favor of writers who had already produced notable work or notable best sellers, there being a big difference between the two.

Now that most of these newspaper book sections are gone we should not look back upon their heyday as if it were halcyon; it wasn’t. These sections represented a deeply flawed taste-making apparatus that was, unsurprisingly, more about money than anything else.

Whether online reviews can become a more trustworthy and helpful critical establishment I don’t know, but I think the potential exists. There will be advertiser pressure, no doubt, but there will also be more venues and less concentration of ownership. The hierarchical structure will be different, the delivery more immediate and capacious.

I began thinking about these issues again when James Polk, a Marist literature professor and frequent reviewer for The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Nation, reviewed my first book of poems, Far From Algiers, in The Country and Abroad.

The editor, Beth Potter, had published one of my short stories. She warned me that Polk could be a tough reviewer. Her magazine received no advertising for Far From Algiers and there was no way for her to gain from reviewing the book. She did it because The Country and Abroad covers regional arts and I live in its circulation area, western Connecticut and Massachusetts and New York’s Hudson Valley.

This is the way things ought to be. But when you see a pile of books in the window of a chain bookseller saying, You must read these, that’s business. A publisher has paid to put that pile there. And a full page advertisement in a newspaper or journal that has reviewed the book being advertised or will review it is no accident. It’s an imperfect system, but we haven’t come up with a better one. Different systems will evolve from the Internet. It remains to be seen how it will operate and what role money will play. Right now the problem with Internet journalism is that there is no money to pay for it.

There are many factors at play other than the merits or demerits of a book. If I were famous, for whatever reason, Far From Algiers would be assured of wide but not necessarily favorable review. If I were well known in the academy or the publishing industry, that too would help. These are not deplorable facts, they’re just facts. At the end of the day, a good book, particularly a good poetry book, depends for its public reception on the impulse of a handful of reviewers, or perhaps only one, whose critical integrity and generosity are such that he or she is literally driven to help the book find its audience. That’s why I occasionally review poetry on my web log. I feel compelled to do my share to call attention to work that has moved me. I feel bound by my work and life’s experience to do so. And so do many others.—DM