What is it with book reviews that never say whether the book is actually worth reading?

From the Little Things That Annoy Me department.

Is it just me, or are book reviewers increasingly using their allotted space as an opportunity to show off their own erudition, style and sense of humour, and failing in their basic duty of telling us whether the reviewed work is actually worth spending our precious time reading?

Maybe it was always thus, and I notice it more now that I am in “intimations of mortality” territory, and have become acutely conscious that I don’t want to waste any remaining hours or days on badly written books.   Maybe the reviewer is a friend of the writer and so is wary of giving a stinker the bad review it deserves.  Maybe certain critics are victims of cultural relativism and instinctively avoid any suggestion that a given work is superior to another.  Whatever the reason, it’s just not good enough, you hear?!

Another bad habit of book reviewers is to go into excessive detail about what the book actually contains, and to argue at tedious length for/against the author’s view of the world.  As I get older, what matters more is how well the book is written, not what it’s about.   I would read anything by certain writers: Christopher Hitchens, David Foster Wallace, Vladimir Nabokov, John Updike, Paul Theroux, Martin Amis (well, almost anything), Robert Hughes, Clive James, Simon Gray, Francis Wheen, Alan Bennett, Gore Vidal.

The non-fiction work of the last-mentioned (Vidal) proves the following point, to me at least: the content may be daft, but a good stylist can be forgiven everything.

So come on, reviewers, stop showing off and stop telling us everything the book is about. Just make sure your review tells us what we most need to know: is the book well written, is it a pleasure to read?

John Lanchester explains the Euro crisis

One of my favourite books ever is John Lanchester’s first novel “The Debt to Pleasure”, published some 15 years ago.  John Banville reviewed it in the Guardian (here).  I have it on my list to re-read it, as I am curious as to whether it will stand up well to the passage of time.  I have also read and enjoyed a number of Nabokov books since, and Banville says that Lanchester’s style is “uncomfortably close to late Nabokov, at once brilliant and unfocused, and glutted on its own richness, but of course, this is part of the joke”.  So perhaps I will be disappointed.

Anyway, Lanchester has recently published a book about the financial crisis, called Whoops!, which I haven’t read but which got pretty good reviews (particularly from non-financial reviewers).  Lanchester writes that “I’ve been following the economic crisis for two years now.  I began working on the subject as part of the background to a novel, and soon realized that I had stumbled across the most interesting story I’ve ever found.”

I followed a Twitter link the other day to an article by Lanchester in the London Review of Books, where Lanchester is a contributing editor.  The article, covering the Greek financial mess, the Euro, German attitudes and more, is worth reading.  Here’s a short extract:

From the worm’s-eye perspective which most of us inhabit, the general feeling about this new turn in the economic crisis is one of bewilderment. I’ve encountered this in Iceland and in Ireland and in the UK: a sense of alienation and incomprehension and done-unto-ness. People feel they have very little economic or political agency, very little control over their own lives; during the boom times, nobody told them this was an unsustainable bubble until it was already too late. The Greek people are furious to be told by their deputy prime minister that ‘we ate the money together’; they just don’t agree with that analysis. In the world of money, people are privately outraged by the general unwillingness of electorates to accept the blame for the state they are in. But the general public, it turns out, had very little understanding of the economic mechanisms which were, without their knowing it, ruling their lives. They didn’t vote for the system, and no one explained the system to them, and in any case the rule is that while things are on the way up, no one votes for Cassandra, so no one in public life plays the Cassandra role.

The last sentence is so sadly true.  We needed more Cassandras in Ireland from 2002 to 2005 (after that it was too late anyway).  Voters everywhere, but particularly in Ireland, are not interested in deferred gratification.  As they say, democ­racy is the worst form of gov­ern­ment ……… except for all the oth­ers.

A maxim for troubled times: quietly do good deeds

 

 I was reading Simon Blackburn’s review of How to Write a Sentence: And How to Read One and the closing paragraph struck me as noteworthy. Blackburn talks about

…… one of Fish’s favorites, the final sentence of Middlemarch, contrasting Dorothea’s quiet future with the idealistic visions of doing good with which she started life: “But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts, and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.”

I have never been an avid reader of “The Classics”, so I have (so far, anyway) no opinion on George Eliot.  But that sentence from Middlemarch has a weight and a rhythm, and a message that resonates. 

In fact, in times of economic depression and hardship such as we are going to experience in Ireland (I use the future tense because the economic correction has unfortunately only just begun), Dorothea’s behaviour could be a guide for how to conduct ourselves so as to retain our dignity and our sense of self-worth and fulfilment. We may be broke, with the Celtic Tiger lying in ruins, but we can still be nice to each other, and seek no reward for doing so.

Do good by stealth, and blush to find it fame.  ~Alexander Pope, Epilogue to the Satires, 1738

On the subject of old age….

…. I have just finished reading Sarah Bakewell’s “How to Live”, a life of Montaigne, and this passage describing his attitude to old age caught my eye:

 It was not that age automatically conferred wisdom. On the contrary, he thought the old were more given to vanities and imperfections than the young.  They were inclined to “a silly and decrepit pride, a tedious prattle, prickly and unsociable humours, superstition, and a ridiculous concern for riches”.  But this was the twist, for it was in the adjustment to such flaws that the value of ageing lay. Old age provides an opportunity to recognise one’s fallibility in a way youth usually finds difficult.  Seeing one’s decline written on body and mind, one accepts that one is limited and human. By understanding that age does not make one wise, one attains a kind of wisdom after all.

 Montaigne, who lived in the 16th Century,  clearly had a no-nonsense attitude to many things (old age, religion, death) which was ahead of its time:

“My life has been full of terrible misfortunes, most of which never happened.”

“I speak the truth, not so much as I would, but as much as I dare; and I dare a little more as I grow older.”

“We trouble our life by thoughts about death, and our death by thoughts about life.”

And one of my favourites is on religion, from a man who lived through decades of savage religious strife in France: “It is putting a very high price on one’s conjectures to have someone roasted alive on their account.”

Conquest’s Limericks

I am currently devouring Christopher Hitchens recently-published memoir “Hitch-22”, of which it can truly be said (unlike so many other alleged examples of the characteristic) that there is something to interest or amuse one on every page. 

I hope I am permitted by copyright law to quote from the footnote on Page 174, which expands on the tendency of those attending the now-legendary Friday lunches of the late 1970s London literary set (Hitchens, Kingsley Amis , Martin Amis , Robert Conquest, Clive James, Craig Raine, Ian McEwan, Julian Barnes to mention a few) to indulge in word games and compose witty poems.

Insistence upon the capacious subtleties of the limerick was something of a hallmark.  Once again [Robert] Conquest takes the palm: his condensation of the “Seven Ages of Man” shows how much force can be packed into the deceptively slight five-line frame.  Thus: 

Seven ages: first puking and mewling,

Then very pissed off with your schooling,

Then fucks and then fights,

Then judging chaps’ rights,

Then sitting in slippers, then drooling.

 This is not the only example of Conquest’s genius for compression.  The history of the Bolshevik “experiment” in five lines? Barely a problem:

There once was a Bolshie called Lenin

Who did one or two million men in.

That’s a lot to have done in

But where he did one in

That old Bolshie Stalin did ten in!

The first Limerick cleverly condenses the “All the world’s a stage” monologue from Shakespeare’s “As You Like It” which can be found in full  here.

The pain of seeing favourite books remaindered

One often reads about the small pleasures in life, and how important they are in getting us through the day.  There is even a popular website devoted to this theme, although I have forgotten the link.

In line with my generally misanthropic outlook on life, I think there should equally be a website devoted to those small but disproportionately painful occurrences that happen to us all on a regular basis.

Near the top of my personal list would be the pain of browsing in a bookshop and finding that a book of which one is particularly fond has been remaindered, and lies unloved  in a pile of less worthy books. 

This first struck me years ago when, after proselytizing madly to my friends about the merits of “The Debt to Pleasure” by John Lanchester, I saw a pile of them for sale in Hodges Figgis at a fraction of the cover price.

But the worst experience of this nature happened recently when I saw Cultural Amnesia: Notes in the Margin of My Time by Clive James on sale at something like €4.99 in the same shop. The pain arose not from the fact that I had paid full price for this wonderful 896-page tome (although I had),  but because I had derived so much pleasure from reading the book, because I regarded it as part of my cultural CV, and because I felt everybody with a functioning brain and even a passing interest in 20th century culture and history should share my discovery.

I will have to learn to live with this particular form of disappointment, as I suspect that few books will escape this fate in the future.  After all, one expects new DVD film releases to fall sharply in price as time passes and their novelty value wears off.  But somehow books seem different.  This isn’t necessarily logical, but they do exert an attraction for book-lovers that goes beyond pure form and content.  Which explains why seeing a great book remaindered is like discovering a former lover who has fallen on hard times and is working as a hooker.

Strange Days – Revisited

One of my favourite writers is Francis Wheen, who gave us How Mumbo-jumbo Conquered the World and a well-received biography of Karl Marx.

I’m currently enjoying his overview of some of the darker aspects of the 1970s,  Strange Days Indeed: The Golden Age of Paranoia. And in Chapter 12 I found highlighted a quotation from the Italian writer and political theorist Antonio Gramsci (1891 – 1937) which Wheen felt was apposite to Britain’s situation in the mid-Seventies:

“The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born. In this interregnum there arises a great diversity of morbid symptoms.”

It struck me that Ireland in 2010 is experiencing such symptoms, and we are perhaps in an interregnum of our own.  I live in hope that the era of corruption and incompetence (of which Bertie Ahern’s Fianna Fáil was the paradigm) is coming to an end, and a more honest and mature society will evolve.  But in the meantime, we witness our own circus of “morbid symptoms”: the banking crisis, the property crash, NAMA, the rise of Labour, the bizarre success of Joe Higgins, and execrable politicians such as Willie O’Dea, John O’Donoghue, Ivor Callelly, Mary Coughlan and Brian Cowen.