To See Again

The Forgotten Art of Reviewing

In lives often lived five minutes at a time, with attention focused just barely ahead, we tend to leave behind the little, but vital, spaces for contemplation. Book reviews are one of the devices that have traditionally taken us to those spaces, but their power is fading.

Writing in the latest issue of Prospect magazine, William Skidelsky pronounces the book review in near terminal decline, squeezed dry by aloof critics, picked over by second-rate journalists and struggling for anything close to depth online. I think he overstates the case, but there’s always room for agreement alongside disparity.

Smug critics are certainly out there in force. A recent exemplar is Adam Gopnik, reviewing the life and writing of Philip K. Dick in the New Yorker. Hitting back at claims that Dick was an underappreciated science-fiction genius during his lifetime, Gopnick assures us that we will “end up admiring every one of his conceits and not a single one of his sentences.” Who do you trust, he seems to be saying, the man with clever ideas or the man who crushes the pot-boiler prose?