Judgment Calls

A Classful of Writers Takes a Look at Literature From a Different Point of View

Three baseball umpires are discussing the finer points of their job. "Ball or strike, I call it the way I see it," says the first. "Ball or strike, I call it the way it is," replies the second. Declares the third, "Ball or strike, it ain't nothing till I call it."

Because most newspapers and magazines review only a handful of the hundreds of books published every week, the vast majority of writers don't even get to step onto the mound to have their pitches called anything at all by the book world's equivalent of umpires, and many of those who do surely return to the dugout thinking the ump is blind. But where have these arbiters whose opinion means so much to authors learned their trade, and how much can we rely on the keenness of their eyesight or, more importantly, insight?

Doctors have to pass comprehensive examinations before they can practice, lawyers the bar, yet anyone who's assigned to do so can review a book. Glance at a few identification lines and you'll swiftly discover that, "Jane Doe is a trumpet soloist," or "Robert Roe lives in Woodstock, N.Y.," while the majority of reviewers are assigned their 800-word disquisitions simply because they themselves have written books.

Now maybe it takes a writer to know a writer, or maybe doing and thinking about doing are different skills that only incidentally coincide. The point is, there are no objective, professional qualifications for book reviewing. Yet earlier this year I, an occasional reviewer who neither plays the trumpet nor lives in Woodstock, wondered what it would be like to try to formalize such a pursuit.

Thirteen curious master-of-fine-arts students at Sarah Lawrence College signed up for my course "Criticism in the World." Each week half the students in the class wrote reviews of the same book, and the other half began the discussion of that book based on what they had learned from the reviews, thereby simulating what happens when people read reviews to determine whether they wish to buy and read a book. To ensure independent judgment, we covered only books due to be published later in the semester. We were helped in this experiment by editors who provided multiple advance copies.

Because my students are primarily fiction writers, most of the books I chose for their reviews were seriously intentioned novels, but I also wanted each half of the class to consider at least one commercial best seller and one collection of short stories as well as one book by a foreign author and one by a first novelist, preferably younger than themselves: Let them strive to maintain equilibrium in the face of envy.

The first week of the semester last January, I dealt out copies of T.C. Boyle's "Riven Rock" like 2-inch-thick playing cards and wondered: Would my students bend over backwards to be nice, would they be cowed by the author's reputation and the copywriter's avowals of brilliance? The first review of "Riven Rock" I read commenced: "One year into the American Civil War and with most of the Union Army seemingly in permanent encampment on the White House lawn, an exasperated Abraham Lincoln noted that after having assembled, equipped and trained the greatest army the world had ever seen, his punctilious general George B. McClellan `apparently has no intention of actually taking it anywhere.' "

Before the reviewer had said a word about Boyle or his book, I knew where he was going. Another student spent half his allotted space on a deep reading of Boyle's jacket photograph, his "face . . . receding in the chiaroscuro light, his left eye glowing as though possessed of second sight, his satyr-like goatee and thick thatch of hair hinting at irony, his necklace of Zuni fetishes and the groovy Hawaiian print of his shirt reminding us that he is also a cool guy."

Each in his or her own way detested "Riven Rock," while Jonathan Levi across the continent at the Los Angeles Times applauded, "Boyle writes with the muscle of a collegiate fullback ripping the OED in two just for fun." For a moment, I felt a worry opposite to my initial one, that, rather than being too nice, my students would automatically adopt an adversarial stance and assume that their role was not to examine, but to take down. As surely as I didn't want a class of flacks, I didn't want a class of killers either.

But with the exception of "Riven Rock" and the bound-to-sell-a- zillion-copies "Thrill" ("metaphorically-challenged"), by Jackie Collins, and "The Street Lawyer" ("a colorless, predictable, downward spiral," good only "if you've recently been hit upside your head with a blunt object"), by John Grisham, most of the other books received "mixed" reviews.

Sometimes the mix contained radically divergent opinions of the same volume. Twenty-six-year-old Judy Budnitz's "Flying Leap" was compared to Tolstoy by one student while another groused that Budnitz's "narrative voice is one of staccato declarations delivered in a clinical, overly stylized manner reminiscent of the Dick and Jane stories." Out in the world, "Flying Leap" received notices milder than the former though kinder than the latter, at least partially because of the unspoken rule that nobody slaughters novices. They may be praised or damned with the same word: "promise."

More often, however, the reviews were internally mixed, which is to say that some less-exalted literary cousin of Tolstoy's was mentioned on the same page as some less-pejorative analog to Dick and Jane. Though respectful of Charles Johnson's version of the last years of Martin Luther King in "Dreamer," my students were also disappointed in his narrative, as they were simultaneously enthralled and baffled by the poetic density of Louise Erdrich's "The Antelope Wife." Their views presaged professional responses in The New York Times, where Diana Postelthwaite said Erdrich's novel contained "haunting fragments," and in The Washington Post, where Jabari Asim noted that "Johnson's characterizations sometimes suffer as a result of his intellectual obsessions."

But was the students' even-handedness a kind of armor they donned to avoid the risk of being wrong? Besides hedging their negative bets, my students withheld unalloyed enthusiasm from Australian Janet Turner Hospital's "Oyster," the only book among our dozen to receive a boxed star (i.e., a rave) from Publisher's Weekly. And though Dan Cryer, the staff writer of Newsday, called Hospital's novel "a triumph of writer virtuosity, an absolutely bravura performance," my students remained cautious. One of them probably caught the majority's tone of tepid admiration for "Oyster" when she finally deemed it "an extremely worthwhile read."

Assertive or guarded, right or wrong, these were, presumably, the honest judgments I desired. Only when my students wrote about Dorothy Allison's "Cavedweller" did they appear to cave in to received opinion. Ironically, the contradictions in their thought seeped through as one student admitted it was "possible, although not likely, to get impatient for the novel to find some resolution," while another described it as "vivid and multi-dimensional, even if a bit stereotypical." A third declared that "(t)here are sections in it that just don't belong . . . redundant passages that neither forward the story nor reveal anything remotely interesting about the characters" yet concluded that " `Cavedweller' remains monumentally impressive, and perhaps if it weren't written by Dorothy Allison, the flaws would be less noticeable." Perhaps, I suggested, the reverse.

Mind, I wasn't saying whether I personally found "Cavedweller" multidimensional or stereotypical. My ideas were beside the point; what I cared about was the clarity and vividness of the reviewers' language and thought. They owed that much to the several different constituencies for any review: (1) the editors, for whom you've got to come in on time and on length and grammatically if not eloquently enough so they don't have to rewrite and get to wondering why your name is attached to their words, (2) the Sunday readers who just want to know whether the book is worth their time and money, (3) yourself, because a review provides an opportunity to advance some broader aesthetic sense of what a novel ought to be and (4) the writer. Each review can be imagined as a private letter sent through a public medium, in which you say, "Hey, this is where you satisfied (or even thrilled) me, and here's where I wish you did better."

We discussed all these things during the semester, along with other reviewing issues regarding the aptness of comparisons or the proper balance between description and judgment, but one question I couldn't fully answer kept coming up: Is there truth or merely opinion? Part of me wanted to defer a response to posterity, but canon-debunkers would insist there's no necessary validity in the ages. Here, we can only return to the three apocryphal umpires on a ball field. Maybe the publishing score is that a book is nothing until a reviewer calls it, and maybe the epistemological base is that you are only capable of calling it as you see it, but the hope is that you will be wise or intuitive or lucky enough to call it the way it genuinely is.