Why (some) writers don’t write book reviews
Bengali-American author (and Quillblog fave) Jhumpa Lahiri is already getting lots of press for her new story collection, Unaccustomed Earth (published here by Knopf Canada). But an online Q&A with The Atlantic Monthly caught our eye because Lahiri addresses a question that could be asked of many authors: why doesn’t she write book reviews herself?
I don’t like to judge. I don’t feel comfortable doing that. But by saying that, I don’t mean to judge people who do. A critic is an extremely valuable thing in art or literature or music, but I don’t feel it’s what I want to do. Before I wrote a book, I wrote some reviews and it was great fun. I’d get free books and write up a little something and I was into it. But then something changed. I think it was writing my own book. To be honest with you, and maybe this is shirking my duty in some way, I like to try and stay as disconnected as I can from the world of contemporary writing because I just think it’s best for my writing. I want to be a little bit unplugged. If you’re reviewing, you have to stay on top of what’s coming out and what’s going on, and put yourself into that discourse. It’s a much more active and engaged position than I want.
cough*wimp*cough
What a cop-out. Maybe (some) authors don’t review because they fear that there will be retribution
when their own books come out.
I don’t think it’s a cop-out at all. Taking responsibility for getting to know a book (well enough to put your opinions out there), and the process of writing a review or critique all can be very time consuming. It can especially be mentally distracting if you’re analyzing a work while trying to produce your own.
I’m not quite sure what type of backlash an author is going to get… how many authors are well known enough that they’d suffer if they give another a bad review? Not too many. If bad reviews were going to be slung back and forth in a frenzy by disgruntled authors, things would be a lot uglier than they are now.
I write fiction, but I’m not much more interested in publishing *reviews* of fiction than I am in publishing poetry. Those things just aren’t (for now, anyway) my genres, and I like to think that book reviews (and poems) are being written by people with a passion for the particular demands of the genre, as well as the expertise to meet those demands. If Jhumpa Lahiri were writing reviews out of some sense of professional duty, I wouldn’t be too keen to have her review my next book. Her choice seems perfectly reasonable to me.
On second thought, if my next book manages to see the light of day, anyone who happens to dig it is most welcome to whip off a clunky, passionless rave …. :)