The Gargoyle‘s “positive” reviews

Both the Winnipeg Free Press and the Vancouver Sun ran stories this week claiming that the early reviews of Andrew Davidson’s uber-hyped The Gargoyle are mostly raves, but did they really read those reviews? From our perspective, the reviews are conflicted at best, and give a distinct sense of punches being pulled.

For instance, Janet Maslin’s review in the New York Times, which functions as ‘Exhibit A’ for both the Free Press and the Sun, never actually says the book is any good. In fact, Maslin seems to be trying to let Davidson hang himself with his own rope, by quoting a lot of very florid-seeming prose at length. And she ends the review by summing up the book thus:

Lessons are learned, love is found, spirits are restored, and faith is revealed, all in the overheated cauldron of Mr. Davidson’s imagination.

And though Ron Charles of The Washington Post writes what amounts to a positive review, he constantly employs the kind of hedge-yer-bets phrases – “an undeniably hot book” – that critics use when they don’t want to deride a likely bestseller too harshly.

Meanwhile, in one openly negative critique, Lev Grossman from Time compares the book unfavorably to The English Patient (he wonders why it wasn’t simply titled The American Patient) and throws up his hands in disgust after trying to summarize the story:

I would very much like to stop summarizing the plot now. Instead, here is a quote from their inevitable love affair: “A cheese strand dangled from her mouth to the edge of her left nipple, and I wanted to rappel it like a mozzarella commando to storm her lovely breasts.” Nurse, is it time for my shot?

Book review ethics 101

The National Book Critics Circle in the U.S. has polled its membership on some basic ethical questions; it’s the followup to a similar poll conducted 20 years ago. The full results can be seen here and a sort of executive summary here. Here are some highlights:

68.5 percent of book reviewers think anyone mentioned in a book’s acknowledgements should be barred from reviewing it.

64.9 percent think anyone who has written an unpaid blurb for a book should also be banned from writing a fuller review.

76.5 percent think it’s never ethical to review a book without reading the whole thing.

Perhaps it’s just Quillblog, but some of those percentages seem surprisingly low.

Even more alarming are a couple of other stats. Almost 20% of respondents think it is “acceptable for a reviewer not to say what she or he really thinks about a book” (question 26). Among the write-in comments are “it’s not nice to be too mean” and “First novels require some delicacy. So do dying authors. Try recusing yourself first, though.”

Which leads us to question 7: “Is it ethical for a reviewer to decline to review a book he has already accepted for review, on the ground that he didn’t like the book and doesn’t want to say negative things in print?” Astonishingly, this drew an even split, with 34.4% respondents answering yes and the same percentage answering no. (“Not sure” accounted for 9.3%, and 21.9% responded with written notes.)

Anyway, the entire survey is probably worth a look, as there’s clearly some room for debate on many of the questions. Interestingly, though, Quillblog couldn’t find a single question along the lines of, “Is it ethical to review a book by an author who’s written negatively about you in the past?” Perhaps that one is thought to be so clear-cut as not to be worth getting into.

(For the curious, Q&Q‘s own reviewer guidelines can be seen here.)

One Canadian on NY Times‘ best books list

So The New York Times has just unveiled its annual “100 Notable Books of the Year” list, and there ain’t a lot of Cancon on it. The only Canadian author we spotted was (surprise!) Alice Munro, for The View from Castle Rock, which, having been released here in 2006, just seems sooo yesterday. Meanwhile, another likely contender – Michael Ondaatje’s Divisadero – is nowhere to be seen.

Review Roundup: William Gibson’s Spook Country

Review Roundup is a new feature on Quillblog, wherein we compile some of the critical reaction to one of the season’s big books. For our inaugural edition, we look at the reviews for William Gibson’s new novel, Spook Country, upon which a lot of ink (real and virtual) was spilled over the past couple of weeks.
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