Cormorant, Carol Windley, and conflicts of interest

Sharon Burnside’s Public Editor column in Saturday’s Toronto Star took on an explosive and controversial subject topic: book reviews. In particular, the Star‘s review of Carol Windley’s Giller-nominated Home Schooling, in which the reviewer, Len Gasparini, declared at the outset that he’d never heard of the author before. Given that the review was ultimately unflattering, Windley’s publisher, Marc Côté of Cormorant Books wrote a letter to the editor that Windley’s previous awards and nominations were included with the review copy, and that, furthermore, Gasparini’s own novel had been rejected by Cormorant earlier this year.

Burnside, probably wondering where all these sparks were coming from, given how shy and retiring book people are, wades into the debate, declaring that Gasparini’s rejection was “a conflict of interest that should have been declared and shared with readers,” to which the Star Books Editor, Dan Smith, replies, “In Canada there’s no such thing as an unbiased reviewer.”

(Quillblog, by the way, finds both statements a bit of a stretch.)

After consulting, among other things, Q&Q‘s own reviewing guidelines (which are available on our website), Burnside draws a much more reasonable conclusion. Namely that, even though “some [in the book industry] argue there is no point in publishing negative reviews, and some reviewers will not review books they don’t like … the newspaper’s responsibility is to pursue the truth…. People who read book reviews want to know if a book is worth reading. And they shouldn’t have to read between the lines.”

Amen to that, though we can’t help but note that these perceptions of conflict arise only when the review in question is negative…

Related links:
Read Sharon Burnside’s column here
Go here to read Q&Q‘s starred review of Home Schooling
Go here to read Q&Q‘s reviewing guidelines

Toronto Star apologizes for Bigge

The most fun In Other Media has had in about two weeks should end with a posting by Toronto Star books editor Dan Smith that went up on the newspaper’s website yesterday. In the posting, which concerns what he calls “freelance reviewer Ryan Bigge’s smackdown of McLaren’s The Continuity Girl,” Smith apologizes both for not informing readers of the history between the two – in 2001 McLaren handed down an unflattering mention of Bigge’s book, A Very Lonely Planet: Love, Sex, and the Single Guy in her Globe and Mail column – and for assigning the book to Bigge in the first place.

“Let us share one salient fact: The CanLit wading pool is far too tiny to ever guarantee three degrees of separation, never mind six – although we really should do better than one, as in Bigge’s case. In a little world of juried state-sponsored publishing, conflict of interest is never far away,” writes Smith, concluding his message with a quote from Andrew Potter, the co-author of The Rebel Sell and a writer for the National Post, who’s been involved in an “author-reviewing-author feud” of his own with Globe and Mail columnist Hal Niedzviecki: “Criticism is itself a form of writing. It is entertainment, and nothing, I mean nothing, is more entertaining than a good literary hair-pulling.” Indeed.

Related links:
Click here for Dan Smith’s piece on the Toronto Star website

The reviewing agenda

Globe and Mail books editor Martin Levin weighs in on the controversy about the Washington Post review of John Irving’s new novel. (To recap: reviewer Marianne Wiggins savaged the book in the Post, but the paper repudiated the review after Irving pointed out that Wiggins is the ex-wife of a close friend of his, Salman Rushdie).

The issue, then, is one of reviewer bias, and Levin concludes that in the small CanLit scene, finding a completely disinterested reviewer is unlikely. “For that reason, we will sometimes allow acquaintances to review one another’s work, but ask that the review itself disclose any relationship.”

A case in point that some readers may remember would be David Young’s review of Michael Ondaatje’s novel Anil’s Ghost, back in 2000. Young’s review begins thusly: “A necessary caveat: Michael Ondaatje is an old and very dear friend of mine and I am a great admirer of his writing.” This is irrelevant, Young goes on to say, because the book is so very wonderful.

Offhand, we can’t think of a Globe review in which the writer confessed a bias and then went on to attack the book, but for anyone who wishes to jog our memory, please do so.

Related links:
Click here for Martin Levin’s Globe and Mail column
Click here for an earlier Slate piece about the Wiggins/Irving case

The right to schmooze

Several lit bloggers are weighing in on the topic of bias and book reviewing, spurred on by the Marianne Wiggins review of John Irving’s Until I Find You in The Washington Post. The Post issued an apology for Wiggins’ review, which called the book a “mass of lazy, unrefined writing,” after Irving pointed out his relationship with the reviewer — Irving is a friend of Salman Rushdie, who is Wiggins’ ex-husband. On her lit blog, Sarah Weinman debates whether reviewers should participate in literary culture or stand on the sidelines (and whether the latter is possible). She writes: “In the mystery world, I think reviewers can be divided into two categories: those that mingle, and those that do not. It’s a no-brainer as to which one I belong to; I don’t believe I would have been able to write any review whatsoever had I not already been an active fan, participating on various internet message boards.”

Related links:
Click here for the blog post from Sarah Weinman’s Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind
Click here for the full story from The Washington Post

Reviews from Hell

A commentary by Adam Langer in The Book Standard maps out the seven deadly sins of book reviewing, with help from Michael Ondaatje, Diana Abu-Jaber, and several other peeved authors. Included in the list of “sins” is the risky gambit of challenging veracity, the fallacy of associating protagonist with author, and the sadly misdirected compliment, which praises the author while missing the point of the book. Also maligned is the just-plain-mean review. As Langer writes: “Michael Ondaatje, author of The English Patient and Anil’s Ghost, says that the worst review he ever received was for a stage adaptation of his book The Collected Works of Billy the Kid. ‘They stop bad meat at the border,’ the critic wrote. ‘Why not this?’”

Related links:
Click here for the full article from The Book Standard

From blurbese to reviewerese and back again

The book world has a language all of its own, writes Tom Payne in this very amusing Telegraph piece about the words and phrases unique to that language. Payne even compiles a long list of book reviewers’ clichés, many of them having made the leap from the land of back-cover blurbs. Examples include “emotional rollercoaster,” “heady mix,” and “minor quibbles.” But Payne’s list isn’t quite complete: where are “hard-won truths” and “secrets of the human heart”? Readers are invited to post their own favourite bookchat clichés below — just click on the Add Comment link.

Related links:
Tom Payne on the language of book reviewing

A shout out to Mr. Olive

You’ve got to scroll down a ways, but political columnist David Olive makes a few pointed comments on the state of book reviewing in a posting on his Toronto Star election blog. Olive does a very funny mini-critique of Don Martin’s National Post review of Jack Layton’s new book, which, Olive implies, doesn’t have a lot to say about the actual book. We also couldn’t help but notice a slightly veiled compliment of Q&Q‘s own book coverage.

Related links:
David Olive’s Toronto Star election blog