Why be a book reviewer if you don’t enjoy it

Anthony Burgess seems a man with a permanent chip on his shoulder. Despite being a successful novelist, he survived for many years by working as a freelance writer, supplementing his royalty income with book reviews.

In a fascinating article published in 1972 in the TLS (and reprinted on December 232016), he discusses his attitude to writing reviews. According to Burgess,

“people never set out to be reviewers. They have to be writers first … Having published a novel or so, they are invited to review novels … A deadline is a fine substitute for a genuine literary urge. But sooner or later the self-disgust sets in. It has to do … with the whipping up a factitious emotion about the book or books reviewed.”

My first problem with this view of reviewing is that it is based entirely around the view of the reviewer. Burgess saw himself as a novelist, of course, and for him, reviews were sidelines; if you just wrote reviews, self-disgust sets in. Not all reviewers are novelists, however, and not al reviewers are afflicted by self-disgust by every review they write. Burgess misses here the reader’s point of view. The reader is expecting to learn something about the book, in an entertaining yet informative way. They don’t have time to have read the book, but the reviewer has. You could say this is the application of capitalism to reading books. I cannot read all the books I would like to read, so I pay someone, in the form of a periodical or a newspaper, to read them for me, assuming that I respect the opinions of the reviewer. Had I known when I read all those reviews by Burgess how much he dislike the task of reviewing, I would never have read him.  

Come to think of it, I abandoned Burgess’ autobiography, Little Wilson and Big God (1986) after the first several pages, occupied entirely by Burgess explaining how he, rather than any other biographer, was the best person to write an account of his life. Most autobiographers do not start with an elaborate justification of their suitability for the task over anyone else.  

It’s a shame, because Burgess, in the same article, makes some genuine points. Short reviews are a waste of time: “Ask for five hundred words on any new book, and you at once absolve the reviewer from reading it … When the wordage of a review gets into the thousands … one trusts such a review – because the reviewer dare not be too careless.”. “Not even the most saintly reviewer can avoid showing off (“As a mere amateur of Dutch painting I must wonder why Professor Bullshop could not … find room for a brief reference to that lovely painter Piet Voedstoppung).” If authors reviewed their own books, Burgess claims, “the personality of the writer would not come in for a trouncing.” One wonders what Jean Rhys would have said of her own novels.

But then Burgess, as usual, in his desire to be both clever and provocative, goes too far in his egocentric freelancer attitude:

The fairest review that any novel of mine ever received was one I wrote myself.

Now we have shifted to reviews of novels – always a rather subjective process, and Burgess, outrageously, thinks himself the best judge of his own work.

Nowhere in all this is the position of the reader justified, or even considered. All we hear is Burgess’ own sense of outrage at the reviews his own novels received, and the falsity of his position at having to write reviews of other people’s work. The reading public is not considered, as if they were entirely passive consumers of whatever the reviewer might deign to write. However entertaining Burgess might be as a writer, you feel he means with a vengeance not to miss the opportunity to earn a reviewer’s fee – or the royalties from an autobiography.  

There is a piece to be written on the benefit of the book review, but this is not it. Many book reviews are undoubtedly poor, but Burgess, the man with a chip on his shoulder, brings us no closer to why some reviews illuminate, inspire, and enthuse. I am left simply with a feeling that Burgess, in his self-centredness, is unlikely to appeal to me as an author.