TLS: Why Read and Write Book Reviews?

These are tough times for books and for book reviews. The Daity Telegraph has dispensed with its literary editor, Sam Leith, and its weekly literary columnist, A. N. Wilson. Bookish types in the United States are still lamenting the demise of literary supplements at the LA Times and other newspapers. One explanation put forward is that the influence of review supplements has been usurped by the book blogs, in which opinion is democratized, often to point zero. As the usually sensible Peter Wilby put it in an article in the Guardian (which so far remains kindly disposed to literature), "All the punter wants to know is whether the book' s worth buying. Better still, they'd like a decent precis so they need not bother reading the thing".
This is wrong-headed. A "good review", in a literary editor' s eyes, is not one that is favourable, but one worth reading in its own right. Mr Wilby writes: "Even in upmarket weeklies such as the New Statesman, books have always been minority interests" . As a former editor of that journal, he might have known that, when edited by Claire Tomalin or Martin Amis, the review pages - written by V. S. Pritchett, Jonathan Raban, Julian Barnes and the like - were the main reason for buying it.
A Scottish periodical once asked a number of distinguished writers to contribute to a symposium, in which the question was posed, "What do you consider to be the main purpose of reviewing?" (New Edinburgh Critical moment Review, February 1980). The poet Douglas Dunn replied: "It is important to bear in mind that reviewing is a form of writing, a highly developed genre". Edwin Morgan backed this up: "the review is in itself on the verge of being an art form" . Anthony Burgess pointed out that "the books that sell best - Harold Robbins, Barbara Cartland - are hardly ever reviewed" but "a good critic is of immense value". Almost all critics start in the literary pages of newspapers and magazines. They also benefit from the attention of discriminating editors. "Reviews are where young men and women can make reputations", Dunn wrote. All were agreed that the review is a vital organ in the body of literature. The point was eloquently made by Tom Paulin: A hook re view is, or ought to he, an aci of taste which contributes to the health of a culture. Reputations are formed and reasse ssed in the review columns, and at its best reviewing is part of the living spirit of a civilization - it forms and changes taste, it di scusses a particular text and relates it to tradition and the present moment, and it displays the operation of a sensibility. Mr Leith probably did not call this to mind each time he prepared to sub a piece of copy; but the presence of a qualified literary editor at every newspaper would be read as an affirmation of its spirit.