Screen Book Reviews

So here's one for you, the week that I got drunk and watched very late-night tennis instead of reviewing the Book Review for you: should we bother reading book reviews? What's the point of them? Whom do they serve? I don't mean to ask these things rhetorically, but really: after all, I do read book reviews, compulsively, and wherever I can find them. I am often unsatisfied, for example, with my review-knowledge of a book of short stories if I haven't seen a breakdown of each story, with a little description of each one (vide my high-school era review at Prestigious Critical Organ amazon.com, of Girl with Curious Hair {or rather don't vide it, because I wrote it in high school}). I want to know what's what, going in, usually.

But I don't know if I want book reviews. I think that really, what I want is something like "to have already read the book and formed a shorthand reminder of what it's about, which reminder is:". So, instead of a few quotes and some musing and scene setting, my pre-reading review of, say, the Adventures of Kavalier and Clay would be "Depression and World War II Era comic book guys/lots of relationship trouble/episodic pacing/very well written/satisfyingly unsatisfying ending". It would be like "plot keywords" on IMDb, except for books. And really, too, I do not know whether that would lead to a better idea of what was in store for books I meant to read or not; probably not, given that most of you who have read Kavalier and Clay might've put down totally different keywords, and many of you who have not read it might now be imagining Kavalier and Clay, based on my list, to be a book totally different from what it actually is. Although possibly not too different, because probably too amorphous. The reason I got to wondering all this about the worthwhileness of book reviews has to do with the occasionally massive discrepancies between the actual books we read, and the books we imagine we're approaching based on their reviews.

Pierre Bayard borrows a term from Freud and calls the idiosyncratic set of ideas we each make for ourselves out of the reputation of a given book that "screen book", and I think that what happens so often to me is that I dream up, based on a book review (or an amalgamation of book reviews) a screen book that is radically unlike the idiosyncratic ideas about the book that are based on actually reading the book. Which is absolutely not to say that I feel as if book reviewers are disingenuous, or shoddy, or creating unjustified hype; simply to say that I am I and they are they and thus we think different things. I think the most egregious case of this was the review I read a book that I enjoyed very much, the Emperor's Children by Claire Messud. I don't know why; subtle phrasings like this: "the metaphorical pawn in their struggle [that is, between Murray Thwaite, Mr. Earnest Liberalism, and Ludovic Seeley, who is basically Nick Denton] -- a struggle over status -- is Bootie Tubb." This is a slightly sophisticated point; in the book, Murray and Seeley are largely unconcerned with Bootie, who's kind of a twerp. But the position here in the book review made me keep an eye out for it. Also, the three main characters are introduced, naturally, at the beginning of the review, and as a group; in the book, they are less of a group and more of a loose aggregate.

Are these big deals? Are they some kind of misrepresentation of the book? Absolutely not. But they are a series of what, to a reader sensitive to sorts of readymade stories, could launch a weird series of in-between screen books. So, in sum, I don't know what to do about book reviews. I guess I'll just keep reading them; it's not like I've got that much better to do. Except maybe read the books they're about.