4
But clothes do not make the man and words do not make the book review. A book review must have a Structure, a Skeleton, if it be no more than the skeleton in the book closet. It must have a backbone and a bite. It must be able to stand erect and look the author in the face and tell him to go to the Home for Indigent Authors which the Authors’ League will build one of these days after it has met running expenses.
Our favorite book reviewer reviews the ordinary book in four lines and a semi-colon. Unusual books drain his vital energy to the extent of a paragraph and a half, three adjectives to the square inch.
He makes it a point to have one commendatory phrase and one derogatory phrase, which gives a nicely balanced, “on the one hand ... on the other hand” effect. He says that the book is attractively bound but badly printed; well-written but deficient in emotional intensity; full of action but weak in characterization; has a good plot but is devoid of style.
He reads all the books he reviews. Every little while he pounces upon a misquotation on page 438, or a misprint on page 279. Reviewers who do not read the books they review may chance upon such details while idly turning the uncut leaves or while looking at the back cover, but they never bring in three runs on the other side’s error. They spot the fact that the heroine’s mother, who was killed in a train accident in the fourth chapter, buys a refrigerator in the twenty-third chapter, and they indulge in an unpardonable witticism as to the heroine’s mother’s whereabouts after her demise. But the wrong accent on the Greek word in Chapter XVII gets by them; and as for the psychological impulse which led the hero to jump from Brooklyn Bridge on the Fourth of July they miss it entirely and betray their neglect of their duty by alluding to him as a poor devil crazed with the heat. The fact is, of course, that he did a Steve Brodie because he found something obscurely hateful in the Manhattan skyline. Day after day, while walking to his work on the Brooklyn Rapid Transit, he gazed at the saw-toothed outline of the buildings limned against the sky. Day by day his soul kept asking: “Why don’t they get a gold filling for that cavity between the Singer and Woolworth towers?” And he would ask himself despondently: “Is this what I live for?” And gradually he felt that it was not. He felt that it might be something to die about, however. And so, with the rashness of youth, he leaped. The George Meredith-Thomas Hardy irony came into the story when he was pulled out of the river by his rival in Dorinda’s affections, Gregory Anthracyte, owner of the magnificent steam yacht Chuggermugger.
So much for the anatomy of a book review. Put backbone into it. Read before you write. Look before you leap. Be just, be fair, be impartial; and when you damn, damn with faint praise, and when you praise, praise with faint damns. Be all things to all books. Remember the author. Review as you would be reviewed by. If a book is nothing in your life it may be the fault of your life. And it is always less expensive to revise your life than to revise the book. Your life is not printed from plates that cost a fortune to make and another fortune to throw away. “Life is too short to read inferior books,” eh? Books are too good to be guillotined by inferior lives—or inferior livers. Bacon said some books were to be digested, but he neglected to mention a cure for dyspeptics.