Bookplanet: what you get out of a book review

The art of the book review -- by BRIAN DOYLE

We skim and scan and peruse them, we note the ones that glow, we grin at those that snarl, but I bet you a pint of excellent ale that no one really thinks of the book review as a genre itself, a shapely form, a unique and peculiar corner of literature; but maybe we should.

Consider the difficulty of composing a brief piece, both graceful and pointed, that must juggle many tasks: assess the feats and flaws of the book at hand, its place in the works of that writer, its place in books on that subject, its general substance or silliness, and -- most of all -- whether the book is worth cold cash. Additionally, a good review should sketch the subject of the book itself in such a way that the reader gets a quick lesson in Antarctic exploration, beekeeping, Guy Fawkes, Tom McCall's fishing waders, etc.; one subtle kick of a book section in a newspaper is that it is fully as informative and stimulating as the rest of the paper (indeed usually more so), whether or not you immediately shuffle to the bookstore to lay your money down.

And it is a form with masters, like John Updike (whose book reviews are literary essays of exquisite grace and erudition, far more interesting and pithy than his novels, with far less neurotic, lusty misadventure) or Christopher Hitchens (whose reviews are energetic, opinionated, bristly, tart and often hilarious), or James Wood (who is almost always startlingly perceptive and who, bless his heart, coined the happy phrase "hysterical realism" to describe much modern fiction).

And like any form it has its charlatans and mountebanks; what is more entertaining, among the dark pleasures of reading a newspaper, than realizing that the reviewer has not actually read the book in question, and is committing fizzy sleight-of-hand? Or reading a review that is utterly self-indulgently about the reviewer, not the book? Or a review that is trying desperately to be polite about a book with as many flaws as the New York Knicks? Or reading a reviewer, like Michiko Kakutani of The New York Times, who must spend hours every day sharpening razors with which to eviscerate the books she reviews, and has liked, as far as I remember, only two books in the history of the universe, Ian McEwan's "Saturday" and Richard Flanagan's "Gould's Book of Fish"?

Ah, low humor, a venial sin. Sorry. But there are great gifts in the book section too. Has not every one of us been introduced here to writers and books that subsequently mattered immensely to us? Have we not all heard here snatches of the voices of sage elders like Ursula K. Le Guin and Peter Matthiessen and Eduardo Galeano? Have we not been reintroduced to men and women of real vision and piercing holiness, like Abraham Lincoln and Flannery O'Connor? Have we not discovered writers and books we might never have encountered in the normal chaos and hubbub of our days -- Alan Furst's haunted war novels, David James Duncan's spiritual essays, Stewart Holbrook's resurrected loggers and thieves? In one sense, the review section is a digest, a distilling, of the vast ocean of books into those that might matter most; and in a nation and culture in which ideas and debate and story still supersede the gun and the lash, we might take a moment to ponder the book review as a quiet inky pillar of the body politic.

There are still more quiet pleasures in the book section. To discover a terrific writer's excitement about other writers, say -- Barry Lopez singing William deBuys, Cynthia Ozick celebrating Amos Oz, Margaret Atwood applauding Alice Munro. Or the arrival, with a tremendous splash, of a ridiculously gifted young writer grappling not-quite-smoothly with a capacious talent -- a Zadie Smith, a Jonathan Safran Foer. Or meeting a writer of startling grace and power whose stories stitch and braid into your heart -- a Helen Garner, a Haruki Murakami. Or meeting again, with a shiver of warm recognition, writers who mattered to you once and who leap right back to the top of that teetering pile of books on your bedside table: Willa Cather, Robert Louis Stevenson, George Orwell, Eudora Welty. Or, another grinning low pleasure, reading a review and recognizing that brassy pub-argument voice, cocksure about writerly rankings -- a voice I drift into myself, I confess, when I insist, banging my tankard, that Twain is the greatest of all American writers, and Bellow the greatest of modern ones, and Stevenson the most broadly masterful of all.

It is an odd genre, to be sure, the review, and every bit as chancy as its literary cousins -- many times a superb book was panned on first appearance, many times reviewers turn out to be laughably wrong about a book's staying power, many times a very fine writer of something else turns out to be a terrible reviewer, and many times a bad review leads to bickering and wailing -- would the letters page of The New York Times Book Review be any fun at all without the moaning of offended authors and the icy, sniffy replies of reviewers?

In the end the book review seems to me every bit as laudable a form, when in good hands, as film and theater reviews have become when sculpted by such as the hilarious Anthony Lane and the perceptive John Lahr. To sit on Sunday morning and flip open the papery halibut that is The Oregonian and peruse the reviews is to be in a village green of voices, learned and light-hearted, erudite and exuberant, snarling and singing. It is to be in a sea of stories. It is to be in conversation, in a real sense; and it seems to me these days that listening attentively to each other, and speaking honestly of that which is foremost in our hearts, is the essential duty of both national and spiritual citizenship. We are ourselves stories, sometimes shapely and sometimes stuttering; and the more we tell and hear stories, the more we trade tales of grace under duress and courage against the dark, then the more we keep reaching for what we are at our best, and remain leery of arrogance, and remember that there are many roads to light.

So why, if well-made book reviews are so important, do such lowly ink-stained wretches as I attempt them? Well, you get to keep the book you review, which is pretty cool, and you get to scribble in it, which is really cool, but most of all for the simplest reason of all -- books are fun, and poking into new books is more fun, and discovering and celebrating great books is the most fun. It's the reverse of that feeling we have all had as readers, of slowing down as you approach the end of a great book, because you're reluctant to leave that world you can only enter for the first time once; the grail for reviewers is the dawning realization that the book in your hand is extraordinary, something that matters, something that will hit hearts. Now that's cool.

(Brian Doyle is the editor of Portland Magazine at the University of Portland. His book "The Grail" was recently published by Oregon State University Press.)