Into the Rabbit Hole with Goals (and Guidelines)

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I’m about to start reading John Updike’s Rabbit, Redux so I was checking out his Wikipedia page and I saw that a feminist critic once described him as a penis with a thesaurus. Which is pretty hilarious if you try to picture a penis reading a thesaurus. Anyway, I also like writing book reviews and I was reminded that Updike’s personal rules for literary criticism (first imparted in Picked-Up Pieces, a 1975 prose collection) are probably the best guidelines for how to write solid reviews, whether you’ve been reading freelance gigs at The New York Review of Books or working at a college paper. I always use the rules as a checklist before I send something out.

      1.  Try to understand what the author wished to do, and do not blame him for not achieving what he did not attempt.

     2.  Give enough direct quotation – at least one extended passage – of the book’s prose so the reviewer’s reader can form his own impression, get his own taste.

     

     3.  Confirm your description of the book with quotation from the book, if only phrase-long, rather than proceeding by fuzzy précis.

     4.  Go easy on plot summary, and do not give away the ending. 

     5.  If the book is judged deficient, cite a successful example along the same lines, from the author’s oeuvre or elsewhere. Try to understand the failure. Sure it’s his and not yours?

     To these concrete five might be added a vaguer sixth, having to do with maintaining a chemical purity in the reaction between product and appraiser. Do not accept for review a book you are predisposed to dislike, or committed by friendship to like Do not imagine yourself a caretaker of any tradition or enforcer of any party standards, a warrior in any ideological battle, a corrections officer of any kind. Never, never…try to put the author “in his place,” making him a pawn in a contest with other reviewers. Review the book, not the reputation. Submit to whatever spell, weak or strong, is being cast. Better to praise and share than blame and ban. The communion between reviewer and his public is based upon the presumption of certain possible joys of reading, and all our discriminations should curve toward that end.

Even during his peak period, Updike was known as a purveyor of the old school, but as long as books remain jumbles of letters on pages or screens, his rules will always be a great starting point for how to approach talking about literature. Check out any good review and you’ll see all of these rules. Long live the educated penis!