Popular Culture Review Vol. 4, No. 1, January 1993 | Page 14

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Popular Culture Review

calendar. Certainly the death of any prominent writer can knock two
to four reviews off the schedule.
Even a carefully thought-out review by a professional critic, who
is an expert in a particular book's area, who begins a book with an
opjen mind and thoroughly reads it, and who objectively measures it
against a body of other writing still represents only one opinion of a
work. Readers and publishers who are swayed by that opinion,
positively or negatively, are allowing someone they don't know to
make decisions for them. They forget that reviewers are merely
p>eople, individual and potentially fallible readers, who may or may
not have been carefully chosen to critique a particular title. A
common statement may be, "The Times loved (hated) it," but the
truth is that the Tim es' reviewer hated it. The newspaper or
magazine itself does not (and should not) dictate policy concerning
the opinions of its staff or freelance reviewers.
Writers who say, "I never read reviews!" are usually lying unless
they are established authors whose works will sell regardless of
what critics say about them. Even famous authors often reveal in
interviews that they have more than a dim awareness of what has
been said about their work in print. They know that their editors are
keeping a sharp eye on their books' "box scores," measured in the
country's book review pages.
Writers may carp and cavil that the future of their careers has
been slowed and maybe killed by "newspaper hacks," by "pwmpous
professors who teach at podunk colleges in towns so small you
wouldn't even stop in one to change a flat," or "knee-jerk liberals," or
"fascist astigmatics," or even by "unlettered morons who think a
Harlequin Romance is a classic," but they do care about anything that
has an impact on sales. They may not understand how the initial
judgments of their agents and editors can be casually set aside because
of the published criticism of a graduate school drop-out from the
Bronx, or an unemployed high school poetry teacher from Fort Worth,
or a retired home economics professor from Twin Falls—descriptions
that would fit any number of reviewers from coast to coast—but they
will ultimately acknowledge that their professional futures are in
large measure dep>endent ujx)n that published criticism, regardless of
who writes it. Finally, they will celebrate the good reviews and
mourn the bad.