How much do politics play into book reviewing? What goes into assigning a critic a book review? Why should readers and the publishing industry alike listen to what critics have to say? Phillipa K. Chong takes us behind the scenes in the world of fiction reviewing, exploring the inherent subjectivity involved in the process, especially considering that seemingly anyone can be a reviewer. Deconstructing the complexities, values, cultural and personal anxieties that shape what critics do, Chong gives book-lovers an inside peek at the politics and social implications of daring to review a modern work of fiction. Phillipa K. Chong is a cultural sociologist who specializes in how we define and evaluate worth: this includes the value we assign to social objects (e.g. books, paintings, knowledge, opinions, etc) and social groups (e.g. experts, artists, minority groups, etc). Chong’s first book, Inside the Critics’ Circle: Book Reviewing in Uncertain Times was published in 2020 with Princeton University Press. Chong earned her PhD in Sociology from the University of Toronto, and was a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Sociology at Harvard University. She currently works as an Assistant Professor of Sociology at McMaster University. Johanna Schneller is one of North America's leading freelance journalists specializing in entertainment features. She has profiled the most prominent actors of our time - among them, Julia Roberts, Johnny Depp, Diane Keaton, Brad Pitt, Julianne Moore, Michelle Pfeiffer, Jeff Bridges, Liam Neeson, Robert Downey, Jr. and Nicole Kidman. Her cover stories have appeared in a variety of major magazines, including InStyle, Premiere, Vanity Fair, Ladies Home Journal and more. She was a senior writer in the Los Angeles bureau of GQ magazine from 1990 to 1994. Currently, she writes the weekly Fame Game column for The Globe and Mail, and for two seasons, she hosted TVO's renowned film series, Saturday Night at the Movies. She lives in Toronto with her husband, the writer and broadcaster Ian Brown, and their two children.
Book by Phillipa K. Chong
Inside the Critics’ Circle: Book Reviewing in Uncertain Times
Books co-written by Johanna Schneller
Mayor Rob Ford: Uncontrollable: How I Tried to Help the World's Most Notorious Mayor
Woman Enough: How a Boy Became a Woman and Changed the World of Sport
Other Related Materials
7 of the Most Vicious Book Reviews (article from Electric Literature)
Is Book Reviewing a Public Service or an Art? (article from the NY Times)
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Live Mic: Best of TPL Conversations
S2:E9 Phillipa K. Chong: Inside the Critics’ Circle
[music]
Gregory McCormick: Welcome To Live Mic, Best of TPL Conversations, our regular Toronto Public Library podcast series featuring curated discussions and interviews with some of today's best known and yet-to-be-known writers, thinkers and artists, recorded on stage at one of Toronto Public Library's 100 branches.
[applause]
Phillipa Chong (PC): And what I'm gonna talk to you today about is a book that I wrote and it's quite simply, it's a book about book reviewers. And usually when I tell people that I've written a book about book reviewers there's a moment of bemusement or maybe even a bit of confusion because they think... Well, how meta is that? And just to add to the level of meta that is following me around these days, I'd like to actually begin this talk by reviewing with you, some of the reviews of the book that I got on book reviewing. So here's one from an academic. His name is Omar Lizardo at UCLA, he says that "This book is the most sophisticated account of the evaluative work of cultural intermediaries to date. A must read book." Very kind, very kind. Here we have Ron Charles from the Washington Post who described the book as offering rare insights, though he did say that some of my writing gave him grad school flashbacks. That's an occupational hazard, that'll happen. And then, here Peter Conrad from The Guardian described me as a tenure-hungry Assistant Professor and the book as an exercise in academic pseudo-intellection. So there's been a range. [chuckle] I like to say that the response has been mixed.
PC: And you know when you get critical reviews, it kinda stings sometimes, but what my publicist, and my friends and my family and colleagues have always said to me is, "Well, you know Phillipa, you got a really bad review and a really good outlet" right? You're a tenure hungry Assistant Professor in the Guardian, that's where you wanna be called that. And as the author of this book, I have to say, it was a bit of cold comfort, but as a sociologist who's been studying the world of book reviewing for the past 10 years, I understood the absolute merits of their arguments, and this is because book reviews play a really important role in the publishing world. If you can imagine it, every single year, publishers put up up to 50-000 adult fiction titles in a single year, and their job is to get some of those tens of thousand books into the hands of readers like yourself and me. Now, of course, given that there's so many books being published, how can a consumer, the average reader even hope to make an informed decision or to get a sense of which of the 50,000-plus they wanna read?
PC: Well to deal with this problem of abundance, what we have typically relied on are book reviews. Book reviewers are meant to sample some of the fiction that has been published and give us a sense of which ones are worth knowing about and which ones might actually be worth reading of those few. And it's important to know that, actually, only 5% of those 50,000 plus books will actually ever get a review, and getting a review matters in those numbers, right? Getting a review matters for sales and there's actually research that shows that getting a review is predictive of whether someone will go on to publish another book. So, reviews matter. So what I do in my book, understanding that reviews matter, is I actually wanted to talk to the reviewers themselves and understand how they did their jobs because there's a lot of decisions that come into play in deciding whether or not a book will get a good or bad review that we as the readers don't get to see when we're just scrolling, looking at reviews on the computer, or when we're flipping through pages.
PC: And one of the key findings or one of the key themes that summarizes the Book is that a lot of what informs what critics do isn't actually about the book itself. The book tells the story about the factors that shape reviewing that are not about the book itself. So what is it about then? Well, at first, I wanna say I'm not... This isn't a dig at book reviewers, okay? I'm not saying that they're singularly not doing their jobs properly. Instead, it's a recognition that book reviewing is actually really multifaceted and complex process, and that critics deal with a number of personal, professional and ethical considerations every time they are faced with writing a review that extend well beyond whether or not they liked what they found in the pages of the book, so these different challenges, I refer to as uncertainties. So what kinds of uncertainties and challenges do critics have to face? Well, there's epistemic uncertainties. How do you know a book is good or bad? And then how do you know you're right?
PC: And what happens if you like a book and all of your colleagues give it a bad review? What does that feel like? Then there's social uncertainty, which refers to how people are gonna respond to your review. And a surprising finding to me is that critics don't just think about us as their audience. They also pay attention to the author that they're reviewing as an important person that shapes what they're gonna put in their review. And then thirdly, institutional uncertainty, this has to do with the existential crisis that reviewing is in. Do we need critics? Do we need reviews? Do I count as a critic, even? And what is the impact of what I'm going to do? All of these questions form the context that a critic sits in when sitting down to read a book and ultimately to write a review of that book, and these different factors and how they shape a review is the story that my book tells. So what I'm gonna do in our time together is I'm just gonna give you a taste of what I mean when I say that many factors shape the book review process that aren't about the book itself. And let's look at one moment here, a very consequential moment which is, which books get selected for review.
PC: Well, I was really surprised to learn that actually the quality of the book wasn't the primary thing that was driving which books ended up being selected, which of the 5% of the 50,000 books actually got any kind of attention. And here, one of the... A review editor for one of the biggest outlets in the States told me it would probably surprise people to know, we are not looking for the best books, we haven't read the books and we have other concerns besides quality. So what are some of these concerns other than quality? I outlined a few of them in the book, but we'll just go through some quickly. What this shows you is the amount of coverage of books by major newspapers according to genre. So here you can see books that were in the general fiction category or the historical fiction category, they tended to get the most reviews, right? Over here, romance got almost no reviews, at all.
PC: And just again to get our reality in, when we're saying historical fiction and general fiction got a lot of reviews we're saying 3% of all historical fiction got a review. Okay, so it's still small amounts of books are being covered. So why is that the case? It's because newspapers feel that their scope and their reporting mandate should only be related to what might be considered as the more artistically legitimate genres. And so regardless of whether that historical fiction's any good or not, and regardless of whether that romance is actually really excellent or not, simply by having that little text on the top right of the book at the back of the book that puts you into genre, is going to influence your odds of getting a review. Another thing that influences which books get reviewed, is whether the book is considered a big book. And we talked about this a little bit. So what are the big books? The big books are the books that you see at the front table whenever you go buy on Indigo, right?
PC: These are the books that are seen as buzz-worthy or as news events, whether it could be... Whether it be because the author seen is very, very famous, like a new Jonathan Franzen is coming out. Or Maybe there's news that say, the advance was in the millions of dollars. There's something about this book that gets buzz. As one person said, we cover the book, "not because it's a great novel but because it's a publishing event". So again, with the editors that I spoke to, some of them even said they prefer not to cover some books 'cause they knew it was bad, but they had to because it was seen as newsworthy. So again, why it gets selected, but it's not actually about good quality books. So there are other reasons that are listed in the book, but I think the main takeaway here is that it's not just quality. And neither is it just the taste, or whims of the editor. There are tons of practical constraints that influence which books get selected for review and those are the books that we often end up hearing about and talking about.
PC: So let's move away from the editors. So let's talk about the reviewers themselves, How do critics write up their reviews? They've got the assignment, they've read the book, they've decided whether or not they like it more or less. How do they write it up? Now, very straightforward way for this to happen, would be that you decide whether you like it or not, or based on what criteria and you type it up. Alas, it's not that simple for them. And part of the reason it's not that simple, is because of the unique way that novelists and critics engage one another in the publishing field. It's called what is termed the switch role, reward structure. So typically you would have someone say, an artist, a visual artist make something, and then the critic would look at it, and write a review or prefer some kind of judgment, right? But they're separate roles. Yet in the fiction world you may be surprised to learn that most people who are writing reviews are actually novelists themselves. And indeed there's a bias and a preference for recruiting novelists to review other novelists.
PC: So what happens is, the novelist gets recruited to become the critic, writes up that one review, and then goes back to their role as a novelist, regularly. What this creates is a situation where the reviewer today can easily be the reviewee tomorrow. This has real consequences for how critics write up their reviews. Specifically, there's a tendency to maybe wanna play nice when faced with a negative review. Are you gonna be as open and explicit about how you dislike the piece so much? Are you gonna pull back? Critics give different reasons for why they might wanna pull back, why they might wanna play nice. Sometimes they're benevolent reasons, they don't wanna hurt other people, but sometimes they're kind of more concerned about their own skin. And in risk management, I'm gonna go through two examples of this. Publishing is a small world, and it is completely common that somebody who wrote a bad review of a book might come face-to-face with the person, the author of that book, and this happened to one woman who told the story this way.
PC: A few years later at a party after writing a negative review, the guy's wife led this broken figure up to me and said, "You know, you've ruined his life" and continued to shout her down during the party. There were oodles of stories, there were so many stories of this. So confrontation was a real possibility. In addition to just confronting the uncomfortable nature of having written a review of somebody else that was negative, there could also be repercussions, there could be retribution. So one thing could be, maybe that person's gonna write a bad review of my book the next time something comes up, or in one case someone said that after she wrote a bad review of Othello, he got all his friends to go online and sort of bomb her reviews on Amazon, right? But even beyond the review world, one person reflected giving a bad review to a fellow fiction writer is risky. If that fiction writer is ever on a panel, a jury for award, they are not gonna vote for your ass.
PC: So what a person does with that one review, can actually have long-term consequences for their careers, not as reviewers, but actually as novelists, and that's something they have to bear in mind while they're going through the process. So, it pays to play nice, unless you're famous. The desire and to play nice, disappears entirely when we're talking about writing a bad review of someone who's seen as at the tippy top of the literary world, not only is it seen as completely fair game to go after really famous people, it's actually for some seen as noble and a form of social justice, and we can talk more about that later. So what the book does, is it tells us how all these different factors shape how critics write their review in a way that's independent of the quality and the characters, and the plotting of the books that they review. And one thing that I've learned from doing this study is, you know, some of the best books should be able to speak to multiple audiences, and have multiple ways in, and I wanna suggest that part of the value of this book is that it gives people who love books a behind-the-curtains peek into the process and the decisions about what goes in, and maybe even just as importantly, what doesn't make it in to the reviews that we read.
PC: For the academics in the house, this is really a study about judgment. We evaluate each other every day, all day long, and we have more ways to do it than ever. This piece is a study of how we judge each other in a way that could probably travel and help us understand many words of judgment, and if there are any reviewers out here, I really hope that chapter one and chapter eight, that's me, Phillipa Chong the sociologist talking about the study, but chapters two through seven, those are really the stories of other critics. Those are the stories of your peers, and I hope that in having that in this format that it can hopefully begin some productive conversation about the importance and the future of reviewing.
Johanna Schneller (JS): Hey there.
PC: Hi!
JS: So that was great. So some of you may know that I write film reviews for The Globe and Mail from time to time. So all of this really rang true for me. All of the ways that we qualify and pull our punches, punch up, play nice, all of that I have freely confessed to having done. Why did this subject grab you to begin with?
PC: So on a personal level, I actually interned at a publishing company when I was in college, and part of my job was actually collecting all of the reviews for authors, and I noticed that there was a lot of differences in the way different authors were treated, but I also knew that they're incredibly important. But then after I decided not to go in publishing and to pursue graduate school, the discourse around critics really changed with the advent of the internet and Amazon and things like that. Suddenly I was hearing all this information about how critics just don't matter. Now, as someone who was in the publishing industry, as someone who's married to an artist and we cling to any kind of public attention we get, I knew that wasn't true. So I was interested in going in and seeing what is going on, and how are people making these decisions. As a sociologist, I'm really interested in worth and why we see some people or some things as more worthy than others, and really, that's part of what critics do, and I thought it was an excellent world to investigate how they do that given that it's seen as so subjective.
JS: Yeah, I wanna talk about worth, because I think that fascinates me, but just overall, why do you think we're so obsessed with evaluations in our culture, right? You see this all the time, "10 best episodes ever", "Worse written script ever". We really all wanna have certitude and judgment. What do you think is going on?
PC: So in the book I say we live in a culture of evaluation. We're subject to it at work, we do it ourselves on our phones and we even watch it on TV now, right? 'Cause you watch the famous judges on if you condense it walk, talk, etc. Why is it? That's a big historical question, but I think that part of the reason there's so much evaluation now, is that there's more ways for us to put out information and then there's also more ways for us to click on what we like or not, but I also think part of the ranking is the fact that there's so much being produced, there's so much content produced on the internet that we rely more on these gate-keeping filtering mechanisms to give us a sense of what we should be paying attention to, or not, because just like the reader who's faced with theoretically 50,000 plus titles to choose from, we need some sort of sorting mechanism to do that, and we're relying on these different evaluations and lists and ranks to do that.
JS: Yeah, the problem with an algorithm which is how a lot of us choose what we're gonna do next, is that it tells you what you've already liked, or it tells you what you know you wanna know, but there's no room for what you don't know you want to know which is a mysterious process. Just a quick note on terminology, you say reviewer and critic kind of simultaneously, you don't make a distinction?
PC: Correct.
JS: Okay. So I just think it's interesting to let people know how you gathered your research. You spoke to 40 different reviewers who were published in at least one of three high profile venues, only 11 of them had full-time jobs at any point as either publishers or critics right? And 35 out of the 40 had written books themselves. So what you said about people going back and forth between writing and reviewing, why did you choose your subjects in that way?
PC: Well, I actually started with a simple question of who counts as a critic, and it wasn't really clear. There's a Professional Association of National Book Critics Circle for instance in the United States, and I think they're very helpful but they have a very capacious idea of who could be a member, they offer things like coupons or discounts on magazines and things like that, but they don't have any power to really restrict and demarcate who can act as a critic, and who cannot. And there's no accreditation to be a critic, right? So what I ended up doing was, "well, I can't figure out who was a critic in the abstract, so I went to who's doing the work of criticism". And I went to these various newspapers, and I just went through an entire year's worth of fiction reviews, and I grabbed all of their by-lines, tried to get their contact information and I started sampling from there.
JS: I can tell you at The Globe, it's spectacularly loosey goosey, how we decide who gets to review what it is. There's no science behind it, at all. So when you amassed your people, on average, how long did you talk to them? Did you chat with them more than once? Would you go back and tell the other one what this one said? I know you agreed to keep them all anonymous, but were you... Was it an ongoing dialogue or was it discrete interviews?
PC: For most people, it was one long conversation. Like usually 60 to 90 minutes. A couple of people I had to return to because they're on lunch breaks or they're on book tours, and things like that, and no, I didn't share anything with one another. And indeed, one of the common things that most people said to me, is I can't wait to hear what other people have to say, because I think reviewing does feel like a really isolated activity and they don't actually talk about the practice that much with the peers. And I'm hoping this is something that the book brings to the community.
JS: Yeah, there's an old line that reviewing is like sex, you never get to see how the other guy does it.
[laughter]
JS: Did you have a questionnaire or did you let it be sort of free-form?
PC: I definitely had a questionnaire, but it was really open to following things as people brought up new ideas because I thought going into this research that I was gonna find out how critics knew what good fiction was. I thought they were gonna tell me how they justified what good fiction was but what they were really more interested in telling me about was how they justified their opinions.
JS: Yeah, well it's so interesting because reading the book, the words uncertainty and vulnerability... And you touched on the uncertainties, but the vulnerability really surprised me. This idea that reviewing is risky. There's this whole Goldilocks thing where they don't wanna be too populist or too academic, they have to find the sweet spot in the middle, and though they might look like they have a lot of power, the feeling of having power is very uncoupled, as you say, from the fact of power, which kind of makes them the perfect subject for this sort of thing. Like if they were certain that they knew what they were doing, they wouldn't be half as interesting, don't you think.
PC: I think that it definitely brings a different perspective to what they do, by having been more entrenched as objects of the reviewing apparatus as much as they are the people who also propel it forward.
JS: Were you surprised by their vulnerability?
PC: I was very surprised by their vulnerability, 'cause I was so nervous to speak to these people. These are some of the most top famous people to speak to, and I was surprised how open they were and how vulnerable they were. And I can say this now. So Ron Charles was someone that I interviewed for the book, and he has volunteered that information, publicly already, and it was... Even when he was writing about the book, he talked about how after 30 years of doing this work, every time he put out a review, it just filled them with anxiety and dread. So it's not, it's really not about how long you've been in the game. There's something intrinsic to the task of being a reviewer that makes you in a vulnerable situation. That being said, I'm not saying all critics felt that way. And there are some critics that they are highly certain.
JS: Yeah, are they... Is there anybody who just likes to be a bastard? Like you talk about how most people play nice, is there anybody who just thrives on mean reviews?
PC: There are definitely people who make careers of being mean reviewers right and people flock to them to get that sort of hit.
JS: Like the Simon Cowell of book reviewing.
PC: Exactly, exactly, and I won't name names 'cause you probably know their names, 'cause they're branded for that, but at the same time, I think that while they might be known for being negative reviewers, their estimation as reviewers club reviewers gets questioned.
JS: So how do they get away with it? Like how do they not have to deal with the risks and the bad reviews and the bad prizes? The things that you mentioned.
PC: I think that when people are writing bad reviews, what's really really important, especially these people who are writing vicious reviews, it's really important who their target is. So if you're going to write all horribly negative vile review of, say, a new author, a first-time author, whether you're known for doing this or not, you're gonna get some flak back from the review community 'cause that's seen as what I call punching down, but when these people write about famous authors, and I think those are the... They are typically titans taking on titans, when you're punching up, it's seen as allowable, and so that's why they get away with it.
JS: Your body language right there, even when you're like, "A new writer", like...
[chuckle]
PC: Like me.
JS: Like her! Don't be mean to them! But Stephen King, knock yourself out, right?
PC: Yeah.
JS: So let's talk about you for a couple of seconds. What kind of a kid were you? Were you constantly reading?
PC: I was reading a lot, yep. I was reading... I did read some fiction, but I admit, I read a lot of my sister's psychology texts to understand peer group formation rules, so I could figure out how to be popular in high school. And the answer is, the answer is not doing that.
[laughter]
PC: Or at least not admitting it, just do it on the slide.
JS: Was your sister older?
PC: Yes.
JS: And was she nice to you? Or did she... Was she your first sort of mean critic?
PC: No, no, no, no. Always very nice.
JS: Do you remember the first things that you wrote that gave you pleasure? Where you thought, "Oh, I'm interested in this" or "I'd like to do this".
PC: The first things that I wrote, they were definitely in grade school and they were just little poems and just the idea of rhyming schemes that you could play with language that way was really magic to me, but the best experience I had was when we were doing a non-fiction exercise, and I wrote this little piece about ladybugs, and the teacher said, "You have to read books about ladybugs, but you have to organize it by mating, by visuals, by their diet", and then the researcher was born. It was suddenly the disorganized world could be organized. And I'd been chasing that dragon ever since.
JS: Wow, ladybugs. Thank you, ladybugs. Did you... Long before you got interested in this project, were you a consumer of reviews? Did you read a lot of reviews? Specifically book reviews? Movie reviews, anything?
PC: I did read reviews, yes.
JS: Okay. And did you have a favorite style? Like I know V.S. Naipaul for example, the novelist always says he will never put plot in his reviews, he just doesn't think that's his job, to recite the plot to you. Do you... Are there things you love, hate, you have pet peeves?
PC: You know what, I have to admit to you, that I have to say after studying this for so long, I don't read reviews anymore. And the reason is I think the best way I can explain it is, a girlfriend of mine, she was a dancer for many years, and she says, that she can't go to watch dance anymore because all she sees is the pain.
JS: Well, well.
PC: And I think all I hear and think about is the pain when I'm reading reviews now.
[chuckle]
JS: I have friends, a lot of friends who have now decided that they're not going to review books that they don't like, they will just pass and it's not that they're trying to... It's not that they're trying to pump these books up, they just don't wanna put the negative reviews out there into the world. Is that something that you encountered a lot?
PC: Yeah, so people did say that they would prefer not to read particular types of books, so believe it or not, there were actually a number of women who said that they didn't want to review books, first novels written by women precisely because they would not wanna be in the tricky situation of having to write a negative review which could have such consequences for that writer's career. Now the intention is noble, but at the same time, it just kind of creates a situation where there's fewer people to review women's fiction. Yeah.
JS: Right. And then fewer things get reviewed.
PC: That's right.
JS: Yeah, so that's... No, don't do that. Can a review be too positive? Can you shoot yourself in the foot by liking something too much?
PC: Absolutely, and I think the repercussions of that is, you look like a shill, like you're working for the publisher or the writer's your best friend or something like that and also if you've gone too high with your praise, other people will probably disagree with you and then you can become the story. So there was one person I spoke to, and he said that he had over-praised a particular novel and he put it on the front of the cover and things like that, and everyone else hated it, and he says to this day, people would make fun of him for doing that. He enjoyed it too much. And even the context of my interviews, two or three other critics brought up this critic's review to make fun of him. So it's a potential for questioning your judgment or just at least someone, making fun of you, a stranger writing a PhD.
JS: That's a terrible feeling 'cause you think, "Oh, I hate myself, but no one else noticed." But no, they all notice. So this brings up other tricky areas around criticism like I know at The Globe, for example, when we're talking about films made by people of color, sometimes they want a reviewer of color to review it, and then there's also the debate of like, "No, whoever your lead film critic is regardless of race, should cover that because you don't want this feeling of the lesser reviewer", like the less well-known reviewer doing it, that things get sort of shunted off to the side. Do those same issues occur in book reviewing? Is there a sense that race is beginning to play into this as well?
PC: I think race is beginning to play certainly, I think that the way that people talked about it though, was in a very individual basis. Did I try to push for books by women and minorities? Yes. And I think that has to do with the fact that there isn't a real sense of book reviewing as a group of people that are all book reviewers. So, you have doctors work doctors, even journalists, we have a journalistic identity. You might be surprised to learn that a lot of critics don't identify as critics. They identify as English professors, they identify as novelists. Even when I invited them to review or to be interviewed for my book, a lot of people said, "Really good topic, I wanna help, but I don't know that I count", because they're not doing this full time, they're only writing three, four reviews a year. But actually, those are the people who make up the majority of the reviews that we read.
PC: So how does this come back to your question? Well, what it means is that although people write the reviews, they don't feel responsible for the reviewing world, they don't feel like they actually can do anything because they're just freelancers and so some people will say, "Yes, I will try to review more women, I will try to review more minorities" and things like that, but they're in terms of they're being some kind of organized effort to correct for some of the imbalances, there's no real sense of how to move forward in that.
JS: Yeah. And also does the same hold true for subject matter? If you've written a novel that has the "Me Too" subject at heart for now, for example, are you gonna pull your punches because you don't wanna be seen as criticizing the movement if you're criticizing the book? Like if this is a bad novel about Me Too, are you criticizing Me Too? So does that... Are people tiptoeing around that kind of thing?
PC: Right. So this again bring this to the idea that book reviewing is such a complicated process. And by that I just mean, that there's many steps. And so one of the most important decisions in a book's life, after it getting selected to be reviewed, is the question of who's gonna review it. And editors, and I describe this in the book, go through a very painstaking process of trying to make a good match because if you don't make a good match, the whole legitimacy of the review comes into question. Perfect example, one woman got a book about golf, she hated golf, she gave the book a really, really bad review, but she didn't know if it was the book's fault, or her fault 'cause she just hated golf so much, right? You can't set up a book. I think that conversations around how people should approach... May approach topics or the extent to which they can approach particular topics need to be happening in that conversation about matching, because I can say "Hi, I want you to review this book", but it takes the viewer to feel competent, to feel confident, to feel that they have something to say for the match to happen. And so those conversations should be happening, there. I think.
JS: Right. Because I also have my pet causes. I personally when I'm writing a review of a woman director, I wanna see more women directors.
PC: Yeah.
JS: So I might give them half a star more than I would otherwise. I think that kind of thing probably happens all the time.
PC: Yeah.
JS: And I think because of social media, there's minefields, that you suddenly can step in now, like we all... Are you guys all familiar with what happened with American Dirt? The book American Dirt? So a person's not allowed to write this book anymore. We were talking about an upcoming book Elizabeth Russell's book "My Dark Vanessa" where it's a story of a young girl who has an affair with an older teacher, and she realizes later in life that she's being groomed and then another writer who happened to be Latinx said, "This is actually my story. I think you're taking my story." And then the writer had to say, "No, I wasn't gonna talk about this because it was a novel, but this also happened to me." So it just... All these things can eclipse the book. You can step inadvertently in a minefield that just blows your book out of the water. So, do reviewers... In your experience, do they take pains to protect themselves from that? And how can they do that?
PC: Well, whether or not they take pains, I think that all of this discourse as you say, that doesn't end up being about the book itself. What it does is illuminate actually, the power that book reviews have because it gives us a venue to talk about some of these issues around representation for instance, or about power imbalances of different authors or positions in the field, and reviews aren't fundamentally just about the books, it's about the place of art in our society, it's about arguing that actually, well, issues of representation are important and do matter, and so that's why in this book you'll see that I try to move away from the most interesting problem being professional reviewers versus amateur reviewers. It's very 2007. 2008. The internet's still here. Newspaper's still here, they kind of coexist. What it is now is about how do these different types of reviewers live together? And I think one way that newspaper critics, the types of critics that I interview do that is by demarcating the unique value in bringing to focus that books are news. That they are newsworthy, and that even the discourse in ideas that they bring up, are worth us to talk about or worth talking about and thinking about to understand the social world around us.
JS: Because one of the things you mentioned is that books are perceived to have a societal good, right? That reading is good. There's not anybody out there who thinks the more books you read, the worse of a human being you are, right? Like it has this perception around it.
PC: Yes.
JS: And so if you're... If you wanna keep the culture alive in a way you gotta buy more newspapers, people, because that's where most of these are from. Now that you've... Your book is very measured and very academic, but I really want you to dish a little dirt for a minute. Are there good stories that you weren't able to put the book? Any great stories of confrontation or revenge or any stories that you wish you could have put in the book?
PC: There are a lot of stars.
[chuckle]
JS: Any of them that stand out or that sort of haunt you at night?
PC: The chain, the chain of writing a bad review. And when that can come back, that can take... That can happen over decades. It doesn't go away. A lot of people can quote their bad reviews, it's just like tattooed on them. I get it now, I get it now, tenure hungry assistant professor.
JS: You can have a T-shirt that says...
PC: Yeah, I get that now.
JS: "Hungry for tenure".
PC: Yeah, but one thing that I couldn't put in the book was that when critics would describe why they gave books good reviews, they would actually use very technical language, and they would almost repeat what they put in the review, okay? 'Cause it's how they thought about the book. When they were describing books they hated, it's like there was an about face, and it became very emotional. They're like, "Yeah that was trash and that person was just trying to make money and did it... " All this stuff, like "Oh, it was complete garbage". And when you compare that to what they wrote, it was... You might be a little lost at this point in the book. So there was a big emotional difference. It was a very robust finding, but I couldn't put it in the book, because I couldn't present it in any way unless I cited the original review and then that would have done the anonymity thing. So playing nice is very real. Yeah.
JS: Other than your own reviews have you had surprising reactions to this book? Have any of the critics that you interviewed read it, or did... Has anybody sort of come at you in a way that you didn't expect?
PC: So a lot of the critics are starting to write reviews especially people that I interviewed for the piece, and I'm happy to say that most of them do see themselves reflected in it which is very nice 'cause usually when you're sociologists and you interview people. They don't read it. They don't read it. Sometimes our colleagues don't read it. So they don't read and give you a sense that you got their story. I think that with a book like this, sometimes people can take it as a deconstruction to be a challenge to them, a challenge to what they're doing, and that's certainly not the spirit of it. So I would say it's more, again, just recognizing what's going on trying to put it down in an academic tone where we can wrestle with it. We have something now to love, hate, agree or disagree with. Whereas before, who is a critic, what is a critic, it's all a matter of taste. Turns out, there's at least 176 pages more of that story.
JS: Do you believe in a kind of objective excellence? Like, do you believe that something that we... There are criteria by which we can judge something good or bad, worthy or not worthy? A good writer or not a good writer?
PC: I do believe that there are some pieces that get great consensus about whether it's absolutely wonderful and whether it's absolute tripe and I think that the majority of stuff ends up somewhere in the middle, and that is just true of findings in film criticism and book criticism and academic evaluations. As I'm looking through my book shop in my head. I do believe that, that some things... The cream sometimes rises. I do not... I also believe, though, that we're not very good at predicting it, I don't think that it's necessarily going to come from the biggest publishing house. I don't think it's necessarily just gonna come from white men. I think that that sorting period of that 50,000 books that we start with are ways of identifying the very, very good books leave a lot to be desired at the moment.
JS: Yeah. So last question for me, and then I do wanna hear from all of you. Everybody famously knows the story that Fifty Shades of Grey was turned down by every publisher. And I personally think there are good reasons for that, no matter how successful it was. But I don't wanna live in the un-mediated, unedited world. I do want some expertise, I do want some gatekeeper still telling me stuff. I know that that's a kind of real retro way of thinking. What is the current thinking on just, should gatekeepers exist, at all? What have you run into?
PC: So I think the gate-keeping role is just being divided in terms of wanting to know what book you wanna read next. I don't know that a single person can beat the algorithms on Amazon or Netflix, or what have you, right? To tell you what you're in the mood for. You might wanna go with those, but I think the reasons that readers turn to review pages are actually more complicated than that. A lot of us go to those pages with no intention of picking up a book whether there's a good review or a bad review, right? We're just kind of reading about what's going on in the culture at the time. So I think that role will become... Remains important. And again, it goes back to the idea that what book reviewers do, in the newspapers, is that it's making an argument that we should know about books in the same way that we should know about business, in the same way that we should know about politics, because it's an important part of our world, and it's important to us understanding ourselves and how we navigate our lives.
JS: Well, that's brilliantly put. Thank you Phillipa, thank you so much.
[applause]
[music]
GM: On the Live Mic episode page, livemic.ca, you will find biographies of featured writers, guests and hosts as well as links to TPL's collections or other episode-related materials. For all of TPL's podcast series, go to tpl.ca/podcasts. Toronto Public Library is one of the world's busiest urban public library systems. Every year, more than 20 million people visit our 100 branches in neighbourhoods across the city and borrow more than 32 million items.
Live Mic: Best of TPL Conversations is produced by the Toronto Public Library. Episodes are produced by Natalie Kertes, Jorge Amigo, and me, Gregory McCormick. Technical support by Michelle De Marco and George Panayotou. A/V support by Jennifer Kasper and Mesfin Bayssassew. And marketing support, by Tanya Oleksuik. Music is by Worst Pop Band Ever, also known as WPBE. I'm Gregory McCormick, manager of Cultural and Special Event Programming at Toronto Public Library. Thanks for listening, and stay tuned for another episode of Live Mic: Best of TPL Conversations.