Q: Who Should be Reviewing Certain Books?

A: Anyone. Just make it interesting.

Jay Caspian Kang, a contributor to the opinion section at the New York Times has written an interesting piece questioning the role of “identity” when assigning books for review.

As the author of a new book, The Loneliest Americans, in which Kang explores the Asian-American experience in the United States, his questioning isn’t purely academic. Kang, a Korean-American, has openly expressed a desire for the book to be reviewed by at least one reviewer who is not also Asian-American. Some of this may be because Kang is something of a prickly figure in Asian-American circles, a reflexive contrarian with a too-cool-for-school Twitter persona that can read as dryly humorous or insufferably superior. (Kang seems very self-aware when it comes to this, suggesting it’s to some degree calculated. Such is the nature of the attention economy.) I’m actually a big fan of Kang, even (or especially) when I don’t agree with him because his writing is always interesting. A few years ago he published a strange and compelling novel, The Dead Do Not Improve that to my eye tried to blend a young man coming of age story, with Thomas Pynchon when he’s in noir/detective mode (as in Inherent Vice). It is discursive in occasionally thrilling, sometimes boring ways, and I’m glad I read it, though I don’t often recommend it because it is definitely not for everyone.

Also, I fully share Kang’s deep enmity for the NPR (alleged) comedy program Wait Wait, Don’t Tell Me.

If we view someone’s identity as a kind of expertise, there is a clear rationale for assigning Asian-American reviewers to a book like The Loneliest Americans. If there is a book about growing up in the Chicago suburbia of John Hughes films, hit me up, I’m available. This framing suggests that a shared identity is an asset to judging the accuracy or acuity of the author’s work, pitting what’s in the book against the experiences of the reviewer.

But as Kang points out, this creates a bind where non-White authors are not allowed to be viewed as universal, or speaking to audiences beyond their immediate identity. It also suggests that accuracy to experience is a primary goal of these kinds of reviews, which is a pretty narrow metric. If Kang’s good is going to be judged good or not good based on whether or not a reviewer has a similar view of the world based in their identity, we’ve been deprived of a potentially far more interesting discussion.

This is not to say that Asian American reviewers shouldn’t cover Kang’s book, but as a reflexive practice, it’s limited and lazy and ultimately not a service to the authors or the reading public. Just like books themselves, reviews have no purpose other than to be interesting and crafted with as much care and consideration as possible. Anyone who is willing to sign on to those underlying values should be qualified to offer an assessment of Kang’s book.

(Yes, there are specialty texts that may require experts to properly assess them, but this is something like peer review in academia, a different milieu and different standard than books meant for we regular folk.)

Of course, these days, one’s political beliefs have become an identity in and of themselves, and I can’t get off this topic before noting that once again, the Times has assigned a reviewer whose political identity guarantees a positive notice.

Previously it was Times contributor John McWhorter reviewing a book by Randall Kennedy. This time it’s McWhorter’s book, Woke Raicism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America being reviewed by Zaid Jillani, a writer who is essentially a full-time “anti-woke” opinion writer at his own quite popular Substack. Jillani and McWhorter are also on the board of advisors of the Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism (FAIR), which is dedicated to the cause of anti-anti-racism. (I’m not a fan.) In my view, this association is far too close a connection to assign the review to Jillani, but maybe I’m a fuddy duddy on that stuff.

Anyway, I have no objection to McWhorter’s book being published or read or praised or anything like that. Though, McWhorter’s core argument that anti-racism is best viewed as a “religion” is to be kind, a stretch, and to be unkind, sorta dumb. Under McWhorter’s argument, everything could be viewed as a religion. A group of people sharing set of affinities is not a de-facto religion. If it was, I suppose I worshiped in the church of Michael Jordan alongside many other Chicagoans in the 1990’s.

No, what I object to is a fundamentally uninteresting and unilluminating pairing of book and reviewer.

Not that McWhorter’s book is likely to convince anyone not already inclined to believe that anti-racist initiatives he thinks are annoying are more harmful than actual racism, but to also assign this book to Jillani does nothing more than provide a few hundred words for the anti-woke brigade to air their grievances, something Jillani and McWhorter already do on a daily basis, including in McWhorter’s case, in the New York Times.

It’s fundamentally boring, and it is my belief that the Times primarily does this so they can point at these examples and say, Look, we’re not hostile to conservatives!

I’m not even going to get into my belief that the Times should not be reviewing books by people who work for them, something they did twice just this week with McWhorter, and a new book from columnist Ross Douthat on his battle with Lyme disease. (Douthat’s book, actually looks kind of interesting, though.)

I guess that’s it for “This Week in Curmudgeon” onto…

Links

My column this week is about books that will actually scare you. I created a dedicated Bookshop.org bookshop with all the books still in print, but it looks like lots of them are on backorder. Dang supply chain!

Also at the Tribune, Christopher Borrelli shares some of his recent favorite ghost stories. I threw these in the Bookshop.org bookshop too.

The Electric Company, which helped a generation of kids learn to read, turned 50.

You may recall that I named Lori Rader-Day’s Death at Greenway one of my books not to be overlooked this fall. She was interviewed at the Chicago Review of Books.

If you heard something on the news about a mom in Virginia who tried to get Toni Morrison’s Beloved removed from her son’s school curriculum because it gave the kid nightmares, you can read Heidi Stevens, who fills in what this is really all about.

November is like, really soon. The New York Times tells us about 16 books that are coming then.

If you want to attend the virtual awards ceremony for the National Book Awards on November 17th, you can sign up here.

Recommendations

All books linked on this page, are part of The Biblioracle Recommends bookshop at Bookshop.org. Affiliate income for purchases through the bookshop goes to Open Books in Chicago.

Another pretty decent increase to $196.35 for the year. Every little bit counts. I still feel like we can hit $300 before the end of the year. Here’s a challenge. For every dollar of affiliate income up to $300, I’ll match it at the end of the year with a donation of my own. Make me give away my money!

If you’d like to see every book I’ve recommended in this space this year, check out my list of 2021 Recommendations at the Bookshop.org bookshop.

Recommendations are always open for. Wait times should be minimal and some will even be featured in the print edition of the Chicago Tribune.

1. Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet by Jamie Ford
2. The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America’s Shining Girls by Kate Moore
3. The Overstory by Richard Powers
4. The Madness of Crowds by Louise Penny
5. The Paris Library by Janet Skeslien Charles

Maureen H. - Bloomingdale, IL

Looks like Maureen likes some history in her narrative. The book that leaps to mind is Jessica Francis Kane’s The Report, an exploration of a lesser known tragedy in London during World War II.

Vowing to be less cranky next week,

JW
The Biblioracle