Why I like to read book reviews

Sometimes it seems I like to read book reviews more than I like to read books.  While this isn’t in the end true, there is a pinprick of truth to it.  It comes back to an essential character of my nature, which I am becoming more aware of as I muddle my way through this ad hoc life I continue to try to cobble together: that I find myself operating much more successfully when I have a framework within which to operate and also against which to rebel.  Two quick thoughts on that: a) This is probably not unique, and may not even be unusual, even for an artist; and b) it may seem counterintuitive to people who are familiar with the way I have chosen to lead my life, which consists of a large degree of freedom (freedoms from and freedoms to) compared to many or most people’s lives.  While this is interesting, and I may pursue it at a future point, I will leave it at that statement and continue on with my earlier thought, which was, that book reviews can occasionally make explicit what in a book is implicit—that certain books (and here I’m going to stick with fiction, as it’s what I do and what I am most familiar with), perhaps most obviously with a certain kind of ambitious novel, but I imagine with most successful novels (the definition of successful to be left unexplained), operate with certain underlying assumptions that function, in this way, as a framework.  So a quote from Sam Tanenhaus, a few sentences from the end of his long review of Jonathon Franzen’s Freedom:

In these pages, Walter, “a fanatic gray stubble on his cheeks,” seizes hold of the novel, and Franzen makes us see, as the best writers always have, that the only pathway to freedom runs through the maze of the interior life.  

I am going to take liberties with the quote and use it to make my larger point.  In the quote, Tanenhaus writes the Franzen is discussing freedom—nothing else—but I believe that an implicit assumption behind many novels, and most traditional versions of the form, is that the interior life is the primary form of life, or—here it seems similar to the philosophical argument between existence and essence—that consciousness is superior to action (these are the two poles in my construction) in myriad ways: that one should be judged (character and person) based on one’s consciousness more than one’s actions; that one can only be understood (character and person) by understanding the consciousness rather than the actions of an individual.  And ultimately, I’m just not convinced of this.

It only makes sense that the novel as a form would promote this, as it is what it can do better than many competing forms (a brief aside—one might wonder for a moment if the superseding of the novel by the memoir as [this gets tricky] the “literary form of our time” [I’m not quoting anyone, just trying to capture a feeling/thought that I’ve seen expressed many times, enough times that, whether one disagrees with it or not, it seems uncontroversial to express it as a kind of larger contemporary common sense] is a result of a change in cultural need—we don’t need what the novel provides (which I stated was an explanation/exploration of consciousness) anymore, so a new form takes it’s place (which, without being any kind of a historian of a novel, is part of my understanding about how the novel came about in the first place—it satisfied cultural needs that arose with the ascension of the middle class/moneyed rather than landed class)—but rather, that it’s an amplification of this need [we need more consciousness, deeper deeper deeper, and true (as in factual--which befuddles me)} or an elimination of the need for what had traditionally come along with that explanation/exploration of consciousness in a novel—plot? multiple fully-developed characters?).  The problem is, do I believe it?  And, if I decide that I don’t believe it, is it possible to work within a framework in which I don’t believe to do the things I want to do without bending the form past the breaking point?

And that, to me, is an interesting question, because although I’m working on stories at the moment, I believe a novel is what comes next, or better to say I have believed a novel is what comes next.  But if I know myself at all, I know that working without knowing my own purposes will lead to at best difficulty and at worst untruth.

All of this calls back to a post from an old abortion of a blog I tried to start (also when I put myself in a situation where I didn’t know anyone, interestingly), which I may repost here for anyone (no one) who cares for a slightly better description of the action/consciousness polarity.

So that’s why I like book reviews, because one sentence summing up a novel can set me off to thinking about my own work in a larger sense.  Where novels do this by example I can either reject or agree with, book reviews state it outright.