To Apprehend What Is There and What Isn’t: John Domini's A Tomb on the Periphery
Aaron Plasek
But an arrow is only an arrow; it is never an end in itself. It is everything save what it aims for, save what it strikes, even, indeed, save what it wounds; this is what makes the arrow miss even that what it touches, which thereby remains safe...
— Jacques Derrida, On a Name
If, when a reviewer whose taste I trust condemns a book, I feel a certain relief, this is only because so many books are published that it is a relief to think—“Well, here, at least, is one I do not have to bother about.” But had he kept silent, the effect would have been the same.
— W. H. Auden, Dyer's Hand
While reviews of John Domini's A Tomb on the Periphery have been uniformly positive, such reviews seem to have no interest in elucidating what experiences the novel offers readers. Reviewers of Tomb, perhaps out of fear the book will not get the readers they believe it deserves, have tried instead to discuss the novel in terms of experiences they believe their audiences have already had and wish to have again. Discussing the novel this way makes the book into an experience-producing machine: in exchange for reading a reader gets a particular experience, a transaction as simple as putting a coin into a gumball machine and getting a gumball. This tactic may initially garner readers for Tomb, but falsely constrains the experiences the book offers readers by placing specious limits on the kinds of reading-activities one can do with the book. Worse, trying to itemize the experiences Tomb offers as if the novel were a buffet from which we can pick and choose experiences actually distorts the book, casting deviations from the reader's expectations as flaws of the novel.
It's a problem of ontology, like you trying to sell me a puppy by describing a fire hydrant. I, in turn, having heard your description of a fire hydrant, then encounter the puppy and look for all the similarities a puppy and a fire hydrant have in common: they're about the same height, they both produce liquids, and so on. I then buy the puppy. Of course, there are some problems with thinking a puppy is a fire hydrant. First, I miss out on the experiences I could have had (e.g. going for walks). Second, there are certain things I assume a fire hydrant does well that a puppy doesn't. I can't very effectively put out a building fire with a puppy. I may write you an angry letter complaining that you sold me a bad puppy when what was really faulty were my own expectations: I fault the puppy for not being a fire hydrant, something the puppy had no interest in trying to be.
My purpose in this essay is threefold: (1) to consider the circumstances that allow a critic to write a review that fails to identify the thing it purports to describe, (2) to identify how existing reviews misrepresent the specific experience Domini's A Tomb on the Periphery offers its readers, and (3) to write a review of Tomb that avoids the pitfalls I have described. (1)
1.
Imagine a thug holds a gun to your head saying, “Identify criteria to rank book reviews from good to bad. Satisfy me or I shoot.” So pressed, your answer is likely to be informed by the reasons you infer the miscreant reads reviews. The specific criteria for reviews of a computer science textbook, a contemporary novel, and a revised folio of Shakespeare's plays are not identical. Disparate audiences have different concerns. You must guess enough about the gunman's interests to provide an answer worth more to him than a bullet.
The aforementioned reminds us that book reviews don't just “tell you what is there”—to borrow Fairfield Porter's assertion—but also tacitly tell you the kinds of experiences you value. It is frequently assumed that telling you what is there is a review's purpose, while telling you what experiences you value is ancillary, likely done implicitly in the book's explication or in the choice of book considered.Yet many reviews routinely deny this, arguing that a book offers similar experiences to those a potential reader presumably values to the point of misrepresenting the very thing the review purports to elucidate. If I wrote a review of Moby Dick saying, “This book follows the exploits of Captain Ahab as he commands the starship Pequod in search of the interstellar space bandit Moby Dick,” anticipating that my review-readers liked stories with spaceships, it would be obvious to both myself and my readers that I had privileged my audience's tastes at the expense of describing the book. Yet reviews aiming to convince an audience to read a particular book (or buy a particular brand of diapers, cars, beer, etc .) need not ever mention specifics that can be tested. Such reviews need only unleash a fusillade of words, idioms, and phrases that a reader has associated with a particular pleasurable reading experience. For convenience, let's identify book reviews concerned with garnering readers for a book above all other concerns as the bookseller's review.
To better examine what a bookseller's review is, how it is effective at getting readers for a book, and the consequences for the writers and readers of this kind of review, let's consider an extreme form of the bookseller's review: the book blurb. The blurbs located on book covers are perhaps most ruthlessly intent on trying to get people to read the book discussed, and so it is here we see prominent examples of how words may be used to suggest a “recognizable” yet ambiguous reading-experience. Consider the book blurb from the back cover of John Domini's A Tomb on the Periphery, published in 2008 by Gival Press:
Few novels can stand up to the promise of tour de force, but here, John Domini is at the top of his form, writing beautifully, humming along like Fabbrizio on his Suzuki. This is a delightful crime novel, with a setting to die for, and at the same time a moving story that should interest a wide range of readers.
The ubiquitous term tour de force is used, but this proclamation doesn't help me to see what the book is or how it works. Tour de force is, I think, being used to mean an exceptional creative achievement, but what exactly has been achieved that is exceptional? The phrases “delightful crime novel,” “setting to die for,” and “moving story” do not answer this, nor are they intended to. The advertising language a book blurb uses functions similarly to the billboard-framed scantly-clothed woman provocatively reclining beside a six-pack of beer. If either blurb or beer ad are successful at getting me to do what is desired, it's not because of what is explained (if indeed any explanation is present), but because of an implied future good, assumed to be a good I value, which I think the item will help me attain. The woman in the beer ad doesn't tell me anything about the beer advertised, but does, through my response, say something about me and what I value. Likewise, the phrase tour de force doesn't tell me anything about the book, but my reaction to the phrase certainly suggests some specific things about me: I don't stop reading when encountering the intermittent Latin, French, or Greek phrase, and have bumped into this particular phrase enough to feel I should know what it means if I don't already.(2) The phrases “setting to die for” and “moving story,” like tour de force, do more to identify the assumed book-review reader's tastes than to indicate anything about the book itself.
The only seemingly descriptive bit of info given by the blurb is the phrase “crime novel,” but, as we shall see, this is as likely to mislead the reader about the kind of experience a book offers as it is to inform. Genre classifications are ill-suited for describing specific books because genres in literature, to borrow the phrasing from Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations, “have no one thing in common which makes us use the same word for all.”(3) I might say crime fiction involves criminals and their motivations as well as having, at some point or another, crime. I might say crime fiction encompasses a range of formal techniques/effects(4): ways of presenting an enigma for the reader to solve; the explication of how a crime has been committed that rivals the detail of biblical genealogies; perhaps sexual intrigue, too, and so forth. And yet none of these aforementioned attributes strike me as being particularly essential to the term. I can imagine another person might give a very different list of attributes, and yet I would still agree that the new list seemed to work as well as mine.
The term crime fiction, like all genres, is not defined by any one particular set of characteristics of content or form,(5) but a set of disparate things and ideas and meaning-making activities of which no particular element is essential. The set of meanings crime fiction can connote is infinite.(6) There are many attributes crime fiction can have, but to compile a comprehensive list of all attributes seems impossible and beside the point. Some of the meanings pointed to by the term crime fiction may contradict other meanings ascribed to crime fiction such that one can imagine two books called crime fictions that have no identical attributes whatsoever.
Any term that can be used interchangeably to describe two books that have nothing in common seems useless to me, assuming our stated goal in a book review is to tell the reader what is there. The back cover blurb telling us Domini's book is a “delightful crime novel” actually tells us worse than nothing. At least if we're told nothing, we know we don't know. Using genre descriptors as a means of talking about a book we haven't read tells us almost nothing too, but gives us the false impression or feeling that we know something about the book. With the term crime fiction one is as likely to find Charles Dickens' David Copperfield as Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep; as likely to find Shakespeare's Macbeth as Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment. The use of terms that seem to provide information is a distinguishing characteristic of the bookseller review. We now need to understand why this characteristic makes bookseller reviews so aptly named.
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In her essay “Against Interpretation,” Susan Sontag argues that a discussion of art which treats the content of art work as the art itself inevitably leads to a kind of interpreting that Sontag says, “is virtually one of translation. The interpreter says, 'Look, don’t you see that X is really—or, really means—A? That Y is really B? That Z is really C?'” She suggests this process of translation originates from a historical motive to alter or expurgate meaning in problematic texts such as, for example, the lascivious Song of Songs into agreement with Christian spiritual beliefs, without actually altering the words of the text itself. This way of interpreting, Sontag writes, is used when “a text has become unacceptable; yet it cannot be discarded....Interpretation is a radical strategy for conserving an old text.” Acts of interpretation of content, Sontag points out, deny art by making it manageable, tame, and receptacles of values we already have.
Bookseller's reviews are necessarily faced with an analogous task of “translating” the book they discuss into something a reader desires, though it seems more accurate to say this interpretative act is not
but is instead
