The new issue of The New Quarterly arrived yesterday and among its many pleasures — new work from Heather Birrell, Zsuzi Gartner, Caroline Adderson and James Pollock — was what may be one of the best essays on reviewing I’ve read in recent memory. Eric Ormsby’s ‘Fine Incisions: Reflections on Reviewing’ gets to the heart of the matter, the role and necessity and art of the critic, as well as the differences one might find in critical approach and appreciation (and expectation) in Canada, the UK and US. Ormsby’s essay is well worth the newsstand price, and is a piece I wish we’d had for CNQ. Once again, the TNQ crew has me jealous.
If I say I was surprised to ‘find myself’ writing more literary essays, more reviews, it’s only in part because of the somewhat shady status of the professional reviewer. Like most writers, I’ve always had a healthy scepticism, in not a downright scorn, of criticism. But the more I engaged in its practice, the more intrigued I became with its possibilities and limitations. It offered “the fascination of what’s difficult,” in Yeat’s phrase. To do justice to a book, to convey something of its substance, if not its essence, in a few hundred words is not entirely unlike the effort required to write a sonnet: Both demand compression, both depend on logical progression, and both — if one is successful — produce a kind of music. More intriguingly, however, the review or essay, unlike the sonnet, has to submerge its effects; it shouldn’t call undue attention to itself; it has to be swallowed up in its subject — the book at hand.
… if criticism is an art, much of its artfulness lies in catching the attention of distracted readers; it takes something more, however, to keep their attention. The critic must stimulate curiosity but he or she must also appeal to our innate sense of justice. Like it or not, the critic is a judge, and sometimes, unavoidably, a hanging judge; that is the etymology of the word (from Greek krites, ” judge”). We may flinch from the “judgmental” but at the same time, I think, we’re strangely elated, as well as reassured, when we see justice done, even in so small a matter as a review; it sets the world momentarily aright.
There’s so much more to this fine, fine essay. And this fine issue. Please: go pick up a copy for yourself.
Tags: book reviewing, book reviews, Eric Ormsby, literary criticism, The New Quarterly