Abstract
Phillipa Chong’s Inside the Critics’ Circle: Book Reviewing in Uncertain Times details the process of book reviewing from start to finish through interviews with reviewers of fiction books at major newspapers in the United States. The book contributes to the sociological understanding of reviewers’ responses to uncertainties when making evaluations, from editors assigning books to reviewers and reviewers reading books and reflecting about the consequences of writing a “bad” or “good” review to the procedures of book reviewing and the status of being a reviewer today and in the future.
The book is placed within both an academic context and a wider audience of readers, an in-between situation common to many commercially published books. A hurdle to overcome for such books is the fact that readers in academia may be left wanting more: more about data and methods, theory development, empirical and conceptual integration, and related research.
Considering these circumstances, the book holds much promise when outlining a classificatory scheme that is useful for studying evaluation processes, not only in book reviewing but also in other fields of cultural production and beyond. The scheme contains three categories of uncertainty. The first category is epistemological uncertainty, which relates the difficulty of reviewing the quality or worth of a non-standardized cultural good such as a fiction book. The content of books comes in many different forms, and the quality cannot be decided until the good is experienced, in this case, when a book is read. Second, social uncertainty is about reviewers not being able to determine how people affected by the review will perceive it. Third, institutional uncertainty covers the trade of reviewing—the procedures, norms, and structures that are of importance in forming what it means to be a reviewer and what a review looks like. The first form of uncertainty refers to making review decisions about books when a flood of books constantly is being published; the second refers to the consequences of reviewing in a situation where relatively few books are being reviewed; and the third refers to the general status of book reviewing and being a reviewer.
Inside the Critics’ Circle is structured following the three forms of uncertainty. The first part, about epistemological uncertainty, describes both how the review editor matches books with reviewers and how reviewers determine the worth of a book. Books being reviewed are the “big books” that necessitate review because they are publishing events; an example would be the publication of a new novel by Stephen King or Margaret Atwood. A book may also be considered for review because it is topical and may shape future reflections and discussions about the state of society. Nevertheless, in the end, there need to be reviewers who can take on the project of reviewing these books, and the editor needs to identify and contact these potential reviewers. Heuristics are used to match a book with an appropriate reviewer, such as the previous book publications (or reviews) of the reviewer overlapping with the book to be reviewed or personal characteristics of the reviewer matching with the book—for example, a book about misfits to a reviewer who is perceived as a misfit. Speaking through the words of Pierre Bourdieu, the book and reviewer are in a homologous position in the literary field that warrants a matching of the taste of the reviewer to the content of the book.
When a book is reviewed, reviewers make two sorts of readings: an initial experiential reading based on gut feelings and then a critical (re-)reading. In the critical reading, an assessment of the book is made by the reviewer using evaluative criteria and thereby discerning the meaning of the initial gut-feeling response. This is a dual-model process often found in evaluative practices, moving from an automatic or implicit response to a controlled and explicit reflection. For example, this reading process is similar to the work of editors at publishing houses, which I have studied, who receive and evaluate unsolicited manuscripts and, depending on the genre, take different reading stances that involve this two-step process (Fürst 2018).
A result of publishing a review is the creation of the meaning and worth of a book. When reviews are aggregated a picture is formed as the critical consensus of the book, which is “a detectable minimal level of agreement about a book’s worth or quality” (p. 54, italics in original). The review affects the book’s identity and the conception of how the book was perceived at the time of its publication.
The second part of Inside the Critics’ Circle is about social uncertainty. Writing and publishing a review not only have consequences for the book and author but also for the reviewer. Chong makes an important sociological contribution by introducing the idea of a switch-role reward structure in reviewing. The concept of the switch-role (market) has been developed by Patrik Aspers (2011) and used in the context of the sociology of markets, where buyers may switch to being sellers (and back again), such as at the stock exchange. Here, in the switch-role reward structure of reviewing, persons switch between being a reviewer and an author. Depending on the positions and resources of the reviewer and the author, the reviewer may be subject to retaliation or reward from publishing a review. Due to acting within a switch-role structure, the author of a book may, in fact, in the future review books of the reviewer. Nevertheless, it is unclear how often this situation of reviewers reviewing each other’s books appears or could appear, suggesting that reviewing also is a fixed-role reward structure. However, reviewers may perceive a potential risk or possibility of retaliation or reward in the future while reviewing or considering reviewing a book. For a reviewer, Chong argues, playing it nice would be a strategic way among reviewers to get a “good” review of their own books in the future. To not write “negative” reviews can come from experiencing the damage of a negative review from their own experience as an author or meeting authors who have received a negative review. Giving a “bad” review is perceived at times as part of the job, as it is perceived as giving an honest assessment of the book to readers.
To right the perceived wrongs in the literary world, where a few authors unfairly get a disproportionately large amount of attention (i.e., many reviews), it is more acceptable and justifiable to write negative reviews of superstar authors than to write negatively about newly arrived authors’ books. In consequence, this attitude unintentionally reproduces the status structure, as the most attention-grabbing reviews are those for superstar authors, while new arrivals may receive more descriptive and polite reviews.
The last part of this work discusses institutional uncertainty, the indeterminacy about how to carry out the task of reviewing and what it means to be a reviewer. A mantra heard throughout the years is that fiction book reviewing is in a state of crisis. Far fewer reviewers than before have permanent contracts at the major reviewing outlets, fewer reviews are published, and reviews become more similar to entertainment than qualified assessments of books.
The indeterminacy of who counts as a reviewer shapes the trade, as people involved in reviewing don’t necessarily identify themselves as reviewers. Being a reviewer is not a profession; there are no formal boundaries (such as certain academic credentials) to become a reviewer. The meaning of reviewing may change due to reviewing becoming a freelance activity and the rise of amateur reviewing online. In the latter case, the issue of evaporating boundaries between amateur reviewing online and professional reviewing for newspapers can be seen as democratization. Nevertheless, even though the professional reviewing of books for newspapers seems to be moving toward entertainment, the primary status of these reviews seems to hold sway, according to Chong.
While Chong’s theoretical scheme, with its three forms of uncertainty, is a promising contribution to the sociology of valuation and the sociology of culture, how the scheme relates to the empirical material remains elusive. One point that should have been further illustrated is how the three forms of uncertainty have been identified. The categories are not directly connected to the interview transcripts and seem to be detached from some important scholarly work about uncertainty. The book follows the perspective of the reviewer, and the experience of anxiety and being in an uncertainty-ridden situation suggests an experiential foundation of the concept of uncertainty. Nevertheless, it would perhaps be more reasonable to take into consideration the fact that all of the forms of uncertainty are presumably conditions for cultural production that are not always salient or acknowledged, but that structure the actions and experiences of reviewers. In clarifying the empirical and theoretical foundation of uncertainty further, the reader would learn even more about the extent to which reviewers are directly or indirectly formed by the uncertainties of the trade.
Further clarification of the relation of the central concepts to the empirical material would also make it clearer how the concepts relate to each chapter of the book. For example, in the first part of the book about epistemological uncertainty, the editor’s work in matching reviewers and books is presented. This market-like situation does not directly correspond to the difficulty in reviewing the quality or worth of a book, that is, epistemological uncertainty. In selecting books to review and matching books to reviewers we even learn that the “quality” of books is far from the most important criterion for evaluation in the matching process. Rather, it is a situation about the uncertainty in finding a qualified reader of the work. How does the epistemological uncertainty then come about in this matchmaking situation? Here, clarification about conceptual and empirical foundations would have been useful for developing the theoretical scheme.
Also, while the categories are part of a scheme, further theoretical integration would have been beneficial to the pervasiveness of the scheme. The author is aware of the lack of theoretical integration and suggests further theoretical work to strengthen the scheme. A point to be developed is the place of quality uncertainty in the scheme. Quality uncertainty is suggested as an overriding uncertainty for cultural production, but it is unclear to what extent the three forms of uncertainty relate to this condition for cultural production. Oftentimes the uncertainties are about the uncertainty in the practice of making aesthetic judgments and not so much about the uncertainty in the reviewing practice coming from a condition of quality uncertainty about the object being evaluated.
Even though further theoretical development is needed, the suggested framework is promising for comparative work. Comparing the findings to other fields of cultural production, as done by Chong, such as the work of restaurant reviewers, it becomes clear that book reviewing is a special case. In the field of literature, it is more common to find a switch-role reward structure, while restaurant chefs usually are not reviewers. A more comprehensive comparison of different cases using the scheme would be a way forward for further developing the scheme and understanding evaluative practices in cultural production.
Another step forward for developing the framework is to engage more in the related literature and take into consideration adjacent concepts in the sociology of culture. For example, there are overlaps between the concepts introduced and aesthetic uncertainty due to infinite variety of goods (epistemological uncertainty), status indeterminacy of producers due to a weak professionalization (institutional and social uncertainty), and the “nobody knows” principle/demand uncertainty covering the beforehand unknown consequences of a publication (social uncertainty) (see, e.g., Anheier and Gerhards 1991; Caves 2000).
Reading a book about reviewing to write a review of the book certainly draws attention to the practice of reviewing books in academia. What can we learn about reviewing in academia from Inside the Critics’ Circle? In academia there is a similar switch-role reward structure as in journalistic reviewing, since academics move between being authors of books and reviewers of books. The role of being an author is probably more important than being a reviewer. Are reviewers in academia also “playing nice,” writing polite reviews for new arrivals? Reviewers would presumably take into consideration that a review is a stake, where rewards and punishment for a “bad” or “good” review may be the return of publishing the review. What is the risk/possibility awareness among reviewers in sociology? Do reviewers avoid certain controversial topics or authors? Following the logic of “punching up, never down”: do reviewers only take down the big names in sociology, as it comes with little to no consequence to the reviewer? These are some of the questions that are raised by reading the book, which warrants further reflection and possibly empirical research on book reviewing in academia.
The book offers a compelling view of reviewing practices among an important intermediary of literary taste, making a significant contribution to our understanding of evaluation in cultural production. A major lesson the reader takes from the book is that to study and understand cultural production and consumption, uncertainty and its different forms need to be taken very seriously.