Abstract
Search online for the words ‘real estate valuation’ and a vast list of methods, guidelines, and certified professionals entitled to make such assessments will appear. One will probably be less successful in finding the exact procedure by which the worth of aesthetic goods, and of fiction books particularly, is evaluated. Even more difficult would be to differentiate who the legitimate evaluators of books are, in a media landscape where any reader can simultaneously act as reviewer. Where does that leave professional book reviewers?
In case the uncertainty characterizing book reviewers’ work is not clear from the title, Inside the Critics’ Circle: Book Reviewing in Uncertain Times as a whole is permeated by an underlying argument: there is more to fiction reviewers’ practices than being market intermediaries, and there is more than a linear and clear process in evaluating books’ worth. Instead, the book characterizes journalistic reviewers as highly conscious of the rapidly changing market in which they operate, which has few objective indicators on how cultural products should be evaluated, and where their legitimacy as reviewers is constantly being renegotiated. Chong’s expertise in the construction of worth, enables her to maintain an open conversation with book reviewers as interviewees. By describing ‘how fiction reviewers do the work of evaluating worth’ (p. 1) from their own perspectives, Chong highlights their agentic role, providing a rich portrait of reviewers as cultural producers and on their work as shaped by reasoned considerations, with the motivations but also the insecurities that entails.
Chapter 1 sets the stage by describing the changing context in which journalistic book reviewers currently operate, in short, a context marked by the decline of traditional newspapers and the increasing appearance of amateur reviewers in online media, which has been pointed out as challenging cultural mediators’ authority (Janssen and Verboord, 2015). The remaining chapters are structured along a typology of contextual uncertainties that reviewers experience as shaping their practices. The first part, comprising Chapters 2 and 3, deals with epistemological uncertainty and reveals that reviewing practitioners are challenged by the impossibility of describing cultural products’ aesthetic quality in objective straightforward terms from the initial moment of choosing which books are worth reviewing and by whom. Furthermore, Chong thoroughly describes the varied criteria, procedures and reading strategies that editors and reviewers creatively draw upon when dealing with the subjectivity of their work.
Chapters 4 and 5 constitute Part Two which focuses on social uncertainty, describing the impact on reviewers’ practices of the unpredictability of others’ reactions to their work and of the consequences of those reactions. Chong identifies that not only the expected reactions from the general readership and editors are consciously considered but also, acknowledging that most reviewers are simultaneously working novelists, the broader publishing community’s response and its potential consequences on their own role as writer-reviewers. The publishing community’s response is particularly characterized as keeping reviewers in tension when considering writing negative reviews.
Part Three, comprising Chapters 6 and 7, provides an analysis of institutional uncertainty, describing the unfixed and unclear nature of the cultural guidelines, rules, and procedures that reviewers, often as freelancers, draw upon in their practice. While no formal structure organizes their practices in a predetermined manner, Chong’s analysis shows how journalistic reviewers differentiate themselves from amateur and academic reviewers, define their role and motivations and what a good book review is, and the significant value of their work. By providing a summary of reviewers’ strategic responses to the different uncertainties they face, the last chapter not only emphasizes the agentic and highly conscious character of their work but also calls attention to the implications of this uncertain context for them as professionals and individuals, for the literary field, and for the world of cultural worth evaluation more broadly.
The book contributes to broader discussions on media producers’ subjectivity and challenges both sociocentric and mediacentric perspectives (Peterson, 2003) by showing how journalistic reviewers deal with their personal identities, inclinations, interests and contextual uncertainties in their work. Methodologically, its phenomenological approach underscores the importance of analysing the factors, motivations, values, and social settings influencing practitioners’ work when studying (cultural) journalistic discourse (Richardson, 2008). Although the book offers a convincing image of reviewers as reflective cultural producers, the picture remains incomplete since the analyses of the process as experienced by practitioners is not supplemented with the much-needed study of the output itself. The book could have benefited from anchoring the abstract conversations with reviewers about the rationale behind their practices with concrete examples of those practices’ outcomes, thus, with the content of their reviews. Due to both the valuable insights it offers into the behind-the-scenes of the evaluation of cultural products’ worth and the thorough reflections the author draws from them, the book deserves the attention of cultural sociology scholars, students, and anyone interested in the processes of cultural worth evaluation.