First we heard from authors (May/June 2003), then assigning editors (July/August 2003) on book reviewing, and in this issue we hear from the reviewers themselves. Our final installment of On Reviews presents the perspective of those who dedicate their time to reading, thinking, and writing about books.

When Michael Dirda was in seventh grade, someone told him that Crime and Punishment was a mystery. He liked mysteries, had read the Hardy Boys, among others, so he went to the library in search of Dostoyevsky’s tome. He checked it out and read it—in three days. “I couldn’t put it down,” says the Pulitzer Prize–winning critic. “I just thought it was the best book I’d ever read in my whole life. I still think it’s one of the best books I’ve ever read.”

From that day on, Dirda says, he never read another kids’ book. Instead, while his friends were stealing ballpoint pens from the local five-and-dime, he spent his time perusing the paperback racks, discovering books like Immortal Poems of the English Language, and memorizing verse on the way to school. This was a boy from the Ohio steel town of Lorain (the same city where Toni Morrison was raised), a boy whose father, a high school dropout, would, on occasion, kick his son’s book from his hands. Dirda took reading seriously then, and he does now. In fact, this October Norton will publish his memoir, An Open Book, “a portrait of a reader as a young man,” as he puts it.

It stands to reason that book reviewers enjoy reading. After all, as was noted in the first two installments of this series, they must choose (often with the help of assigning editors), from the immense heap of books that accumulates each year, the titles to read and write about—in fewer and fewer words, under deadline, and for not much pay.

It wouldn’t be a stretch to call book reviewing a labor of love, except for the fact that it is so often a vilified profession. Reviewers are accused of having agendas and of cronyism, are called show-offs and career-killers. It’s a lot of heat to take for some free books, a few bucks, and a byline.

So what’s the draw?

“I think a lot of people have this itch to be in something that might be called the cultural conversation. [Reviewing] is one of the most direct paths in,” says Sven Birkerts, whose reviews have appeared in the New York Times Book Review, Esquire, and the Boston Globe, among other publications. “You really are interacting with authors and readers. You’re playing the culture sport, and there’s a lot of satisfaction in doing that.”

For Laura Miller, Salon senior writer and biweekly columnist for the New York Times Book Review, the appeal of writing reviews is the appeal of writing in general—“getting a chance to work out what you think and to put your point of view out there as part of the big conversation. And it’s great to be able to read all these books that I might not have the time to read otherwise if it weren’t my profession.”

Of course, not all books provide a singular reading experience, but there’s the thrill of finding those that do. “When you come across that sense of amazing discovery you think, ‘Boy, all those mediocre books—it was worth slogging through them to get to this,’” says Jonathan Yardley, Dirda’s colleague at the Washington Post Book World and also a Pulitzer Prize winner in criticism.

Dirda says that the happiest hours of his life are those six hours in the evenings when he writes his weekly piece for Book World. The act of writing and the idea that his work serves “to keep reading going, to keep the excitement of books alive for another generation or two,” compels him.

“Reading of any kind is a leisure activity,” says Miller, “and if we make people feel like they’ve wasted their time, they’re bored, they could have been watching Sex and the City, then all we do is discourage them from reading again the next time they have a choice. Our job is to be interesting and to make people feel like they’ve added something to their lives by reading what you’ve provided, even if all they’ve done is laugh.”

But not everyone is laughing. Book reviewers and the state of book reviewing itself are often under assault, especially by authors. In the inaugural (March 2003) issue of the Believer, a monthly literary magazine, novelist and coeditor Heidi Julavits wrote in her introductory essay, “I fear that book reviews are just an opportunity for a critic to strive for humor, and to appear funny and smart and a little bit bitchy, without attempting to espouse any higher ideals—or even to try to understand, on a very localized level, what a certain book is trying to do, even if it does it badly. This is wit for wit’s sake—or, hostility for hostility’s sake.… I call it Snark, and it has crept with alarming speed into the reviewing community, infiltrating the pages of many publications.”

Undoubtedly, “snarky” reviews receive a lot of attention. Take, for example, Dale Peck’s review of Rick Moody’s book The Black Veil: It has continued to be discussed and written about since it appeared in the New Republic last year. So, is getting attention the point? “There is a certain snarkiness that has arrived, a certain wise-ass quality, and a certain tilt in some quarters toward sensationalism,” says Birkerts, who has written for the Believer. “It’s a temptation that’s very palpable. You write a review and you know that the sassier you get, the more attention your review is likely to garner, and everyone is doing it more for the attention than the money. Most people try to resist that, but human nature is fallible.”

While Birkerts understands how it happens, he doesn’t condone it. He saw Peck’s review as sending poison into the system. “I went on record deploring it, really. To me it seemed all too transparent. It wore its hatchet on its sleeve, to mix a metaphor.”

Hatchet is an apt word for Birkerts to choose, considering that Peck’s collection of reviews, forthcoming from the New Press next year, is titled Hatchet Jobs. Peck says he was completely shocked by the reaction to the Moody review, as he had been writing reviews of the same nature—one calling for the end of gay literature, another slamming David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, another lambasting the vogue of black women’s fiction—for about eight years. “All of those book reviews kerplunked into the silence out there,” he says. “To suddenly have this be a cause célèbre and to have people line up on one side or the other was really surprising to me.”

It’s likely, though, that the review was singled out for its opener, which accused Moody of being the worst writer of his generation. However, according to Peck, “As the next paragraph makes clear, that was nothing but hyperbole—a piece of hyperbole any number of publications seem to take great delight in quoting out of context.” Peck admits that he was being snarky—or to use his term, “bitchy”—but he says he doesn’t regret writing the review.

“There’s one thing that I care about more than anything else, and that’s literature—particularly the way that literature affects people. When I write these book reviews and I seem to get all hopping mad and angry, it’s because I am all hopping mad and angry. I tend to get more angry with people that I really think are just dicking around with their talent,” says Peck. “When I called Moody the worst writer of his generation, basically what I meant is that he has deviated farther from his natural and, I think, very considerable talents than any other writer.”

Peck agrees with Julavits that snarkiness has its limitations, and he doesn’t want to be pigeonholed as a negative reviewer. In fact, he has vowed that from now on he will dedicate himself to championing books by writers whose work he values. But, he says, “My biggest problem with the Julavits piece was that nowhere in it does she allow for the fact that people are saying what they actually mean, nor does she allow for the fact that people might actually be right.”

Honesty is something that Peck finds lacking in most reviews these days. He points to the prevalent trend of writers’ reviewing other writers’ work as the reason—reviewers who are writers fear that a negative review will provoke retribution, he believes. It’s difficult to say if Peck’s reviews have had any effect on his own writing career. “I have had really frank meetings with my agent in talking about how, for example, I will never publish a book with Little, Brown after my reviews of David Foster Wallace and Rick Moody [the authors’ publisher]. I can just write that off.” And he’s been told to expect paybacks in November, when his memoir, What We Lost, will be published by Houghton Mifflin.

“The thing is that readers love snarky reviews,” says Miller, “because readers have this massive grudge against book reviewers, and to a certain degree authors, for disappointing them. When they read something nasty or snarky or cutting, whatever you want to call it, the reader probably thinks the reviewer was just being really honest. Often readers feel like here at last is a person who’s not in the logrolling club, who’s really telling it like it is.” Miller says that, in general, readers—whose opinions matter most to her—think reviews are too soft.

While she concedes that her taste in fiction differs from Peck’s, Miller still found his review “a little hysterical.” Some of Peck’s anger, she felt, was fueled more by a reaction to the publicity Moody’s book received than to the book itself. “While most reviewers need to put books in some kind of cultural context, some get overly preoccupied with publicity and feel like it’s much bigger than it really is.” Many reviewers, she offers as an example, overreact to the media attention paid to Dave Eggers, author of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and the publisher of McSweeney’s Books. “I meet people all the time who do not know who Dave Eggers is—really smart people who read the New York Times—so the idea that he is some kind of titan bestriding the literary continent is really ludicrous. But often those reviewers are people inside this literary world, with a completely distorted view of reality based on a really limited experience.”

Another criticism brought against book reviewers is almost the opposite of snark: using book reviewing as a forum for championing certain writers or schools. This charge has been leveled most frequently against those in the poetry world, where reputations measure success more than sales do. “The review culture around poetry is more hermetic than the poetry itself,” says reviewer Raymond McDaniel, a regular for Fence’s online book review Constant Critic. “There are plenty of online, well-regarded poetry communities that are just ridiculously insular. The more insular it becomes, the more vicious it gets, and the more oriented toward the promotion of certain schools. That’s not the kind of thing that you can hide from the general reader.”

Birkerts, who also reviews poetry from time to time, agrees: “I’m very much aware that most poetry reviews are written by practicing poets. I’ve been around long enough to know where those [poets] sit in terms of the various schools and camps. Usually there’s some ulterior boosterism at work.”

While McDaniel says that the Constant Critic was founded on the principle of avoiding such favoritism, connections with authors, editors, and publishers can become even more of a problem for reviewers to navigate in the poetry universe because of its relatively smaller size. “I would studiously avoid reviewing books of poetry by anyone with whom I was friends or, if the case arose, explicit enemies,” says McDaniel, “but the community is too small to avoid reviewing people you don’t know of.”

But how close a friendship is too close? What, indeed, should the relationship between reviewer and author be? Most agree that there shouldn’t be one at all. The National Book Critics Circle (NBCC), an organization founded in 1974 made up of approximately 700 active book reviewers, recently surveyed its members on such ethical concerns. When asked if editors should be allowed to assign a book to a friend, enemy, or relative of the author, the majority said no (76 percent). The majority also agreed that it’s unethical for critics to consult authors while writing reviews and unethical to show authors or publishers reviews before they’re published. Regarding the issue of allowing sneak previews of reviews, one member wrote, “How can the NBCC even be asking this question?” As with most things, though, there’s the ideal on one end of the spectrum, failure on the other end, and reality somewhere in the middle.

“When you’re in the business you can’t avoid it,” says David Kirby, whose reviews have appeared most recently in the Boston Phoenix, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and the Chicago Tribune. “Especially since I’m a poet and an essayist, I know academics and poets, and just by being out I’ve met a million novelists, so I’m always reading and writing about books by people I know.” But, says Kirby, “I wouldn’t know these people unless they were good writers, so I’m going to review them, but I’m not going to praise them beyond their merits. I’ve given mixed reviews to friends.”

Birkerts says he reviews books by authors he knows, but not by friends. “I’ve been reviewing for getting on twenty years or something, and I’ve met too many writers in different contexts to have that be a prohibiting thing. I guess we draw on the have-you-gone-out-and-had-dinner-with-the-writer-and-had-a-long-conversation rule, not whether I’ve stood at a cocktail party and talked to that person.”

The “no-friends” distinction seems to be generally accepted among professional reviewers. “I don’t review books by my friends, and I don’t review books by my enemies,” says Yardley. “I tend not to review authors about whom my feelings have become so fixed that I really would have trouble a) writing an unpredictable piece and b) perhaps reaching a fair judgment.”

Gail Caldwell, another recipient of the Pulitzer Prize in criticism and chief book critic for the Boston Globe, agrees. “I have a couple of writers who are good friends of mine whom I actually met after I had reviewed them and immediately stopped reviewing them once we got to know each other. I even step aside when their books are being assigned for review, which is to say I remove myself one step further.” Caldwell, who has been working for the Globe for 17 years, says that the longer one works as a reviewer, the more difficult it becomes to not know writers.

Many authors try to correspond with reviewers—if even just to convey appreciation. Traditionally, reviewers avoid anything more than a courteous response. But the ease and volume of e-mail has made reviewers’ jobs even harder. “Before e-mail came into existence and that sort of communication was done by letter or even telephone,” says Yardley, “I found that these contacts with authors led to friendships, which of course meant that I couldn’t review the authors anymore. So I tend not to encourage people who thank me for my reviews, unless I don’t think I’m going to be reviewing them again.”

These are the words of a reviewer who is keeping his audience—the reader—in mind. And if there’s any consensus among professional critics, it’s that readers’ needs should determine the nature of book reviews.

For most large-circulation publications—newspapers and magazines with general audiences—reviews provide a service. “I think that the working book reviewer, quotidian book reviewer, has to understand that they are really serving a consumer-advice function to a significant degree,” says Yardley.

“I remember a jazz critic telling me about a reviewer who wrote a wonderfully esoteric review that was for the nine other people who understood what he was talking about,” says Caldwell. “He ran into somebody who used to hang out in the jazz clubs and she walked up and said, ‘I read your review this morning.’ She paused and said, ‘So, does it swing or does it suck?’ And I thought now there’s the fundamental question that you really should be trying to answer,” Caldwell says, laughing.

Aside from the swing-or-suck determination, book reviews, says Caldwell, should be written with “coherence, sanity, kindness, and some kind of critical and analytical acumen.” As noted by Miller, some readers perceive reviews as being too gentle, providing plot summary more than anything else. “I do think a review needs to be evaluative, and I think a lot of the reviewing I read hides from that,” says Birkerts.

While most reviewers agree their work should pass judgment on some level, how they arrive there varies. “My whole view of book reviewing tends not to be highly critical—it tends to be descriptive,” says Dirda. “What is there on the page? What do I see? Let me tell you what is there, let me quote you some examples of the prose, let me tell you how I respond and what I think of this.” Kirby agrees: “In most cases, I think it’s more important to be clear about what I’m holding in my hands than it is to say, ‘Hey, bud, you’re going to like or loathe this.’”

Reviews should present a fair and honest reading of a book as well as an accurate representation of it. “You have to judge a book on its own terms rather than your own,” says Yardley. Some admit that they’ve observed that this isn’t always the case. “I sometimes read reviews of what I have read or what I have written about,” says Caldwell, “and I’m a little bit startled by how lacking they can be. I sometimes think that there’s a pool of people who are firing stuff off, and they’re not reading carefully.”

Caldwell says that while there are some good critics doing terrific work, she wouldn’t say there are a lot. “I remember more and better daily and alternative criticism in the seventies and eighties. I remember reading people like Geoffrey Stokes at the Village Voice and James Wolcott—all those loudmouth, post–Mary McCarthy, New Journalism critics who took over raw criticism in the sixties and seventies. I feel like there was a heyday, and now it’s much more workaday.”

Birkerts sees the current state of reviewing as having lost its mainstream role. “What I’m saddened by is that there’s a great flourishing around the corners of the garden, but a lot of the large-circulation venues have so dropped back or discontinued it that it creates a vacuum in the large-circulation zones of life. It used to be when a big Philip Roth book came out, there would be two pages in Time, two in Newsweek, and on and on. You’d get a real sense that it had landed squarely in the middle of the culture. Now it’ll get a hundred reviews but a lot of them will be local, smaller, more specialized.”

This, says Birkerts, creates a “balkanized sense of a literary culture.” As a result, people look to the “enormous booster power of chain stores and the kind of recommendation machine that is really driven by money, buying space, display space. It also encourages the kind of Amazon straw poll reviewing—you read half of those, they’re just complete nonsense if you know the book, but there they are, widely disseminated as opinions on the book in question. There’s less of a sense of the big main touchstone response to the book.”

Dirda says that for a similar reason, he’s been trying for years to abolish the Post’s best-seller list. “People go into bookstores with the best-seller list in their hands and say, ‘Give me Danielle Steel, or James Patterson, or Stephen King,’ or whatever. Whereas if they didn’t have those lists, they’d have to ask their friends, ‘Well, have you read anything good?’ Or they’d have to talk to librarians or go into a bookstore, wander around the shelves, and pick up interesting-looking books, read a page or two, and say, ‘Hey, this is pretty good, I think I’ll give it a try.’”

Clearly, critics and authors share a deep desire to maintain a culture that values reading and writing. “In the best of all possible worlds,” says Caldwell, “we’re all on the same side—toward the greater good of the novel or the cultural dialogue, or whatever you want to call it.” And while, as many admit, they sometimes fall short, critics, like all writers, seem to take their vocation seriously.

“It’s a humane and a human endeavor, being a book reviewer, and love is what should activate your work,” says Dirda “Your love for literature, your love for the word on the page, love for wit and humor and style—those are things that count.”

Mary Gannon is deputy editor of Poets & Writers Magazine.