Writers and Reviewers

New Zealand Listener, Volume 9, Issue 228, 5 November 1943, Page 3

Writers and Reviewers

N a letter printed in another column on this page one of the authors selected for inclusion in the second volume of New Zealand New Writing complains of the manner in which the volume was reviewed. He says, first, that our reviewer "seemed to grudge conceding that the writing was promising," and second, that a review is useless to a young writer unless it tells him specifically what his writing lacks. The first statement is merely foolish. Our reviewer praised what he thought was good, and said that he would be glad to be proved wrong about the rest. A reviewer who is not grudging with flattery-in short with lies-is a salesman and not a reviewer; and a bad salesman, too. But reviewing is not salesmanship. It is a service to the reader of books, not to their writers or publishers. Its purpose is to pass on, in whatever space is available, an honest opinion about a book submitted to it for judgment; to pass this opinion to the public, not to authors or printers. It is not even criticism, though the nearer it approximates to criticism the better it is in general, if not always. It would obviously not be good reviewing to print in a popular journal what only highly educated people could understand. But in general the nearer a reviewer gets to critical standards the more helpful he is likely to be to those for whom he is writing; and in the case under discussion our reviewer was careful to point out that an opinion on this book must be based on the standards by which it was judged. It might have meant something to the writers themselves to say that they were young, or "feeling their way up," or attempting "something new in the land;" but that was not what our readers wanted to know. They wanted to know whether the book reviewed was a good or a bad book by Listener standards, interesting or dull, important or negligible-and this they were told as respectfully as our reviewer could put it without dishonesty.