February 2, 2004
Benjamin Schwarz on book reviewing
An excerpt from "Why we review the books we do" published in the January/February issue of The Atlantic by Benjamin Schwarz, that magazine's literary editor. He is also a candidate to replace Charles McGrath at the New York Times Book Review.
Readers sometimes note that we tend to run pieces that are either unusually short or unusually long compared with those in other review sections. As for the short ones, we're convinced that important and praiseworthy titles can be reviewed analytically, with verve, and even definitively in much less space than other book sections usually allot. We strive to make these short pieces read like mini-essays, tightly argued and with a strong point of view, rather than like capsule summaries. In our fiction reviews we eschew plot summary; we think novels should be elegantly characterized, not recapitulated. This approach gives the reviewer, even in a short piece, room to place the book in a larger context, be it of the author's body of work or of trends in fiction. As for the long pieces, we're trying to nurture and revive the stylish, critical, often saucy and disputatious review-essay, because we believe that from Macaulay through Virginia Woolf to Edmund Wilson, Dwight Macdonald, and Gore Vidal it's proved to be a form perfectly suited to discussing complex ideas with grace and flair, and to taking the pulse of the contemporary intellectual and cultural scene.
[Emphasis mine.]
Replace the words "titles" with "exhibitions" and "book" with "art" and you have a pretty fair representation of what I look for in reviews of contemporary art exhibitions. Lately I'm attempting to limit the space devoted to description in reviews, to more success in the reviews I'm writing for myself than those I publish.