Updike’s rules for reviewers

An old friend, and editor at the Library of America, just reminded me of the rules for reviewers that Updike set out in the foreword of his 1975 collection Picked-Up Pieces.

One of the advantages of owning an almost complete set of Updike is that I was able to take down my copy of the book, see the rules in context, and add a little more. So here they are, words to live by:

Apologies, if any, would be tendered to those authors, like Grass and Gombrowicz, who came to me coated with a muffling murk of missed nuances—dusty plaster replicas of statues whose pure marble glowed in an inaccessible museum. But even when the visibility was poorest I tried to give each book the benefit of a code of reviewing drawn up inwardly when I embarked on this craft, or ("a man should have a trade,” my father used to insist) trade.

My rules, drawn up inwardly when I embarked on this craft, and shaped intaglio-fashion by youthful traumas at the receiving end of critical opinion, were and are:

1.) Try to understand what the author wished to do, and do not blame him for not achieving what he did not attempt.

2.) Give enough direct quotation—at least one extended passage—of the book’s prose so the review’s reader can form his own impression, can get his own taste.

3.) Confirm your description of the book with quotation from the book, if only phrase-long, rather than proceeding by fuzzy précis.

4.) Go easy on plot summary, and do not give away the ending. (How astounded and indignant was I, when innocent, to find reviewers blabbing, and with the sublime inaccuracy of drunken lords reporting on a peasants’ revolt, all the turns of my suspenseful and surpriseful narrative! Most ironically, the only readers who approach a book as the author intends, unpolluted by pre-knowledge of the plot, are the detested reviewers themselves. And then, years later, the blessed fool who picks the volume at random from a library shelf.)

5.) If the book is judged deficient, cite a successful example along the same lines, from the author’s oeuvre or elsewhere. Try to understand the failure. Sure it’s his and not yours?

To these concrete five might be added a vaguer sixth, having to do with maintaining a chemical purity in the reaction between product and appraiser. Do not accept for review a book you are predisposed to dislike, or committed by friendship to like. Do not imagine yourself a caretaker of any tradition, an enforcer of any party standards, a warrior in any ideological battle, a corrections officer of any kind. Never, never try to put the author “in his place,” making of him a pawn in a contest with other reviewers. Review the book, not the reputation. Submit to whatever spell, weak or strong, is being cast. Better to praise and share than blame and ban. The communion between reviewer and public is based upon the presumption of certain possible joys of reading, and all our discriminations should curve toward that end.

Easier said than done, of course. Here and there filial affection for an older writer has pulled my punch. Fear of reprisal may have forced a grin or two. In a few reprehensible cases I may have dreamed of sleeping with the authoress. In other cases irritations of the moment added their personal pepper.