Download March 25, 2008, 11:52 am Seven Deadly Words of Book Reviewing

March 25, 2008, 11:52 am Seven
Deadly Words of Book Reviewing
By Bob Harris
Like all professions book reviewing has a lingo. Out of laziness, haste or a misguided effort to sound
“literary,” reviewers use some words with startling predictability. Each of these seven entries is a
perfectly good word (well, maybe not eschew), but they crop up in book reviews with wearying
regularity. To little avail, admonitions abound. “The best critics,” Follett writes, “are those who use
the plainest words and who make their taste rational by describing actions rather than by reporting
or imputing feelings.” Now, the list:
poignant: Something you read may affect you, or move you. That doesn’t mean it’s poignant.
Something is poignant when it’s keenly, even painfully, affecting. When Bambi’s mom dies an adult
may think it poignant. A child probably finds it terrifying.
compelling: Many things in life, and in books, are compelling. The problem is that too often in book
reviews far too many things are found to be such. A book may be a page turner, but that doesn’t
necessarily make it compelling. Overuse has weakened a word that implies an overwhelming force.
Reviewers often combine these first two words. Like Chekhov’s gun. If there is a poignant in a
review’s third paragraph, a compelling will most likely follow. Frequently reviewers forestall the
suspense and link the words right away, as in “this poignant and compelling novel…”
intriguing: It doesn’t mean merely interesting or fascinating although it’s almost always used in
place of one of those words. When it is, the sense of something illicit and mysterious is lost.
eschew: No one actually says this word in real life. It appears almost exclusively in writing when
the perp is stretching for a flashy synonym for avoid or reject or shun.
craft (used as a verb): In “The Careful Writer,” Theodore M. Bernstein reminds us that “the
advertising fraternity has decided craft is a verb.” Undeterred, reviewers use it when they are
needlessly afraid of using plain old write. They also try to make pen a verb, as in “he penned a
tome.”
muse (used as a verb): Few things in this world are mused. They are much more often simply
written, thought or said. “War is hell,” he mused. Not much dreamy rumination there.
Stretching for the fanciful — writing “he crafts or pens” instead of “he writes”; writing “he muses”
instead of “he says or thinks” — is a sure tip-off of weak writing.
lyrical: Reviewers use this adjective when they want to say something is well written. But using the
word loosely misses the sense of expressing emotion in an imaginative and beautiful way. Save
lyrical for your next review of Wordsworth.
It’s possible to (mis)use all seven words in a one-sentence book report: “Mario Puzo’s intriguing
novel eschews the lyrical as the author instead crafts a poignant tale of family life and muses on the
compelling doings of the Mob.”
Of course, these seven words aren’t the only ones overworked by book reviewers. After all, I
haven’t even mentioned limn. Perhaps, readers, you’d like to add your favorites?
Comments
1. 1. March 25th, 2008 12:01 pm
“Nuanced.” It makes me want to claw my eyes out.
— Brian Hagerty
2. 2. March 25th, 2008 12:05 pm
a tour de force
— Terry
3. 3. March 25th, 2008 12:07 pm
“that said” makes me want to claw my eyes out.A plague of verbal and written “that saids”
has descended upon us.
— mhoney
4. 4. March 25th, 2008 12:08 pm
The word “famously” should be drawn & quartered, burned at the stake, then fed to the pigs.
Famously, as in: Thomas Pynchon, who famously shuns the media, etc. etc. The word
provides neither light nor heat.
— Dana Jennings
5. 5. March 25th, 2008 12:09 pm
contrived, realistic, majestic, masterful, romantic..
— lawrence kornfeld
6. 6. March 25th, 2008 12:09 pm
“fresh new voice in American fiction”
— jeanne
7. 7. March 25th, 2008 12:10 pm
“Magisterial.” Used almost exclusively to describe biographies, generally anything
approaching 1000 pages with at least that many footnotes.
— JAS
8. 8. March 25th, 2008 12:10 pm
“Lens” - used most often in reviews of non-fiction and academic works (not to mention the
works themselves): ‘The author explores American history through the lens of [the labor
movement, professional sports, dildo production, whatever]‘. I hate it; it’s overused and a
product of laziness and lack of imagination.
— Embu
9. 9. March 25th, 2008 12:12 pm
It’s not just book reviewing — it’s theatre reviewing, too. Add “searing” to the list.
— Alexa
10.
10. March 25th, 2008 12:13 pm
Writing, whether a review, novel, non-fiction, requires a constant editing process. There is a
great deal of sloppy, lazy writing going on due to time constraints for deadlines, or simply
because the writer thinks that “in” words or phrases are
acceptable ways of “pepping-up” the writing. It all amounts to jargon. There needs to be less
pepper and mayonaise and more critical thinking about what is written.
— Martha J. Pierce
11.
11. March 25th, 2008 12:14 pm
“Readable.” I don’t know what that means. Is the work grammatical? Is it a comment about
the book’s typeface?
— Bruce Haxthausen
12.
12. March 25th, 2008 12:14 pm
The poet Alice Notley has written about how often male reviewers of her books use the word
“engaging” to describe her work, as if the reviewer felt the need to thank a feminist writer for
not entirely shutting him out.
— Paul Killebrew
13.
13. March 25th, 2008 12:15 pm
The whole genre of “critical” discourse made up of lexical pet peeves is, itself, a tedious
wallow. Just because you have a little list of words that bug you doesn’t make you
particularly, um, “trenchant.”
— Mark Haag
14.
14. March 25th, 2008 12:15 pm
Let us not forget “subtle.”
Also, “rare,” “powerful,” “startling,” “bold,” “saucy,” ALL foreign phrases that have English
equivalents, “unexpected,” “frightening,” “lavish,” “amusing,” “work,” “culminates,”
“climax” and “necessarily.”
Can I use ‘em all in a sentence? I’ll try:
This SUBTLE but POWERFUL WORK uses BOLD and STARTLING language in a RARE
combination — one part SAUCY, one part E PLURIBUS UNUM — to construct a LAVISH
and NECESSARILY FRIGHTENING story that CULMINATES in an AMUSING and
UNEXPECTED CLIMAX.
— Alex the Bold
15.
15. March 25th, 2008 12:16 pm
“Deeply.” I find it deeply disturbing that this adverb has metastasized from the Op-Ed page
to the Book Review.
— Padraig Murchadha
16.
16. March 25th, 2008 12:16 pm
If I ever finish my novel and get it published, I hope no reviewer will refer to it as my
‘debut’; leave debut to debutantes and theatricals.
— David Malkus
17.
17. March 25th, 2008 12:17 pm
The “much-anticipated debut.” By whom? The author’s landlord?
— Audentes
18.
18. March 25th, 2008 12:18 pm
Perhaps we can all eschew the phrase “makes me want to claw my eyes out”, which makes
me want to…well, you know….
— PA Pearl
19.
19. March 25th, 2008 12:18 pm
“Smart.” Smart how? Aren’t computer books “smart”? Or is “smart” supposed to be code for
“not chick-lit”?
And publishers have got to stop using elipses in their book descriptions. Putting “…” at the
end of a marketing blurb doesn’t blow my mind, and drive me to find out how someone
“defies the odds and learns to love again…” (or insert your own odd-defying feat).
— june
20.
20. March 25th, 2008 12:18 pm
“Epic.”
— Ashley
21.
21. March 25th, 2008 12:18 pm
Lofty … tumultous…Mr Harris has done it again
— Russell
22.
22. March 25th, 2008 12:19 pm
“Taut” is another adjective that only seems to show up in reviews—perhaps more often in
movie reviews.
— Tom
23.
23. March 25th, 2008 12:20 pm
A phrase rather than a word: “a luminous parable”; words, even in parables, do not glow in
the dark.
— Peter
24.
24. March 25th, 2008 12:21 pm
E.B. White is no longer with us to say it himself, but I’ll quote from “The Elements of
Style”:
The world of criticism has a modest pouch of special words (luminous, taunt), whose only
virtue is that they are exceptionally nimble and can escape from the garden of meaning over
the wall. Of these Critical words, Wolcott Gibbs once wrote: “… they are detached from the
language and inflated like little balloons.” The young writer should learn to spot
them—words that at first glance seem freighted with delicious meaning but that soon burst in
air, leaving nothing but a memory of bright sound.
— Dan Styer
25.
25. March 25th, 2008 12:21 pm
I wonder if sometimes we read “tour de force” when the reviewer really meant “tour de
farce.”
— Keith Gumowitz
1. 26. March 25th, 2008 12:21 pm
I think if I have to read another description of someone’s “spare and elegant prose” I’ll eat
my newspaper!
— Meg
2. 27. March 25th, 2008 12:21 pm
Negative: “sentiment”.
Positive: “redemption”.
— Natuptown
3. 28. March 25th, 2008 12:22 pm
“Evocative.” Ughh.
— A reader
4. 29. March 25th, 2008 12:22 pm
“spare language,” “economy of words,” as though the use of words were some kind of
literary crime.
Oh, look, Dante uses spare language and an economy of words to descrbie hell, or is it not
wonderful how Melville describes the whale with such spare language, sparing the reader
description as to the color of the whale, leaving it all to the reader’s imagination. Now,
really, you never read that about those great authors. But today and on any given Sunday you
can read ten reviews of the same latest literary offering (and yes, it must be from a”new
young literary sensation,”) and I swear the reviewers received the same template from the
author’s publicist. So, I wonder how many of those books are really read by the reviewer
because very few reviews indicate a depth of understanding, something that gives the readers
pause and a willingness to at least go to their local bookstores to give the book a try. Then
here’s where the mundane reviews are somewhat absent: science fiction; science fiction and
fantasy reviewers are extra special because they seemed to have actually read the books they
review.
Lyn LeJeune- The Beatitudes, a paranormal novel for and about New Orleans at
http://www.beatitudesinneworleans.blogspot.com
— Lyn LeJeune
5. 30. March 25th, 2008 12:24 pm
My father regularly used the word “eschew” - in retrospect, though, it may have been SAT
preparation for us kids…
— Morgan
6. 31. March 25th, 2008 12:25 pm
Hahaha! Maybe these reviewers need to be “learned gooder” on their Engrish skills. That
said (lol, joking), reviewers do overuse vocab to a great extent. Reviews are actually way
more fun to read when words used aren’t ”eschewed” and what have you, more to language
every person can relate to.
— Taylor
7. 32. March 25th, 2008 12:25 pm
“gone missing” or worse, “went missing”
— Peter A. Wright
8. 33. March 25th, 2008 12:26 pm
Along with offending words um, like, and you know in oral discourse, should I see or hear
the words amazing and awesome again, I shall scream … loudly! Amaze me and remove the
words from active use for a decade or so. Now that would be awesome!
— Pamela Greene
9. 34. March 25th, 2008 12:26 pm
“Cracking”. Especially when used in tandem with “yarn” or “tale”.
How can every thriller be a cracking good yarn? Makes me want to be barfing.
— Dan S.
10.
35. March 25th, 2008 12:26 pm
Can we do away with “page-turner”? Please please please? Can we say instead, “This
pot-boiler, hyped and marketed in order to be consumed and thrown away…”
— Kristin Yates
11.
36. March 25th, 2008 12:26 pm
You wrote:
eschew: No one actually says this word in real life. It appears almost exclusively in
writing…
Is there a way to use words other than reading or writing? If not, the fact that no one says
“eschew” compels (or is compelling, if you prefer) the conclusion that “eschew” appears
exclusively in writing, without qualification. I find your use of the word “almost” quite
intriguing.
While we’re on the subject of words that should not be used as verbs, I cannot stand
entertainment reporters’ use of the word “helmed” as a synonym for “directed”.
— Michael
12.
37. March 25th, 2008 12:27 pm
How about “arguably,” as in “he is arguably the world’s foremost writer”? As comment #4
says, “The word provides neight light nor heat” and reviewers should show some courage.
— Sharon Z
13.
38. March 25th, 2008 12:28 pm
The second I read “poignant” or “affecting” on the inside of any cover, I immediately put the
book down and walk away. If those two words are the only description that any PR
department can come up with, than the book is not worth my time.
— Ian
14.
39. March 25th, 2008 12:29 pm
‘chthonic’: i word i learned from reading the book review, and have since eschewed.
that, and ‘desultory’ or ‘desultorily’, which i challenge anyone to claim to have heard, much
less pronounced correctly, in polite conversation.
— mwolff
15.
40. March 25th, 2008 12:29 pm
Luminous. Yech!
Who doesn’t say “eschew?” As in, “I eschew tobacco.”
— THM
16.
41. March 25th, 2008 12:29 pm
Thanks to Bob Harris, Brian Hagerty, Terry, mhoney and Dana Jennings for making me
smile.
— Bernie Saccaro
17.
42. March 25th, 2008 12:30 pm
“mordant wit”
And thank you for calling out those who limn. You know who you are.
— Andrea Messina
18.
43. March 25th, 2008 12:32 pm
May I (as a serial offender on many of the above counts) also offer “luminous” and
“haunting”?
— William
19.
44. March 25th, 2008 12:32 pm
“Subtle.” Just because you noticed something and think you are smart does not necessarily
mean you picked up on a subtlety.
— FieLdJunKie
20.
45. March 25th, 2008 12:32 pm
“Wise”–and all variants, please.
— A. Reader
21.
46. March 25th, 2008 12:33 pm
You nailed it with limn. Limn is the most egregious reviewer word of all. Typing limn into a
review should automatically lock up the offending reviewer’s word processor, erase every bit
of the review from the hard disk, and force the reviewer to start over.
— conall
22.
47. March 25th, 2008 12:34 pm
Luminescent! Most often spotted on back cover blurbs.
— Vicky
23.
48. March 25th, 2008 12:34 pm
“imagined” as in “fully imagined”. Applied to fiction.
— Old Vermonter
24.
49. March 25th, 2008 12:34 pm
Memorable. Unforgettable. I should save these for the one or two (out of 200+ books a year I
read) that I really can’t forget.
— Lyn Miller-Lachmann
25.
50. March 25th, 2008 12:38 pm
In general usage, I’d like to add to the list: utilize (overused word to sound more intelligent
than the perfectly useful “use”), and irregardless (makes me cringe every time). It’s also my
pet peeve that there’s a trend to “verb” nouns, and to perform random acts of capitalization,
in marketing in particular. Honestly, I think a lot of people in marketing studied it because
English was apparently too hard.
— Mark Boltz
http://papercuts.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/03/25/seven-deadly-words-of-book-reviewing/?hp