Rating Books

I'm not good at reviewing works in ways that will be useful to other people.

I think that problem's pretty widespread, however. I do tend to glance at Amazon's ratings of a book, but at best those are a loose index to how good a book is, and whether or not the book is a "genre" piece is going to skew the rating as well i.e. Patricia Wentworth never wrote a remarkable book in her life, but if you want a cosy-style mystery (complete with a Nice Young Couple who need to be engaged and/or reunited by the last chapter), she's your writer, and a very competent one at that. In fact, she's very good at establishing characters with efficiency, and maintaining that characterization, even when the story is kind of silly. (Wentworth sometimes has to work very hard to get her spinster detective, Miss Silver, involved in the narrative, and tends to skim over the more ludicrous set-ups so she can get on with the mystery). So, as mystery novels, I would tend to rate hers as three-to-four stars, depending on how plausible Miss Silver's entrance into the story is, and how well she handles the crime. As books, though, I would tend to rate most of her stories three stars, with some of the lazier books at two stars. She's never a terrible writer, but she does get rather workmanlike from time to time.

So, I rely on comparisons, often trying to articulate why one novel works or fails in comparison to other novels in the same vein. I have been reading David Foster Wallace's The Broom of the System, and while I enjoy it, I also would describe it as "trying too hard." There's too much cleverness going on, especially too many punny names that draw attention to themselves. Too many of the male characters have started lusting after the protagonist by the mid-point of the novel. The tone changes radically after the first chapter, although the style doesn't. All in all, Broom owes a heavy debt to Pyncheon's The Crying of Lot 49; my library copy of Broom, a hardcover with a really dreadful late-eighties cover illustration, pushes 500 pages. It's possible that the accretion of outrageous characters and details just taxes my patience around the 200 page mark. Of course, that statement probably should include a definition of "outrageous," in the context of a narrative not exactly committed to verisimilitude. Put "outrageous," "silly" and "patience" together, though, and you'll get an idea.

[Marisha Pessl's Special Topics in Calamity Physics was similarly show-offy and pleased with itself, so to speak, but more coherent as a story. As a first novel, it's probably a little better than Wallace's Broom, so I will be interested to see how her second novel turns out.]

That said, I do see lots of evidence of the things I really really liked about Infinite Jest. I want to say that Wallace isn't really committed to the reality of the book's Cleveland, with its "rotting mayonnaise" Lake Erie, whereas he took his near-future Boston seriously and thought of it as real. Infinite Jest can also be a very silly book, but I would describe it as more grounded.