Under Review

My main, in fact, solitary purchase from Parkway Parade last Sunday was the April edition of The New York Review of Books. It was with some delight that I discovered that the newly opened branch of Borders there stocked the magazine late last year and I've been buying it ever since. The last time I bought a literary periodical regularly was when I lived in England some twenty years ago and such publications were fairly easy to come by. (Back then it was The Times Literary Supplement. Oh, and I also used to buy the music review Gramophone in an attempt to extend the capacity of my ears.)

The odd thing is though that now my delight on being able to get hold of this excellent review is tempered by a mounting sense of guilt (it's pretty expensive) that I don't always read it all - lack of time - and an equally mounting sense of worry that I'll start to rely on it as a primary source of reading rather than actual books. I suspect this is what a number of the literati are prone to. I'm also concerned that this can easily become allied to an easy, lazy acceptance of ready-made opinions about books and writers in place of a genuine struggle to form one's own.

I noticed this when reading an interesting piece on John Steinbeck. It's easy to be grandly dismissive of a writer like Steinbeck whose faults are obvious and the article though informative tended to go in this direction. I had to struggle to remember the hair-raising power of The Grapes of Wrath - that extraordinary ending! - to keep myself in touch with the reality of the first-hand reading experience.

It's worth remembering when reading this kind of periodical that the worst insult the two tramps in Waiting for Godot can think of to throw at each other is 'Critic!'