Reviewers Reviewed

Writing about the brouhaha over the recent Washington Post review of John Irving's Until I Find You by Marianne Wiggins, Nicholas Klee has this to say in his New Statesman column:

"I have just turned down the opportunity to review a book by an acquaintance. If I had expressed reservations, he would have interpreted the review as an unfriendly, even hostile, gesture - because the friendly thing to do, if I did not like the book, would have been to avoid the commission. Another personal example: I once met the novelist Joseph O'Connor, who, to my mortification, quoted to me a rather pompous sentence I had once written about him ('He will write better books, I am sure'). Later, I got a commission to review his terrific novel The Salesman; the enthusiasm of my piece was not unrelated to the relief of being able to make up for my previous sniffiness. Both reviews were fair, I still think, but the process was messier than it should have been."