Echoes aplenty in the Penny Press!

One of the little joys of book-reviewing is finding “echoes” of your own reviews in somebody else’s Table of Contents. My beloved Open Letters Monthly, though well-respected in the industry, is virtually unknown outside it (except perhaps for those curious browsers who find one of our blurbs on some new paperback), so it’s extra-pleasing for me to open a journal like the New York Review of Books or the London Review of Books and discover that their editors have run a review of something I myself have already reviewed. I like the no-doubt-fraudulent way it creates the illusion that we’re all in this together, encountering the same onrushing tide of new books and making roughly some of the same decisions as to what warrents coverage and what doesn’t.

The latest TLS to hit my mailbox was a perfect case-in-point. Not only was there an Adam Kirsch review of A Voice Still Heard, a collection of Irving Howe essays recently reviewed by my esteemed colleague Robert Minto, and not only was there a very good Kate Webb review of The Paying Guests, the new Sarah Waters novel recently reviewed by my esteemed colleague Rohan Maitzen, but there was a veritable cacophony of further reviews! Seamus Perry writes at very satisfying length about The Intellectual Life of Edmund Burke, which I reviewed here; Norma Clarke turns in a superb review of Reynolds: Portraiture in Action (which I reviewed here), even going so far as to point out some of the book’s shortcomings:

[The author's] admiration for Reynolds can sometimes sound like endorsement of the values espoused by his elite subjects. The knowledgeable reader can fill in some gaps and guess how far Reynolds was painting to order or shared those values, but in this respect [the author] doesn’t help. There is almost no information here about how Reynolds reached his decisions – did Frances Crewe ask to be painted with sheep, for example? When he painted Lady Worsley en militaire was that his sensitivity to fashion or was it her choice? How far was he countering satirical cartoonists, such as Gillray, when he presented Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire playing at home with her baby? And did she suggest it? How much did he charge? What did he do if the clients didn’t pay?

There’s also a review by Theodore Rabb of R. J. B. Bosworth’s Italian Venice (which I reviewed here) in which the reviewer praises Bosworth for an excellent job all the while hinting that it might also be a bit of a boring job – although it isn’t, as I can attest.

But then, two critics disagreeing about a book is the kind of disagreements that only strengthen the Republic of Letters, yes? I almost prefer it, whenever I encounter one of these echoes in the Penny Press.