Mark has admitted a penchant for reading the previous work of an author when he’s assigned a review. I think this is a fairly common trait; I can’t imagine any reviewer is willfully uninformed. Me, I got in the completist habit when I was writing about music. It usually took less time and brainpower to listen to a couple of CDs than it would to read and digest the entire Roth canon, sure. But the idea is the same: know your material.
Still, it’s possible to OD — you don’t want to so overfill your brain with earlier books that there isn’t enough room for the new one to get in there and shake around a little bit. I started feeling this when I was reading all of Tom Perrotta’s books in order to review The Abstinence Teacher, and Lydia Millet’s for How the Dead Dream*. When I was drawn to (or less thrilled by) aspects of earlier works, and noticed myself keeping an eye out for those elements in the new novels, I felt I was going down the wrong path. The backlist can inform the new book, of course, but it shouldn’t proscribe it — or a reviewers’ expectations for it. Each book comes between its own covers: it’s an independent artifact, and has to be able to be understood as such.
Every reviewer has undoubtedly figured out how much they want to delve into an author’s backlist versus how much they should stick to the work in question. I suppose it shows I’m new to this (and, might I suggest, that Mark is too) that we’re exposing process on our blogs. Or maybe it shows that I’ve got a new assignment that calls for me doing some serious catch-up. Which I’m off to begin now.
Oh – took the photo in my neighborhood the other day. No relevance. I just like it.
* inexplicably replaced in the LA Times archives by another review I wrote.
