Confessions of a Book Review Editor

BY PAUL BAUMANN

Sigmund Freud thought that every sexual act involved more than two people (think Oedipus). The same can be said of every book review. There is, of course, the primal couple, the author and reviewer. But hidden behind the scenes -- and sometimes not so hidden: think of The New Republic's Leon Wieseltier -- is the book review editor. Bringing books and reviewers together is not glamorous work, but from time to time, an element of (literally bookish) drama and even excitement can be part of the job.

I've been the book review editor at Commonweal magazine for eleven years. I love book reviews. I confess to having read far more reviews than books, although in my line of work such philistinism is almost inevitable. I am sent thousands of free books every year, and more than a few (to my wife's exasperation) end up adorning our walls at home. I like the smell of books, the feel and heft of them, and especially the promise that reading, which should first be a pleasure, can also broaden our experience and deepen our lives. Book reviews, then, are invitations to reading, and to something more.

Like any arranged marriage, the pairing of book and reviewer involves matching pedigrees, personalities, and that indefinable attraction that promises a measure of passion on the page. Ultimately, of course, this sort of marriage is all about progeny. Editors are matchmakers willing to put both author and reviewer through interminable agony in order to produce a bright-eyed offspring that will catch and hold the reader's eye.

It took me a few years to get the hang of putting together a book and the right reviewer, and like all matchmakers I'm responsible for my share of sour or merely dutiful marriages. There have been memorable disasters: friends -- some of them now former friends -- who take every editing suggestion as a personal affront; the well-known author who turns in illiterate gibberish; the writer whose review is so dull that it gets lost on my desk for three months and I can't remember it when he calls.

The most treacherous challenge an editor faces is reviewing the books of friends or contributors. In these situations, one is always torn between professional integrity and personal loyalty. Publishing a negative review of a friend's book is, as Don Corleone would say, only business, but everyone (understandably) takes it personally.

All editors tell stories about how a bad -- or even an insufficiently enthusiastic -- review ended a relationship. I've gotten an earful from more than one unhappy author, but surprisingly not much more than that. Jack Miles, who won the Pulitzer Prize for God: A Biography, is a good example. We ran an excerpt from Miles's book in Commonweal and I also reviewed it glowingly for New York Newsday. I was confident that no one who knew the Bible, enjoyed literary criticism, and who possessed a little imagination could dislike the book. With no apprehension, I assigned it to Luke Timothy Johnson, a scripture scholar who taught me in graduate school. (Editing one's old professors is great fun!) I was sure Johnson would appreciate both Miles's immense learning and literary skill. Well, Johnson did appreciate those things, but he also hated the book. His arguments were persuasive enough. I was distressed, but Miles was unfazed, and he continues to write for us. So does Johnson.

One reason for Miles's equanimity might have been that he was an editor at the Los Angeles Times Book Review for many years, and knows how the game is played. When things go right, editing the book review section can be like throwing a good party: just the right mix of new faces, old loyalties (and antagonisms), and the tantalizing possibility of something unexpected. I threw a pretty good party in January. The center of it was an important review of the current bestseller, Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews, A History, by the Catholic novelist and National Book Award winner James Carroll. How that came about may be of interest to inveterate book review readers.

Commonweal is a journal of opinion with a special interest in religion, politics, literature, and culture. Though we have no official connection to the church, we're known as the "liberal Catholic" magazine. The magazine has existed since 1924, and has published such luminaries as W.H. Auden, Graham Greene, and Evelyn Waugh. For us, Constantine's Sword was a must-do book. Carroll, a former priest, is an outspokenly liberal Catholic who as a columnist for The Boston Globe often advocates for church reform. I knew he had been working on Constantine's Sword for several years, and that Houghton Mifflin was likely to push the book hard. Carroll had caused heartburn among some Catholics (including me) with a 1997 New Yorker essay about the papacy and anti-Semitism. It was my understanding that the essay, which attributed the Holocaust to "absolutist" Christian claims about Christ's divinity, was the germ of the new book. Carroll's thesis is superficially plausible, but ultimately in my view is a much too simplistic reading of the relationship between ideas and history. Still, he can write, and if Constantine's Sword was in fact an extension of the article, I knew it would attract a torrent of praise from reviewers who would rightly appreciate a Catholic's condemnation of church anti-Semitism but were unlikely to grasp the contradictory nature of Carroll's theological agenda. That agenda, I suspected, ultimately was as subversive of Judaism's claims about God as Catholic ones.

So I had my eye out for news of Carroll's 700-page opus, and last September I requested a bound galley from Houghton Mifflin. The publication date was in January, and I would have to get the mammoth text into the hands of a reviewer immediately if we were to publish a review contemporaneously with major magazines and newspapers. At Commonweal we can't always time a review perfectly to a book's publication, but doing so -- especially with a high-profile book -- is a plus.

Houghton Mifflin was prompt. A sheaf of publicity material, including an interview with Carroll, came with the galley. The interview did not assuage my worries about the book's thesis. Who could I get to review this tome, and quickly? I browsed the book's lengthy bibliography to see what scholarship Carroll was relying on, and came upon a reference to Robert Louis Wilken. Wilken, a historian at the University of Virginia, had written a few things for me over the years. He is conservative, a convert to Catholicism who always seemed to be rushing off on monastic retreat when I called him. His reputation as a scholar is formidable, and his writing accessible to the general reader. He also had an interest in Jewish-Christian dialogue. I knew Wilken was likely to be tough on Carroll, but honest.

Whether to go with a "writer" or a more knowledgeable scholar as reviewer can be a difficult choice, but it's not a choice I often have the luxury of worrying about. When your standard fee is $100 and your circulation is less than the number of persons working in the average Manhattan skyscraper, people are not exactly beating down the door to write for you.

How much sway to give my own take on an author or book in selecting a reviewer is a frequent consideration. I work for a journal of opinion, and I have lots of them. But it would be deadly if I chose reviewers on the basis of ideological conformity. As the late Lars-Erik Nelson said: "The enemy isn't liberalism. The enemy isn't conservatism. The enemy is bullshit." That, I think, is the best rule. Whether a reviewer comes from the left, the right, or the middle, a low tolerance for cant and obfuscation is the skill to be prized.

I put down the galley and called Wilken. Getting to him fast was crucial (well, I'm not pretending this was life-or-death crucial, just journalistically crucial). Wilken's reputation made him a likely candidate to review the book for a number of publications.

On the phone Wilken was cool to the idea. He was busy. It was a long book. He didn't know who Carroll was. I told him that Carroll had won the National Book Award for his memoir about his Catholic upbringing (An American Requiem), that I was sure the new book was going to get a lot of attention, and that someone like him should examine it. He wanted to take a look at the galley and then decide. I said there wasn't enough time to do that. I didn't want The New York Times, Time, and the rest to exclusively set the terms of the book's initial reception. Reluctantly he accepted the assignment.

I was pleased -- actually, more than pleased. I had wooed a hesitant writer and won him over. I grew even more pleased that we had snared Wilken when, in a subsequent phone call, he told me that the Los Angeles Times had asked him -- after I did -- to do the book. Snatching a reviewer from the grasp of bigger and far wealthier competitors is a bit like going dateless to the prom and coming home with the prom queen.

Now there was nothing left to do but wait.

As anticipated, the positive reviews started piling up early. In November, Publishers Weekly gave Constantine's Sword a starred review. In December, The Atlantic hit the newsstands with a rave.

I called Wilken to make sure he was forging ahead and would meet the January 2 deadline. He said he was almost finished reading the book and that he didn't like it much. Actually, he said, it was a "terrible" book.

That remark made me somewhat apprehensive. The last thing I wanted was a diatribe. If Wilken met the deadline, we would barely have time to get the piece into our second issue in January. I'd be in a bind if he sent me a choleric rant or a condescendingly dismissive piece. The subject was too serious and explosive and the broader reception of the book too positive for us to publish a vituperative response. I trusted Wilken's judgment, but when you send out a book for review, you never really know what you'll get back. That's supposed to be the fun part of the job.

Wilken didn't disappoint. On January second, he sent me the review. I read it with growing excitement. Wilken's conclusion addressed exactly the point the mainstream reviews would miss: "What we have then is a rather conventional cultural critique of Christianity," he wrote. "The Jews are the victims par excellence of the excesses of revealed religion. But what Carroll forgets is that the Jews too believe in revelation. If Christians, on the basis of the Scriptures and Christian tradition, cannot confess Jesus as Lord, can the Jews, on the basis of Scriptures and Jewish tradition, claim that they are the elect people of God? In Carroll's brave new world there will be neither Jews nor Christians."

Precisely.

Length was a problem. I had asked for 2,000 words; Wilken sent me 3,500. We decided to make room. I did a little editing and some cutting, mostly of the piece's harsh opening. I wanted readers sympathetic to Carroll to get to the substantive objections raised in the body of the review and not be put off by Wilken's sometimes indignant tone.

While we waited to go to press, a review appeared in The Boston Sunday Globe by Paul Wilkes, a progressive Catholic writer, who endorsed Carroll's book unequivocally. A few days later, on January 10, I joined a crowd at New York's Interfaith Center to hear Carroll, along with the novelists Mary Gordon and Cynthia Ozick, talk about the book. Listening was agonizing. I felt like shouting, Wait, you have to read our review! You're all missing the point!

Then, on January 14, The New York Times Book Review published a front-page review of Constantine's Sword by Andrew Sullivan, a former editor of The New Republic. A dextrous writer with a polemical edge, Sullivan noted the strengths of Carroll's book, while shrewdly detecting some of its flaws. Still, Sullivan's demurrals were but a brief aside in an otherwise positive notice.

It may seem presumptuous for an editor at an obscure journal with a circulation of 21,000 to put himself in the company of newspapers and magazines with millions of readers. But editors at small journals like Commonweal like to think that, despite modest circulation numbers, what they print can have an impact on the larger conversation. And it does happen. With Carroll about to start a nationwide publicity tour, we'd sent around advance copies of Wilken's piece. As a result, Christopher Lydon, then host of the NPR show, "The Connection," seemed to press Carroll with some of the questions raised by Wilken. The review also entered into the conversation when Carroll spoke at Harvard Divinity School, where he had worked on the book while on a fellowship.

By January 16 -- at last -- the Wilken review was on its way to the printer. Will all this sturm und drang make a difference in how Carroll's book is received and his arguments understood? A little, I hope. For me, the press of getting the review out had some of the excitement of breaking a news story, which is what I did (every so often) on a daily paper before taking up the job of book review editor. And, when it was all done, there remained the satisfaction of knowing that I'd helped midwife an honest and challenging review, and that a perspective that otherwise might not have made its way into print was now out there in the world.

In the meantime, have I had a chance to read Constantine's Sword? I'm afraid I've read only parts of it. Will I read the whole thing? That depends. But I have read the reviews.

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Paul Baumann is the executive editor of Commonweal magazine.