Books We Never Finished Reviewing : AND WHY YOU SHOULD BE GLAD

Convinced that harsh reviews discourage reading, the man on my left believed critics like me should willingly accept a blame for the decline in cultural literacy. After all, by the time a book arrives for review, a rigorous selection process has already taken place. Every book in print is a survivor. Junior readers have recommended it to their elders and betters, who then discussed it with the writer, suggesting changes, improvements and revisions. These presumably made, the manuscript has been accepted by the publisher; funds dispersed, galleys printed and edited. At least six people have already found merit in the book before the reviewer ever sees it. The trade journals have spoken and the editor of a book section has glanced at the accompanying publicity and decided that this particular novel deserves the standard 12- column inches. With safeguards built in every step of the way, only the most worthy could ever land on a critic’s desk. How bad can a book be? I agreed, silently, to treat the next assignment like a poker hand and let it speak for itself.

And then it arrived.

We’ll call the novel in question “Swap,” not its actual title, and never mention the author or publisher by name. Everything that follows, however, about its plot, style, character and setting is true. If, after accompanying the reviewer on this voyage of discovery, you decide that you’ve been deprived of a potentially rewarding experience, a self-addressed stamped postcard will promptly bring you the missing particulars.

“Swap” opens in an Atlantic City casino, where a devastatingly handsome man has drawn a crowd by playing blackjack for $100,000 a hand. Among the spectators is our narrator, who decides that the player must be an Arabian prince, which turns out to be the only sound judgment he makes in the entire course of the book. A confiding sort, he immediately tells us his salary ($31,000 a year as a corporate speechwriter); his marital status (happily wed to a stunning blond graduate of “Shipley’s and Vassar” who finds his “Hebrewness” thrillingly exotic); his military record (a hero of the Six-Day War in Israel), and his family history (carried over the Pyrenees in a knapsack by parents fleeing the Holocaust). Though the reviewer has never heard an alumna of The Shipley School refer to her alma mater as “Shipley’s” or an alumnus of the Harvard school say he’d graduated from Harvard’s, carping about such errors is not considered sporting. Reviewers are now warned by publishers to check quotes against the bound copy “for your legal protection and ours.” We live in a litigious society, which encourages caution.

The gambler is dressed all in black to match his mustache and hair. He isn’t carrying a pitchfork, but symbols should be subtle. There are other, more crucial issues at stake here, like that salary of $31,000 a year. How does that leave our hero any discretionary income for gambling? Though you’d think he’d barely be able to keep a roof over his head, he’s a habitue of the casinos. Either the cost of living in Philadelphia is half that in Los Angeles or this manuscript has been circulating for 20 years. Surely the narrator could have found himself a better job? The poor chap must be 50 by now. Credibility, however, is not a fashionable literary criterion, and one learns to ignore it. Magic realism is chic.

Spotted lurking at the velvet rope, the hero is summoned to the prince’s private table. “You have brought me luck,” the prince says, and with our narrator in the anchor chair, he proceeds to win $4 million. Expecting a tangible reward for his mascot duties, our man is understandably disappointed when the prince merely dismisses him with a terse thank you and an ominous “We will do business.”

Now let’s meet the hero’s wife and eavesdrop as they talk about their negligible net worth, looking for a small but telling prose sample to illustrate the strengths and weaknesses of the writer’s style. A perfect microcosm turns up on Page 21. “But I don’t mind, so long as we’re happy and we’re together . . . . Money isn’t everything.” (At this point, the man who considered reviewers excessively cruel asked me to send him this passage by fax, because, he explained tactfully, he was eager to try out his new machine.)

Eventually, the prince invites the couple to dinner, where he and the narrator engage in a bout of under-the-table wrist wrestling. By coincidence, both men studied with the same Israeli master of Krav Maga. The reviewer rejoices. Maybe “Swap” will still turn out to be an espionage novel instead of a travesty on the Faust legend. No such luck.

The next day, the prince summons our chap to his hotel suite and makes him an offer--a million dollars for one night with his long-stemmed American beauty--tax-free, which makes the deal even sweeter.

“No money is enough for what you’re asking,” the narrator says, thinking “somewhere there was the perfect response to all this but I could not call it in.” The reviewer has no problem calling it in, but lets the chance slip by in aid of cultural literacy. The point of no return has already been passed. Two hours have been invested in the book.

After an extended discussion of the possible moral implications of this proposition (“I’d be doing it for you. . . . We’d be able to leave Philadelphia, which you hate. Your money could find the cure for cancer”), the narrator’s wife takes matters into her own hands and goes off for her rendezvous with the prince, an adventure which gives the author a chance to test his abilities as a pornographer. “What’s sex?” the wife asks rhetorically; “another bodily function.”

In a just world, the matter might have ended there, but the prince has made a video of his million-dollar night. Though our hero manages to dispose of the tape, the bloom goes off the marriage and the beautiful blond mysteriously loses her luster. She develops a blemish on her nose and becomes a suicidal depressive. Temporarily rallying, she plans an elaborate reenactment of her first meeting with the narrator in an effort to recapture the magic of their love, but when a second pimple appears, she has a relapse, cancels the arrangements, and takes to her bed. I consider mentioning skin eruptions as classic metaphors for spiritual corruption, but decide against it. This example seems inadvertent.

The couple separate, and the heartbroken husband, unmindful of his advanced age, returns to Israel as a volunteer in the current conflict. He’s still tormented by the traumatic events of the previous months when he glimpses the back of a blond head in a schoolyard. Hardly daring to hope, but knowing “there remained only this: for her to turn around,” and for her to say, “So you have to keep on fighting. Especially for something very rare and precious.” And for him to say, “Yeah, you have to keep on fighting,” and for her to say, “Yes we do. I guess that’s why I’m here.”

Despite the vaunted checks, screens, hurdles, etc., “Swap” made it to a reviewer’s desk with dialogue as dull as this. Keeping its perpetrators anonymous is, I submit, a small but significant action in defense of literary standards.