I’ve been reading the Cambridge Introduction to Narrative, by H. Porter Abbott, because I’m thinking about adopting it in the fall. I thought I’d summarize one bit, on overreading and underreading. This applies to any reader actually, not only those who write book reviews, let alone those who write online book reviews.
As avid readers, we know how vulnerable we are to the effect of novels.* Indeed, the pleasure of those effects is a major reason we seek them out. But as readers we, too, exercise a power over texts. One of the ways we do that is by underreading. As Frank Kermode once wrote,
It is not uncommon for large parts of the novel to go virtually unread; the less manifest portions of its text (its secrets) tend to remain secret, tend to resist all but abnormally attentive scrutiny, reading so minute, intense, and slow that it seems to run counter to one’s “natural” sense of hat a novel is (Art of Telling, 138, as quoted in Cambridge Introduction to Narrative, p. 86).
My own reviews, at least of genre fiction, tend to focus a lot of character and plot. Abbott’s long discussion of just two words in Madame Bovary (“elegeic epithelamium”) made me realize how much more focus I could place on specific words in the text. I recall hearing a paper by Eric Selinger on Laura Kinsale’s Flowers from the Storm, a book I love, and thought I had read carefully, that opened up the text in a mindblowing new way. I had “missed” so much! I realize these are example of academic readings, which have a character and a vocabulary of their own, and I’m not suggesting I aspire to that with each book review here (in part because the audience and purpose are different), but thinking about underreading has made me wonder which parts of a novel I am more like to underread.
On Kermode’s view, we have to close the narrative to achieve interpretation, and we do so by exclusions. This is not just something a reader who is in a hurry, or uneducated does: even very sophisticated readings (the ones characterized by “abnormally attentive scrutiny”) have to posit an “embracing formulation” (in Abbott’s words) in order to move through the book.
One of the motives is to bring a text into line with our worldview, to make it more comfortable to engage with. Our own vested cultural or personal interests unconsciously influence this process. Abbott’s fictional example is Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings, a story in which an ancient winged man who arrives in the protagonists’ back yard is recast as something quite ordinary:
Then they dared speak to him, and he answered in an incomprehensible dialect with a strong sailor’s voice. That was how they skipped over the inconvenience of the wings and quite intelligently concluded that he was a lonely castaway from some foreign ship wrecked by the storm.
Abbott quotes Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities, which contends that narrative is inevitably underread, because we need a simple sequence of events in order to navigate “the overwhelmingly manifold nature of things” (Abbott, p. 88). And psychologists might point to “the primacy effect”, the tendency to let earlier interpretations dominate later ones. Abbott’s example is Wuthering Heights, a book many readers remember as the story of Cathy and Healthcliff, despite the fact that Catherine dies halfway through and the romance of Hereton Earnshaw and Catherine’s daughter is equally important.
I wonder how this point applies to our reviews. If the first few chapters of a book are problematic, do we let that unfairly influence our take on the book as a whole? And how about DNF “reviews”?
Then there’s overreading. This is finding things in narratives for which there is no direct evidence in the text. Again, we come to books with different backgrounds, experiences, and expectations, and these influence what we find in the text. Abbott’s example is of an ungainly, friendless girl with a beautiful but spoiled and ungrateful little sister reading Cinderella: she might see Cindy as a scheming hypocrite.
Abbott gives an example of “loading up a stranger with an unflattering moral character, cued only by the color of his skin” (p. 89), which is interesting. Is that overreading if the author him or herself was using that character as a shorthand for “bad”?
When I think of genre fiction, especially romance, I recognize certain signaling turns of phrase that help me identify in the first pages who the hero and heroine are, even when it’s not made explicit by the text. Is that overreading? Or experienced genre reading? I taught Jennifer Crusie’s Bet Me in the fall, and after we read the first half of the book, one student opined that he wasn’t sure if Cal and Min would end up together, because they seemed to fight so often!
And every text has gaps. No character or setting is described in full, for example. I may get a sense of height, weight, hair color, eyes, or whatever else the author thinks is important, with the rest left to my own mind to fill in. In Asa Larsson’s Sweden-set mystery suspense Sun Storm, three pastors are interviewed by the police after a murder in the church. Rather than describing the men in detail, Larsson has the detective, Anna-Maria, take careful note of how they each shake hands (for example, “Gunnar Isaksson had nearly crushed her hand in his. And it wasn’t the unconscious strength you sometimes find in men. He’s just afraid of seeming weak, thought Anna-Maria.”). It’s very effective, but not exactly complete. My point is that what counts as “overreading” is going to be hard to determine.
On the other hand, what led me to write this post was finishing Julian Barnes’ The Sense of an Ending, and looking online for fellow reader opinion about some ambiguous parts of the text. The narrator remembers a weekend spent in Kent with his girlfriend Veronica’s family in college. He remembers them treating him as inferior. He remembers an oafish brother, a father who drank too much, a mother who inexplicably warned him not to let Veronica get away with anything. Tony speculates that Veronica was the victim of abuse — a leap I didn’t understand how he could make on the basis of such a small acquaintance with them, but this gets softened when he remembers his own mother saying everyone who survived childhood was abused in some way (this is kind of an echo of the point of this post.). At any rate, I did not think the abuse in Veronica’s family was that important.
But the readers on Amazon has spun tales of incest and violence in Veronica’s home that I found ridiculous. They took a line from the text: “gouts of sperm circling a plughole, before being sluiced down the full length of a tall house” and determined from that alone that the narrator had had sex with Veronica’s mother that weekend. I was outraged! Talk about willful overreading. I understand that nature abhors a vacuum, but let’s not ruin the book by turning it into a Lifetime movie!
Abbott says that one of the correctives to underreading and overreading is intentional interpretation in light of others’ readings. I think that’s what we do when we join book groups, Tweet about books, engage in discussions on Goodreads and on our blogs. Just yesterday on Twitter, I had my own view of a book by Adrienne Wilder revised by a fellow reader, Merrian, who suggested that what I found bizarre and offputting in some of the characters (“dragons”) was actually a welcome antidote to the safe, fake “otherness” (sparkly vampires, for example) we are presented with in most PNR. Although I don’t want to go far into the recent author meltdowns over critical reviews, to my mind, one of the more awful things about authors swooping in to shame and shut down critical readers is not just the effect it has on the reader (it doesn’t feel good to be called a “bitch” and mocked by a group of authors on Twitter as in this last kerfuffle), but on this wonderful process of filling in the gaps for each other and turning our solitary reading experience into a communal one.* [*Edited to add: I don't think it actually has this effect in most cases, but I think the attempt shows a real disregard, even disrespect, for the process of communal interpretation, a process I think is tremendously important.]
Gaps are inevitable in any narrative, which is a good thing since, as Wolfgang Iser has written, “It is only through inevitable omissions that a story gains its dynamism” (as quoted in Abbott, p. 91). Our readings give narrative its power. Still, it can be interesting to think about underreading or overreading as we attempt to engage with the novels we love, and love to hate.
*This point can be made about texts in general, of course, but this is a book blog and I’m sticking with books.
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Thanks for such an interesting and thoughtful post. I’m new to book blogging myself, and I’m still trying to find good places to discuss books online.
Great post Jessica. Thx for the thought provoking words. I think you’re so right about the community aspects of reading/reviewing. I love to see what others got out of a book, even if that was something different to my take.
What a fascinating topic, and very pertinent to some things I’ve been thinking about. I think reviewers — including myself — sometimes fall into “overreading” during the act of reviewing. I sometimes find myself wondering if I overemphasized a point because it fit so well with what I was writing. (One of the problem with ebooks is that it’s hard to skim through and recheck whether the text was really what I thought it was — though the easy bookmarking is a big help while reading for review.)
I’ve been outraged by reviewers making claims that seemed blatantly wrong to me (Lord Cockmonster is NOT an asshole!) and I used to think it was possibly a deliberate attempt to stir up drama, but the concept of “overreading” makes more sense.
I had also noticed how your review of Pricks and Pragmatism brought up many aspects of the books it never even occurred to me to mention. My focus was very specific. Nothing wrong with that, I’m no longer a professional reviewer and give myself permission to review however feels right, but it was interesting.
Reminds me that unless a book/story is read it is only paper stored on a shelf or scattered electrons on a hard drive. A book has multiple stages of existence of which being written is only the first one.
I think this article is a great contribution to the discussion about reading and reviewing that we are having in hiccups and kerfuffles across the internet at this point. People talk about eBooks changing reading I think the internet has already done that far more than the mechanism of the eBook has.
A very fine post, as usual. Timely, for me–putting together a lit methods syllabus.
@Rebecca: Hi Rebecca! I see you blog mainly about crime fiction. Have you read Yet Another Crime fiction Blog? Keishon, who runs it, is the one who recommended Asa Larsson, who I really like. Personally, I think the best way for a new blogger to become a part of the community is to comment on and link to other blogs. If folks like what you have to say, they will do the same for you. Welcome!
@kaetrin: Thanks Kaetrin.
@willaful: You mention the specific connection between overreading and writing a review, and I hadn’t thought about that, but clearly the process of writing about a book invites its own forms of ovverreading. So thanks for that point.
I did not like the way the difference between “reader” and “reveiewer” has been brought up lately to discredit seme reader reviewers, and to excuse bad author behavior, yet I do feel, in my own writing, that I sometimes feel more like “just a reader” and at other times like more of a reviewer.
@Merrian:
I agree. I (a) would not be reading, (b) would not be reading what I read, and (c) would not be talking about books the way I now do without the internet.
@Pam Regis: Thank Pam. I’d be interested to know what you think about the Abbott.
For a long time I have been basking in the glory of my own underreading. As a fast reader, it is only the books that I thoroughly enjoy that I will return to reread (and often I will do this as soon as I finish it the first time) in an overreading fashion, pouring over the minutiae and relishing the beauty of the words. I agree with
For it is the discussions with fellow readers that either change my perception of a book or further cement my initial thoughts.
@Vassiliki:
I so envy your ability to get lost in a narrative this way!
ps. Hey, aren’t you that wonderful librarian from Ultimo?!!!!
I think the best way to solve this issue is for the reviewer… If they make a declaration as fact about a character or scene. To back it up with corresponding passage from the book. Then the reader of the review can think for themselves and figure out if the text supports the assertion.
I try more often than not to do this because I tend to go against the grain “review wise” and I do feel I owe the people reading my review proof of my point.
I will at least have page numbers handy in the comments if people want to ask questions about what I said. Which is why I insist on reading PDF.
@Teddypig:
I agree. This is something I try to do in my classes. So, we read Bet Me, and a student asserted that Min was wishy washy, was led around by the nose by her domineering friends, was a wimp, etc. Surprised, I asked him to find some passages that supported his interpretation. Eventually, after looking through the book for a few minutes, he said, “I don’t know where I got that idea, actually. I guess it was just an impression.” If he had pointed to certain passages, that would have been a great discussion, too. Maybe my own mind would have been changed. But yes, I 100% agree it can really help to go back to the text, and the best reviewers do back up their opinions with some references to what is actually written on the page.
@Jessica: I can think of one passage off the top of my head with Min that *might* lead me to believe that she’s a wimp and that’s the hot dog scene on the picnic table.
Other than that I’d have to think on it some more because it’s been a while since I read this one.
Good post.
I also wonder how much genre-shortcuts and/or expectations play into under-and-over reading of texts. Or how much authors really know about their own texts. Okay, that did sound bad. But I’m thinking is along the lines of what they purposefully put in the text and what they believe it meant when they wrote it vs. what they tapped into unconsciously vs. how they would view the text years later vs. what an author might personally believe vs. what they are willing to say publicly.
Ray Bradbury and Fahreheit 451 comes to mind of the past vs. future interpretations.
@Jessica:
I can only speak for myself. When I know I’m going to review a book before and while I’m reading it, I read the book completely differently. In fact, it almost kills my enjoyment in reading and I wind up wondering why I’m reading it at all.
If I read a book and it hits some marvelous or hideous note, it will move me to write a couple of lines about it on Goodreads, but I have not read that book as a reviewer.
I also almost NEVER read reviews of a book I haven’t read. A LADY AWAKENED was an exception because of the description of the heroine.
@AQ:
I’ve gone back over my own work later and noted things that I didn’t intend, but that are symbolically significant to the work and the overarching themes I was going for.
Re BET ME. You know, I’m the outlier on Crusie because I can’t say I don’t like her work, because I do, but she is the only author I’ve ever read that I had fun reading, but as soon as I close the book, I feel like I wasted my time. After three books of hers, I also have acquired the impression her women are wishy-washy and easily led. Could I point to examples? Yes. Do I care enough to do so? No.
@Moriah Jovan:
Me neither. I really want my experience to be as uninfluenced as possible.
Ok, so both you and AQ can see this.
Honestly, about Crusie, I think her heroines are 90% bluster. Yet they are often portrayed overtly as these really ballsy, independent, take no prisoners women (code for “feminist” in the romance genre). That said, I did not see how Min’s friends were leading her around by the nose in the first half of Bet Me. Maybe I need to have a reread!
@Jessica:
Look at the scene where Min & Cal kiss on that picnic table for the first time. It’s a fun scene admittedly but here’s the rub. Min isn’t mentally or emotionally impaired. There’s no alcohol involved, no coercion (unless Hot Dogs & Donots are considered coercion) and her friend, Liza, hit Cal over the head with something (can’t remember what) while they are kissing and then drags her away. I get that Min’s supposed to be torn and that it’s an obstacle being thrown up against fate (the antagonist). Even so she wanted that kiss and does allow herself to be dragged away without a whimper.
How the scene plays out does makes her a wimp and rather wishy-washy. Her not admitting that she overheard the bet also makes her rather a wimp. Perhaps just a human but still rather wishy-washy and let things happen to me (if it happens it was meant to be, if not then it wasn’t and I don’t have to admit that I failed or nobody actually worthy doesn’t love me) rather than take charge and go after what I want.
@Moriah Jovan:
I enjoy reading Crusie and I’ve purchased her books on occasion. What I think I enjoy more than anything else (when I have the time) is watching pieces of the story unfold on her blog or on the forum. Haven’t done it in years but I remember one where I had so much fun with the motivations and the layers on the boards that the story itself while fun didn’t really capture that experience. Call me weird. I probably would’ve been better off reading the story first and then going on the board. Perhaps a case of raised expectations combined with knowing about certain character motivations that didn’t actually make it onto the page.
I thought of a notable case of overreading (to my mind, anyway) — the AAR review of “Rejar.” That reviewer saw so much in the book that I believe simply was not there in the text. Unless I was the one underreading, which is certainly possible. But reading that review felt like reading a review of, say, “Pride and Prejudice” in which the reviewer commented, “I was so impressed by Darcy’s outrageous sense of humor and his silly pranks.”
@AQ: Those are two really good examples. The bet one I agree with and was inexplicable given her character. I guess I read the picnic example differently. I’m so used to the “my body wants it but my mind says no” in romance, that I read the friend’s actions as almost an extension of Min.
@willaful: There are a few reviewers I can think of who overread consistently, and I mean both bloggers and reviewers who write for journals and newspapers.
I just looked at the Rejar review. I haven’t read Rejar so I couldn’t tell if the reviewer was finding things in the book that were just not there.
I did feel that the enthusiasm was a bit stifling.
@Jessica: Ha, the picnic table. You’re right it is a classic romance novel technique on the push-pull of body over mind. Would you view the encounter any differently if Min had been hit over the head and Cal dragged away by his friends?
[...] problem intersected with my personal reading when Read React Review‘s Jessica did a post linking an academic discussion of underreading and overreading to on-line reviewing and some of the [...]