The Troubles of a Reviewer.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XLV, Issue 12, 21 September 1910, Page 54

The Troubles of a Reviewer.

An American newspaper has cast a friendly eye on the troubles of the poor book-reviewer. The principal male character of the modern novel, it appears, is so often lacking in every quality that may rightly be termed heroic that only a very bast 1 or slovenly reviewer could possibly write of him as ‘‘the hero”—a new word is wanted. There is some truth in the contention; but if the reviewer's conscience desires easing in the matter of the hero it is opportune to point out that there arc other parts of the modern novel for which new and more appropriate names are desirable. We have read novels without the vestige of a bold, honest plot. We have read novels in which the dialogue is of a kind that no mortal men could ever exchange*. A vast amount of heavy brain work at the reviewer’s table (supposing a reviewer ever to be wealthy enough to have a table of bis own) would be saved if instead of laboriously explaining that a novel has no plot and hopeless dialogue he could write two neat words describing each fact at a glance. Meanwhile, however, it is the principal male character on which attention is to be concentrated; and America—supreme in the matter of coining words—stands not where it did if some merry and bright substitute for hero is not immediately forthcoming. Thackeray, it will be remembered, faced by a similar difficulty, described “Vanity Fair” as “a novel without a hero”— though how many modern heroes of ficfiction, (*ither Dobbin or Rawdon Crawley are worth may be left to individual reckoning.