Charlotte Grimshaw is crowned best reviewer – yet again
Novelist and memoirist Charlotte Grimshaw won the reviewer of the year award at the Voyager Media Awards on Friday night for the third time. Her portfolio – two reviews in ReadingRoom, two in the dear old Listener – was described by judges as "a marvel". Quite right; she really has no peer in literary criticism in New Zealand, with her close reading, her lively mind, her ability to raise a review into a piece of thrilling and sometimes suspenseful literature. You don't know where she'll go, you can't tell what's going to happen next.
It's actually the fourth time she has won a reviewing award. Back in 2009, she won the reviewer of the year award at the Montana national book awards – the last year the category was recognised. It ran for 11 years and during that time one writer won it four times: David Eggleton. He was good. He was really, really good. I commissioned and published his work when I served as books editor at the Listener and the guy was spectacular, in love with language and metaphor and daring insights – the reviews sort of read like his poetry, which he always delivers at rapid pants-on-fire haste, but there was nothing performative about the reviews. He took them seriously, paid strict attention to the work.
Grimshaw has won the Voyager review award in 2018 and 2019, and also been shortlisted twice. All throughout the years I've commissioned and published her work and seen at close quarters how seriously she takes each assignment, too. Nothing is bashed out or filed for the sake of filing. Grimshaw doesn't have the cynical good cheer of a hack. Writing means everything to her – well, you know, up there with food, shelter, and family – and each review exists as an opportunity to think hard, to make connections, to look at the work from however many interesting angles. She reviews as a novelist: alert to character, and narrative. We've argued about her copy over the years, now and then bitterly, she's called me low and awful names, which is to say she stands up for what she's doing and wants it known it's taken a lot of good, careful work. One word comes up quite a bit: "logic". This is when she instructs me that her reviews operate on a logic and that to interfere with that logic is close to insane. She wins most of our arguments.
Some of her reviews that I published at the end of the last decade are quoted in her extraordinary new memoir The Mirror Book. She refers to her review of a collection of letters by Sylvia Plath, and two of her reviews of works by Knausgaard. Interesting. Here was Grimshaw, writing hard and deep about those books, and at the same time seeing connections in Plath and Knausgaard to her own life: she was a reviewer as researcher. There was a more explicit example of this when Michael King asked me to send him each and any book of New Zealand history to review when I was at the Listener. They formed part of his massive and majestic synthesis of New Zealand history when he worked on his great Penguin History of New Zealand. (He twice won the Montana reviewer of the year award.)
Grimshaw's two ReadingRoom reviews in her 2021 portfolio were of Nothing To See by Pip Adam, and a book of portraits by Marti Friedlander. There was an audacious, high-spirited passage in her review of Adam's book that only Grimshaw would have dared to write. She had been describing the way the novel played with ideas of the divided self, and then she stepped off the page, so to speak, and wrote, "The reviewer felt the beginning of cracks, and suddenly she began to divide. There was Char, the conscientious one, always willing to press on, to be respectful, literary, diligent. And suddenly there were other selves, who…complained: 'What are these characters like? Why don’t they get out more? Where is the world? What’s going on?'
"And Char quelling them, firmly: 'Patience. All will be revealed. Pip Adam is playing with issues of identity. She plays with gender, with surface, with "reality." With the way we "simulate" our own personal truth. Perhaps with the way our electronic devices draw energy from us, keeping us in an unreal world. Note the young child character, who is called "they" not because they are divided but because they identify that way. Adam is writing a story of those society chooses not to see, whose history is sometimes unspeakable. The very fact that she’s divided us shows she’s succeeded brilliantly: her ideas have interested and diverted us, have entered our heads!'
"The selves vanished, and the review could proceed, with due decorum…"
A meta review, the divided Char – fantastic. As for her review of Friedlander's book, one sentence can be seen as a kind of mission statement that ought to describe Grimshaw herself: "She refused to settle for the superficial, the passionless explanation; she looked harder and deeper and never stopped looking."
