What type of review works best

This is the point at which I’m going to take you on a little detour through the world of literary theory. I promise you it will be interesting, and I will try to keep it as short as possible. In general, there are two ways of looking at literature (and if you want more than that, you might try “How to Read a novel like an English Professor” which I confess I initially bought of guilt, because it’s another one of those topics which I felt that I should know something about.)
In short, I am a constructivist (as are many of you, I am sure), while our friend Harriet clearly is not. A constructivist is someone who feels that there is no such thing as an inherent meaning to be found and identified in any object, piece of writing or event. A constructivist does not care to try and find out what the author’s “original intent” was when he or she was first writing Wuthering Heights or A Room of One’s Own. Nothing has just one meaning, nor does it have a fixed meaning.
Are you tracking so far? Those peole who feel that a book only has one meaning and that that meaning is “what the author intended” are usually referred to as positivists. They think that you can basically take the measure of any event, happening or piece of writing in a mathematical way, with mathematical precision, as though literature were just another brand of science. If you find a passage in Proust where he is talking about a saucepan, it might be appropriate to analyze exactly what word he was using in French, and to lok at exactly what types of saucepans were for sale in his particular village in France at that time. Under no circumstances would it be appropriate to assume that although he used the word saucepan, he was really thinking about a boat, or even to state that we, being products of twenty-first century America, have no right even attempting to figure out what he might have meant when he wrote saucepan. Am I making sense so far?
A constructivist, in contrast, draws meaning from an event or a passage by making a relational meaning. That is, something is only meaningful if it has been filtered through your own experiences. In the case of Proust and the saucepan, this would mean that it would be perfectly reasonable for you to consider not only Proust’s own saucepan experiences, but your own as well. If this passage ended up reminding you of a certain camping trip you took with the girl scouts back in 1976, this would not lead to a “wrong” interpretation of the passage. Rather, it would lead to an idiosyncratic rendering of the passage which gave the story meaning for you. In other words, a constructivist would have no problem with your writing about how Count Vronsky in Anna Karenina reminded you of your old boyfriend, or how Madame Bovary reminded you of a time when you felt similarly empty and unfulfilled in your marriage. I suspect that everyone who reviews a book on amazon in which they use the phrases “the characters just didn’t feel believeable to me” or “I wasn’t convinced” is actually a constructivist. These are the women (moi included here) who read chick lit to figure out why they don’t have a boyfriend or a good relationship, and who treat books like pharmaceuticals. And I suspect that the publishers know this – unconsciously if not consciously. They package their “medicine” in familiar packages and colors so that we can identify and grab hold of our drug of choice, disappearing into the stories as we attempt to make sense of our own lives. Pink for the unhappy single girl, blue for the fortyish hausfrau rubbed raw by the pain and emotion of a loveless marriage, green for the “going not all that gently into that good night” lady in her sixties, still trying to make sense of her life as a whole. Why do we read? It depends on who we are.