Shoptalk, pretty much, is shoptalk, whichever the shop. Out on the foundry floor, book reviewers gripe about pay, paymasters, and the grim, thanks-free life it is they lead. More than most of the working classes, reviewers also resort to math: there is no longer or more depressing division than that of unprincely fees by hours spent reading books for review.

Separate from the eternal questions of recompense and of what use book reviews are to the wider world is the matter to do with why as a writer a reviewer reviews.

Many writers don’t review and never have, so it’s not as if reviewing is an apprenticeship you’re required to serve if you’re intent on writing novels. And yet in some other lights, book review pages do sometimes feel like literary proving grounds, territory largely claimed by or ceded to younger writers finding their feet. You can only follow this so far, of course. From the fact that, for the most part, writers of senior standing – Atwood, Munro, Ondaatje – don’t often review, you could conclude that you come to a point a career where time begins to matter more, when you feel the need to clear other people’s work out of the way to be with your own full-time. Then again, you could also conclude that Atwood, et al. recognize the desolation of the reviewing scene in this country. Or, simpler still, they plain don’t like reviewing.

Still, enough writers keep on reviewing long after they’ve established themselves in other kinds of print. George Orwell believed reviewing wasted a writer’s time and vitality. “He is pouring his immortal spirit down the drain, half a pint at a time,” he warned in an essay. And yet he couldn’t resist the gravitational tug of the plumbing; the collection containing that essay is filled out by reviews. Some of the most instructive thinking on the subject may be in the introduction with which John Updike opens Odd Jobs, a 900-page reminder of his non-fictional energies. Updike, to begin, goes to his abacus. He reckons he’s reviewed 369 books, to each of which he’s devoted, at modest estimate, ten hours. “That comes to 3,690 hours, or 461.25 eight-hour days, or, less holidays and vacations, just about two working years.” Those, he considers, were years well spent; reviewing is “a profitable subdivision of creativity.” Reviewing is its own reward; it leaves him “shyly happy among texts.”

That sounds about right: reviewing is, in the end, a self-service by which a writer, knowing the math, is satisfied to engage someone else’s language and plot, to test themself against someone else’s prose. And, if we’re honest, to feed there, by take-out. “My purpose in reading,” Updike adds, tongue only partly cheeky, “has ever secretly been not to come and judge but to come and steal.”