Reviewed by: The Gist of Reading by Andrew Elfenbein Joey Frantz (bio) The Gist of Reading, by Andrew Elfenbein (Stanford University Press, 2018), 272 pp. Andrew Elfenbein's The Gist of Reading isn't about meticulous, erudite, critical reading. It's about what literary reading is like for most readers most of the time. What exactly goes on in someone's head when they read, say, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie? The gist of The Gist of Reading is that readers forget most of what they read but construct a "gist representation" that boils a text down to its essentials. This, alone, is obvious, but the questions Elfenbein is interested in are: (1) what is remembered, and what is forgotten? and (2) how can we know? He takes both psychological and historical approaches. The psychological [End Page 150] approaches are ambitious and promising but lack explanatory power, while the historical angle is merely illuminating. A Victorian literary scholar and professor of English, Elfenbein sought training in experimental psychology so he could ask basic questions about reading. For example, how can we know what word association really is? One way is to ask experimental test subjects to make what's called a lexical decision, that is, to present them with words and see how quickly they can decide whether a word is real or made up. It turns out that people identify a word as being real more quickly if it is preceded by a related word, i.e., they are more likely to identify bird as a real word if it was preceded by sparrow than if it was preceded by an unrelated word. What makes this finding interesting is that this effect holds true even if the first word (such as sparrow before bird) was presented so briefly that test subjects had no conscious awareness of having seen it. Elfenbein glosses over many studies related to sound (such as alliteration and rhyme); other studies deal with how test subjects make sense of what they read. Though provocative, such research is hard to use in a more specific, literary context. One reason is that whatever unconscious work goes into the reading process cannot, by definition, be verified by readers; unconscious means unconscious. When I read "The Hollow Men," the unconscious work that goes into understanding "A penny for the old guy" isn't something I can report on. Alas, Elfenbein falls into the familiar trap of making banal claims imbued with an aura of technical precision. For example, Elfenbein works with the distinction between online reading experiences (how we experience a text as we read it) versus offline experiences (how our brain processes a text once we're done with it). He uses the concept of a situation model to describe a reader's representation of what's going on in a text. These terms are useful in and of themselves. But consider how Elfenbein uses them in this sentence: The offline retrievability of long-term situation models may depend on online "depth of processing." Since "offline" means "after we're done reading the text" and "situation models" means "mental models of what happened in a text," this sentence simply means that how well you remember what happens in a text may depend on how deeply you read it. Another term, activation, is used in research on memory, but in this specific sentence, activation just dresses up a mundane idea: Depending on the reader, emotional sympathy with certain concepts or the ability to connect concepts to personal experience may increase activation. [End Page 151] The problem isn't that Elfenbein wants to interweave psychology and criticism; the problem is that the psychology doesn't always provide new insights. In a particularly egregious moment, Elfenbein actually offers an equation to describe how entertaining a text is: entertainment value = A (interest) + B (self-relevance) + C (transportation) This is offered as "a model that has predictive value," but it simply does not. Of course Elfenbein would not claim that the values of the equation could be calculated precisely, but since "interest," "self-relevance," and "transportation" are fuzzy concepts, the equation is woefully imprecise and reeks of Physics Envy. Elfenbein seems to admit...