Being a Book Critic Is Nothing Special
Since I first wrote about the call for less niceness in literary criticism, there have been a few more rounds in the argument, most noticeably after a particularly nasty review of Alix Ohlin’s most recent novel and short story collection, a review I went to town on not just for being badly written but for stemming from bad first premises. Shortly after my blog post, Commentary literary critic D.G. Myers offered some qualified praise for my response. On the plus side, Myers considered me “the only critic who grasped what was at stake in the whole controversy,” but then he ultimately decided that my critique of the reviewer’s style was wrong. Here’s the big climax:
“American fiction is in decline, because so much of it is ‘literary fiction,’ written not to defend a style—not to declare This and only this is how fiction should be done!—but to have a career, usually in a college or university somewhere, about which a creative writing professor can feel lucky. The indolence of Alix Ohlin’s prose represents a betrayal of the literary vocation, and William Giraldi attacked it in the name of defending the value and dignity of good writing. Those who would sneer at him for being ‘mean’ prefer the convention of social pleasantness, a heartfelt relativism which holds that every judgment is a personal preference anyway.”
For my own part, I think the problem has less to do with William Giraldi being “mean” than with him and other critics arrogantly assuming that they are gatekeepers capable of deciding whether a work of prose shows enough, to borrow his phrases, “linguistic originality wed to intellect and emotional verity” to pass muster as a “worthy assertion of imagination.” That they’re the ones sufficiently strong of heart and character to, circling back to the Katie Roiphe line that describes Giraldi’s self-selected mission so well, “protect beautiful language.” Even Dwight Garner touched on this tradition when he expressed a longing for more critics “perceptive enough to single out the voices that matter for legitimate praise, abusive enough to remind us that not everyone gets, or deserves, a gold star.”
I’ve used a Northrop Frye line about literary criticism being evidence of “the history of taste” a few times over the years on this blog, and I’m invoking it again—the idea that what critics are telling us is beautiful language reflects “the vacillations of fashionable prejudice” more than it demonstrates any intrinsic literary merit. They’re just subjective evaluations which, because they line up with a bunch of other subjective evaluations, get bundled together as a “tradition,” or a “canon,” or some such. I’d argue that this runs a bit deeper than Myers’ formulation that “every judgment is a personal preference anyway,” because that’s only half the story. This relativism, if we want to call it that, leaves “social pleasantness” in the dust—because I’m not suggesting “it’s all good,” I’m suggesting it doesn’t much matter whether any of it’s good or bad, because the idea that any of it is “fiction that will really endure” is the real convention of social pleasantness. We can prop some of it up for decades, maybe even centuries, but eventually it’s all going to fade into oblivion, and us with it.
There’s a cheery thought, right?
Now, I’m not saying that we should just abandon our critical philosophies (whatever they may be, and if that’s not too grandiose a way to describe them) and embrace radical nihilism. After all, I still get up every morning and look for stories—fiction and nonfiction—that entertain me and enrich my understanding of the life I’m living and the world I’m living it in (including all those lives that are profoundly unlike my own). What I am saying is that instead of pretending, to ourselves and to others, that we are holding up the banner for some great tradition or another, we accept the historical contingency of our beliefs about literary accomplishment and greatness. Actually, no, we don’t just accept it: We dive into it, probe it as vigorously as we’d probe the books to which we’re applying our judgment. Instead of saying “This and only this is how fiction should be done!” we can say “This is a way of doing fiction that works for me,” and if we can work past that level to “And here’s what I’ve figured out about why it works for me,” even better.
This idea that being able to do that is something special, though, that it puts those of us who do it (or at least try to do it) in some sort of cultural vanguard—that’s got to go.
5 September 2012 | theory |
Let the Hate Flow Through You
Slate has run an article by Jacob Silverman bemoaning “the mutual admiration society that is today’s literary culture, particularly online,” because authors connecting with their readers, and with each other, is going to ruin everything.
“if you spend time in the literary Twitter- or blogospheres, you’ll be positively besieged by amiability, by a relentless enthusiasm that might have you believing that all new books are wonderful and that every writer is every other writer’s biggest fan. It’s not only shallow, it’s untrue, and it’s having a chilling effect on literary culture, creating an environment where writers are vaunted for their personal biographies or their online followings rather than for their work on the page.”
“Not to share in the lit world’s online slumber party,” Silverman continues, “can seem strange and mark a person as unlikable or (a worse offense in this age) unfollowable.” He seems to be suggesting that panning a book is seen as bad form, “making it harder and harder to hear the voices of dissent—the skeptical, cranky criticisms that may be painful for writers to experience but that make for a vibrant, useful literary culture.”
That’s right: Silverman says negative reviews keep literary culture from becoming irrelevant.
Silverman does get much of the backstory to this issue right, particularly when he talks about how the alternate literary discourses that have flourished in the online era created a siege mentality among that class of people who reviewed books for mainstream media outlets. And it’s true that there are reviewers, and review editors, who prefer to accentuate the positive. (In fact, I’ve written for such outlets, including my current freelance contributions at Shelf Awareness and a recently concluded gig with the USA Network.) Where he goes wrong, I think, is in believing that there’s a problem that needs solving.
After all, there’s still plenty of negative reviewing out there, if you put in a little effort to look for it. Hell, Jonathan Franzen gets panned, and he’s supposed to be the darling of literary culture. Even online book lovers, who Silverman accuses of “cloying niceness and blind enthusiasm,” are known to get in on the criticism. Now, let’s stipulate for the record that there’s currently a “movement” online in which people are so put out by criticism that they’ve taken it upon themselves to shame negative reviewers into silence—but it’s also pretty well established that we recognize those people as assholes. For the most part, I think you’ll find that reasonable, sane people who like books and participate in online forums like what they like, and if you don’t like what they like, they’re fine with that—unless, of course, you’re stupid or condescending about it, like, let’s say, a literary snob who thinks it’s still au courant to snark about chick lit. Then, you’ll get the smackdown you so richly deserve.
I can’t speak to anybody else’s motivation for choosing to write positive book reviews over negative ones, but this is where I’m coming from: Life is too short to waste on books I don’t like, unless I’m getting paid to read them. I do make exceptions for some books that make our culture actively worse by their existence, but for the most part, I’m content to tell you about books and writers I believe matter… and why I believe it.
3 August 2012 | theory |
Our Endless and Proper Work is my new book with Belt Publishing about starting (and sticking to) a productive writing practice. 
