Oh those naughty critics
jmc
Critics as "'The Snarky, Dumbed-Down World of Book Reviewing', in which she
defines 'snark' as the 'hostile, knowing, bitter tone of contempt' that she
sees as characterising mainstream book reviewing". From my experience,
theatre and music criticism in the UK is just as vituperative and
uneducated.
What is extraordinary is the assumption throughout that this is a new thing
and the last paragraph's exhortation to author's to "toughen up". It might
be well to reflect that such narrow-minded moronism in reviewing murdered
John Keats and sentenced William Blake and Herman Melville to lives of
obscurity and poverty.
Time to revive Caviar to the General, ROBBIE?
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
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The pen is crueller...
Do authors protest too much?
Stephanie Merritt
Sunday May 11, 2003
The Observer
A couple of years ago, I was at a book launch with a friend who is a
prolific literary critic with a reputation for uncompromising bluntness.
Late in the evening my friend was approached by a man with an aggrieved
expression and a newly split lip, who asked him to confirm his identity. My
friend gave his name and the man with the bleeding face replied: 'Well,
someone's just come up and asked me if I was you, and before I had a chance
to say no, he did this.'
My friend never uncovered the identity of this hit-and-run merchant, though
he managed to produce a list of at least 12 authors at the party who might
conceivably want to punch him in the face. It's not news that writers take a
bad review to heart, nor that they are Mob-like in the dedication and
longevity of their grudges. One former literary editor was once introduced
to an author whose book he had long ago reviewed unfavourably and was
greeted quite earnestly with the words: 'For 15 years I've dreamed about
driving you to the edge of a cliff and shooting you in the head with a
silver revolver.' (The silver revolver was a nice touch; it showed he'd
spent time refining the details.)
Many authors nurture similar fantasies of violent revenge on their critics;
fortunately relatively few are galvanised to carry them out. Instead they
usually hit back in kind - the pen is crueller than the silver revolver.
The art of literary criticism and the wounds it inflicts have come under
scrutiny again in recent weeks, largely concentrated around the figure of
critic-turned-novelist James Wood. Rarely has a first novel been seized upon
so gleefully by critics; it seemed a universal assumption that in writing a
novel Wood, who built his critical reputation on the savagery of his attacks
on contemporary literature, had more or less invited a career's worth of
vendettas down on his head.
'There is undoubtedly an awful tension between telling the truth and not
being a monster,' Wood is quoted as saying in this week's New York Observer.
His comment appears in an interview with novelist Heidi Julavits, a member
of Dave Eggers's McSweeney's literary circle and co-editor of its newest
arts and literature magazine The Believer. The first issue began with a
10,000 word essay by Julavits entitled 'The Snarky, Dumbed-Down World of
Book Reviewing', in which she defines 'snark' as the 'hostile, knowing,
bitter tone of contempt' that she sees as characterising mainstream book
reviewing and which ought to be replaced for the good of literature with 'a
more thoughtful, sophisticated kind of book review'. Surprisingly, perhaps,
Julavits cites Wood as the exemplum of the right kind of critic.
The Believer's crusade to change the tenor of book reviewing was apparently
inspired by Julavits's experiences with reviews of her first novel, The
Mineral Palace. 'I would read a review with the tiniest little criticisms
and I would be under the table for three days,' she says.
Julavits is not the only American writer to complain about the vicious tone
of modern critics. In the current issue of the influential Poets and Writers
magazine, as part of a new series on the state of contemporary reviewing,
Steve Almond writes at length about the effect of negative criticism on a
fragile ego - specifically, the New York Times review of his own short-story
collection.
Every author will recognise the frustration and anger he describes in the
face of a reviewer who appears not to have understood (or even read) your
book and the desire to refute every poorly informed conclusion, but he is
wrong to say: 'There's no appeals process. No way to defend yourself in the
court of public opinion, nor to question the critic's qualifications.'
Obviously there is; you write long articles of self-justification or launch
your own magazine.
Questioning the nature and purpose of reviewing is not a new development;
Orwell was doing it 50 years ago with considerably greater wit in essays
such as 'In Defence of the Novel' and 'Confessions of a Book Reviewer'. But
you have to wonder if these current jeremiads are simply the cries of
writers who couldn't take a bad review dressed up as a concern for the
direction of literary culture.
And it's not as if they have a great deal to complain about; Julavits
received a $500,000 advance for her first two books, and Almond mentions
that he received '50 or so reviews' - not bad for a first collection.
Razor criticism in the Wood vein may cause pain to authors, but - when
executed with intelligence - carries a frisson for readers that fulsome
praise does not. Perhaps authors just need to toughen up and realise that
books which divide critics and excite debate generally have a longer shelf
life, and that no writer was ever prompted to improve by reviews full of
bland pleasantries.
Do authors protest too much? Email bo...@observer.co.uk or have your say on
the Books talkboards
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2003
ROBBIE
"jmc" <jamesmart...@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:b9l8p1$8rk$1...@sparta.btinternet.com...
>
> Time to revive Caviar to the General, ROBBIE?
I couldn't agree more; we need to contact Felix Dennis, the magazine
magnate, and appeal to his OZ past- he boasts he likes spending lots of
money on projects.
>
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------
Martha Bridegam
jmc wrote:
> Guardian Unlimited Š Guardian Newspapers Limited 2003
Through the mysterious workings of abgosynch, I bought that issue of *The
Believer* the night before jmc posted this.
Actually Julavits' article leads off with Orwell's 'Confessions of a Book
Reviewer' and moves on to 'In Defence of the Novel'. (Something that btw Ms.
Merritt might have had the grace to mention.)
Julavits quotes Orwell at length, especially this from "In Defence...":
"To apply a decent standard to the ordinary run of novels is like weighing a
flea on a spring-balance intended for elephants. On such a balance as that a
flea would simply fail to register; you would have to start by constructing
another balance which revealed the fact that there are big fleas and little
fleas. It is no use monotonously saying, 'this book is tripe.' [The reviewer]
has got to discover something which is not tripe, and pretty frequently, or get
the sack. This means sinking his standards to a depth at which makes [sic]
Ethel M. Dell's *Way of the Eagle* a good book, *The Constant Nymph* a superb
book, and *The Man of Property* -- what? A palpitating tale of passion, a
terrific, soul-shattering masterpiece, an unforgettable epic which will last as
long as the English language, and so on and so forth. (As for any really good
book, it would burst the thermometer)."
Actually, the phrase is slightly misquoted, even considering the effect of the
square brackets. It should read:
"To apply a decent standard to the ordinary run of novels is like weighing a
flea on a spring-balance intended for elephants. On such a balance as that a
flea would simply fail to register; you would have to start by constructing
another balance which revealed the fact that there are big fleas and little
fleas. And this approximately is what X does. It is no use monotonously saying,
of book after book, 'this book is tripe,' because, once again, no one will pay
you for writing that kind of thing. X has got to discover something which is
not tripe, and pretty frequently, or get the sack. This means sinking his
standards to a depth at which, say, Ethel M. Dell's *Way of an Eagle* is a
fairly good book. But on a scale of values which makes *The Way of an Eagle* a
good book, *The Constant Nymph* is a superb book, and *The Man of Property* is
-- what? A palpitating tale of passion, a terrific, soul-shattering
masterpiece, an unforgettable epic which will last as long as the English
language, and so on and so forth. (As for any really good book, it would burst
the thermometer)."
Near as I can tell, Julavits agrees with Orwell that a kind of 'grade
inflation' has resulted from hack book reviewing. However, she goes on to say
that unenlightened 'snark' seems to be the current reaction against what she
terms the "Orwell Tripe Effect," so that the reaction against praising tripe as
genius is to cut down interesting literary efforts as "overly ambitious" (she
hates that phrase) and to sneer at people (like her) who come out of MFA
programs and attend events that are apparently called Yaddo and Breadloaf that
she presumes her readers will have heard of.
"...I don't know what many critics believe when it comes to literature; at
worst, I fear that book reviews are just an opportunity for a critic to strive
for humor, and to appear funny and smart and a little bit bitchy, without
attempting to espouse any higher ideals -- or even to try to understand, on a
very localized level, what a certain book is trying to do, even if it does it
badly. This is wit for wit's sake -- or, hostility for hostility's sake. This
hostile, knowing, bitter tone fo contempt is, I suspect, a bastard off-spring
of Orwell's flea-weighers. I call it Snark..."
Apart from the Orwell, her other texts include the James Wood-Zadie Smith
exchange at
<http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/generalfiction/story/0,6000,563868,00.html>
and
<http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/generalfiction/story/0,6000,568381,00.html>.
Critics she praises include Wood, Edmund Wilson, Mary McCarthy, Norman
Podhoretz (despite a few zings at his personal character), and Lionel Trilling,
in fact she idealizes the '40s New York Intellectuals generally.
What she doesn't like is the conversion of literary criticism into something
like "gossip." She says, "Here's the scary truth: individual books don't get
reviewed -- careers do. People do." In this regard she seems especially jealous
of the reception given Stephen Carter's "The Emperor of Ocean Park."
She agrees with Orwell that the right kind of critics should be "probably,
neither highbrows nor lowbrows, but elastic-brows."
Via all of the above and much more, she arrives at the view that proper
reviewers should, like Wilson and McCarthy, write reviews "underwritten by an
attempt to sort out right and wrong." I.e. that criticism, if withering, should
be withering for a responsible, literate reason, & not just nastiness for the
sake of self-promotion or paying off scores or simply covering the reviewer's
ignorance about the nature of writing.
--
I dunno. Everything out of McSweeney's is so smooth and elliptical and cool
that you never precisely know what it's trying to tell you. McSweeney's as an
institution reminds me of a giant egg, maybe two or three stories high and
proportionally thick-shelled. You know there's nourishing yolk inside and maybe
even some kind of life forming, but you can't get inside, so you settle for
admiring that hard smooth exterior even as you beat your puny fists on it.
...and now I had better drop this metaphor or it will hatch a giant chicken
that I don't know what to do with.
/M
Martha Bridegam
find it's online:
<http://www.believermag.com/issues/march_2003/julavits.htm>
/M
Martha Bridegam
Martha Bridegam wrote:
Further abgosynch: this morning a case I was handling turned out to have a tangential
relation to the boatyard where Jack London built his yacht the "Snark".
/M
Martha Bridegam
apologies if it appears twice/M)
jmc wrote: