I have a confession to make. For years, I earned a living—or a sort of living—writing negative book reviews. Panning a book wasn’t all I did, and it wasn’t even most of what I did, but the pans were what got the attention. Yet when I think of the prospect of sharpening my knife and setting to work on another negative review, distaste for the enterprise makes me listless. The truth is that I intend never to write a negative book review again.
I didn’t realize how strong my revulsion against negative reviewing had become until some months ago I read, in the New York Times, an essay by the critic Clive James titled “Whither the Hatchet Job?” James laments the inability of American critics to lay into their scrivening colleagues with the exuberance practiced by their British counterparts. “America,” James wrote, “does polite literary criticism well enough. And how: there is a new Lionel Trilling on every campus.” In contrast to the soporific American scene James sets the thriving vitality of book reviewing in Britain, where “ripping somebody’s reputation is recognized blood sport.”
James is on to something significant about the current critical landscape, but the mild tone in American book reviewing today is not a permanent feature of the American character. From Dwight Macdonald to Pauline Kael, John Simon, Seymour Krim, Mary McCarthy, Elizabeth Hardwick, Renata Adler, and Dale Peck, American critics have been as sanguinary as the Brits in their estimations of that lamb gambolling toward the slaughterhouse known as the “new book.” Even the “polite” Trilling was lethal in his sardonic condescension toward “The Kinsey Report.”
In fact, the New York Review of Books recently printed, on the happy occasion of its fiftieth anniversary, a glorious facsimile edition of the first issue, in which the majority of the reviews are mixed to negative. The negative judgments yield nothing to the Brits in critical spleen. Here is Mary McCarthy on William Burroughs’s “Naked Lunch”: “disgusting and sometimes tiresome, often in the same places.” Norman Mailer on a memoir of nineteen-twenties Paris: “a modest bad dull book.” Jonathan Miller on John Updike’s “The Centaur”: “a poor novel irritatingly marred by good features.” Nicola Chiaromonte on Edward Albee’s “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”: “pretty near unbearable.”
Fifty years ago, the savage tone of book reviewing thrived in intellectual journals like the New York Review, Partisan Review, Commentary, and Dissent. Contentiousness was not just an intellectual style; it was a social habit, practiced at cocktail gatherings, parties, dinner parties, meals, and while strolling in the park. The tone of the essays in the first issue of the New York Review is casual, brisk, conversational, almost intimate, as if the written text were the spillover from a hectic conversation of the previous night.
Criticism was socializing by other means. And since socializing in those narrow literary and intellectual precincts consisted of egos battling for position, status, friendship, and love, it was inevitable that the criticism embody and sometimes exemplify what Delmore Schwartz—no mean takedown artist himself—once called “the scrimmage of appetite.” Pulverizing reviews were not taboo because the victims could always make their retort at the next social gathering, or on the pillow, or in one of the journals that served as kitchen tables for the extended family of writers who published there.
In the popular imagination, the intellectuals—especially the so-called New York intellectuals—were hugely influential, but this is a distortion. Hannah Arendt’s “Reflections on Little Rock,” published in Commentary in 1959, caused few ripples outside her own circle, even though Arendt’s argument that the United States was wrong to pursue integration at that moment was incendiary. By contrast, her article “Eichmann in Jerusalem” caught on in the larger culture because she published it in The New Yorker, one of the dreaded “middlebrow” magazines that was then in the process of making intellectuals like James Baldwin, Dwight Macdonald, Elizabeth Hardwick, Mary McCarthy, Alfred Kazin, and Harold Rosenberg prominent national figures.
But during much of the fifties and sixties, literary and intellectual life was far removed from the mainstream. Miller’s dismissal of Updike’s novel had zero effect on Updike’s career. The same, one imagines, went for Albee’s play, and for a volume of Arthur Schlesinger’s essays, most of which were panned by Dwight Macdonald in that first New York Review issue. The intellectuals’ inability to affect the social currents and political trends they obsessed over was a driving force behind their negative reviewing.
Elizabeth Hardwick refers, with worldly bluntness, to this sharp sense of limitation in an essay in the inaugural New York Review: “Making a living is nothing; the great difficulty is making a point, making a difference—with words.” A few years earlier, Harold Rosenberg had described the downtown bohemian atmosphere as “a kind of metaphysical retirement.” Saul Bellow, in his 1968 story “Mosby’s Memoirs,” contrasted the character of Hymen Lustgarten, a bumbling, ineffectual former left-wing writer, with Willis Mosby, a smooth WASP aristocrat who, by virtue of his position in society, has become a member of the political elite. For many of these writers, the imbalance between the power of their minds and their actual power was almost vertiginous.
The insular, hothouse atmosphere of postwar intellectual combat is where, about twenty years after it disappeared, I schooled myself in the dark art of the takedown. I can now see the irony of my situation—or, as those bygone critics would have said, my “position.” My awareness of my own ineffectuality in the world also led me to seek out the power conferred by words. But the world had changed. I was not practicing a shared style. I was cultivating an idiosyncrasy: I was one of the few critics who carried a hatchet.
What had once been nicely divided into highbrow and middlebrow culture—even at the time a crude formulation of a complex reality—had become a wildly eclectic place where “high” and “low” and everything in between existed side by side. A critic I admired as I was starting out was Robert Hughes, who reviewed art for Time, ruminated more deeply on culture in the New York Review and in the back of the New Republic, published serious books on serious subjects, and introduced people to art in television series on PBS. His style was gripping, elegant, and, above all, popular. Though I didn’t share his fierce aversion to much contemporary art, I thought that the way his career blurred the distinctions between “high” and “low” was exemplary.
The general condition that reigned was the gravitational force of commerce. Writers—including serious ones—began to be financially rewarded for their previously marginal ideas; in the process, they expressed them with less bitter ardor. We are used to wringing our hands over commercialization, but the assimilation of sharp critical intellects into the mainstream sprang them from their downtown ghettos. Rosenberg, Macdonald et al. at The New Yorker, Daniel Bell at Fortune, and Irving Howe at Time (before returning to world of the small intellectual journal with Dissent) all enjoyed the greater effect their new venues allowed them to have on the world around them, even as it nudged many of them into tempering their tone. They didn’t “sell out.”’ Rather, the “middlebrow” publications that hired them were evolving and acquiring a new type of candor and complexity. It was as gratifying a surprise to come across Hughes’s high literary excursions in Time, or Janet Malcolm’s clairvoyant profiles in The New Yorker, as it was to find James Wood’s unforgettable briefs for a more ontologically vivid fiction in The New Republic.
One of the results of everyone sharing the same literary-intellectual-commercial space was that serious negative criticism—there had always been the brisk negative newspaper review—could, for the first time, have real-life consequences. Now that authors could make a living from their advances, a withering takedown could be a blow to someone’s livelihood. Reviewer and author were no longer part of an extended community, one of whose shared tribal rites was the Olympian takedown. You, the critic, were just some person out there saying something nasty about someone else. Critic and author stood before a far wider audience than the postwar literary critics ever dreamed of having.
This dissolution of literary ghettos, where the slaughtering review once reigned, has produced what James decries as our current “polite” tone of reviewing. But his longing for the “blood sport” of “ripping somebody’s reputation” seems to me both theatrical and anachronistic. Our book reviews—and our art and movie and theatre reviews—are not so much polite as, to borrow the phrase John Berryman used to describe W. H. Auden’s criticism in that first New York Review issue, “modest and generous.”
They are necessarily modest because, unlike a positive review, a negative one implies authority, and authority has become something ambiguous in our age of quick, teeming Internet response, where all the old critical standards and parameters are in the process of vanishing and being reinvented. Fifty years ago, Dwight Macdonald’s excoriations were sanctioned by a tight-knit community of readers and thinkers. In our time of dizzying reconfiguring, a Macdonald takedown, so assured in its acerbic judgments, would not have the resonance it once did. The source of its vituperative authority would not just be opaque. It would be non-existent.
Authority is a slippery thing, and its nature is going through yet another permutation in literary life. There are plenty of young, gifted critics writing fiercely and argumentatively in relatively obscure Web publications. But they are keenly aware that, along with the target of their scrutiny, the source of their own authority is also an object of examination. Macdonald simply took for granted the fact that membership in a community conferred on him a certain accredited brilliance. This is what, for me, makes reading him now an incomplete experience, because the group that certified his judgments has disappeared. Literary criticism on the Web, on the other hand, draws whatever authority it has by renouncing any claims to authority. The Web critic relies on his or her readers for attentiveness and approval. A social style is gradually replacing an idiosyncratic one—whether it’s n + 1’s collective tone and worldly references to literary coteries and cliques or Choire Sicha’s slyly self-deprecatory exclamation marks.
Twenty years ago, Robert Hughes might have taken up the subject of Andy Warhol with a demon barber’s gleam in his eye. Instead, this article by Nick Faust in the online journal The New Inquiry, though its occasion is a reflection on Andy Warhol, captures the new spirit of criticism. It is a positive critique of the genre’s social possibilities, and it is expressed in a social tone:
In other words, the critics will leak the total secret context surrounding a work of art—Edmund Wilson meets Edward Snowden! The French Annalistes wrote history in such a way, characterizing a moment in time by reconstructing its finest, most mundane details. Why not a criticism that draws from the same energy? I have no idea whether it would be successful, but I love the possibility of it.
Today’s reviews are generous, some people say, because it is a nervous time, and an economically capricious time, and therefore no time to be making enemies. Plus, they argue, reading and writing themselves are in a precarious state, and have to be protected. Both points are true, but superficial.
More profoundly, we are living in what the nineteenth-century French sociologist Auguste Comte called a “critical” age. Comte defined critical epochs as times of social and political disharmony, when values and traditions were in upheaval and there was no consensus on what society and culture should be. He opposed critical ages to “organic” ones, when harmony, consensus, and unity reigned. Critical ages, as in Comte’s own Romantic era, were times when artistic creation moved faster than critical scrutiny, even though new critical standards were being constructed, destroyed, and constructed again at a rapid pace. Organic ages, on the other hand, were periods when critical standards and artistic traditions were stable and coherent.
It’s a rich distinction, one that I often find myself returning to, though my understanding of it keeps evolving. We now live in a critical age, liberating and discombobulating, where everything is allowed but nothing is permitted to take root in a deep or lasting way. Yet even our rapidly proliferating criticism has started to be outpaced by creation—or at least by innovation, in the way that technology is shaping the way we write, think, and disseminate our writing and our thoughts to other people. That inspiring, devouring, confounding breathless flux is the source of our modest and generous criticism.
Applying old standards to a time when everyone is throwing everything they can at the proverbial wall to see what sticks is like printing out a tweet, putting it in an envelope, and sending it to someone through the mail. The very fact that reading and writing are in jeopardy, or simply evolving, means that to try to put the brakes of old criteria on a changing situation is going to be either obstructive or boring. In our critical age of almost manic invention, the most effective criticism of what, in the critic’s eyes, is a bad book would be to simply ignore it, while nudging better books toward the fulfillment of what the critic understands to be each book’s particular creative aim. The very largeness and diversity of present-day audiences make less and less relevant the type of review that never gets beyond the book under review. It’s the critic’s job nowadays not just to try to survive and flourish amid ever-shifting modes of cognition and transmission, but to define new standards that might offer clarity and illumination amid all the change. Quite simply, the book review is dead, and the long review essay centered on a specific book or books is staggering toward extinction. The future lies in a synthetic approach. Instead of books, art, theatre, and music being consigned to specialized niches, we might have a criticism that better reflects the eclecticism of our time, a criticism that takes in various arts all at once. You might have, say, a review of a novel by Rachel Kushner that is also a reflection on “Girls,” the art of Marina Abramović, the acting style of Jessica Chastain, and the commercial, theatrical, existential provocations of Lady Gaga and Miley Cyrus. Or not. In any case, it’s worth a try.
New demands for new times are the big-picture reasons I’ve lost the taste for doing negative reviews. I have smaller, personal ones, too. Having become an author of books myself, I now find that the shoe is most definitely on the other foot. I once dismissed as maudlin the protest that one shouldn’t harshly disparage a book because the author poured the deepest part of herself into it. What, I replied, has that got to do with defending civilization against bad art and sloppy thinking? Nowadays the abstractions of aesthetic and intellectual criteria matter much less to me than people’s efforts to console themselves, to free themselves, to escape from themselves, by sitting down and making something. In my present way of thinking, mortality seems a greater enemy than mediocrity. You can ignore mediocrity. But attention must be paid to the countless ways people cope with their mortality. In the large and varied scheme of things, in the face of experiences before which even the most poetic words fail and fall mute, writing even an inferior book might well be a superior way of living.
Lee Siegel is the author of among other books, two collections of criticism, "Falling Upwards: Essays in Defense of the Imagination," and "Not Remotely Controlled: Notes on Television
Illustration by Jordan Awan.
