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Writing Negative Reviews: A Defense

Writing Negative Reviews: A Defense

Last updated on: March 9, 2017 at 2:06 am by Scott Eric Alt

Writing Negative Reviews: A Defense 2017-03-09T02:06:59-04:00 Scott Eric Alt

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George Orwell: scourge of the cliche (public domain)

Flannery O’Connor, in a classic baring of the knife, said: “Everywhere I go I’m asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don’t stifle enough of them.” O’Connor spoke with some authority: She did not have to go around trying to pretend she could write. Once, when asked why she wrote, she did not come up with wind like “to make the world a better place,” or “to inspire people,” or “to change lives.” She said: “Because I’m good at it.” Exactly.

I wrote my first negative book review last month. It was not published, and that’s fine. Originally I had suggested to Mr. P that I not write the review for his site at all, because I could not think of any positive value the book had, other than to termites. But Mr. P asked me to write it anyway; then, after I sent it to him, he decided just to e-mail a rejection letter to the author, with the (mildly edited) review attached. (I did not say anything about termites in the actual review.)

I put the book and its author out of my mind, and I would not be writing anything about it now, were it not that C. wrote about the review on her blog. The title of the post was a metaphor comparing me to an assassin. So I feel somewhat at liberty to say a few words, though I think it improper to mention the name of the author, or the book, or the Web site for which I had written the review.

In truth, I had not said anything all that negative in the review. I said that the novel was stuffed shapeless with clichés (like the dictator who rules “with an iron fist”). I said that it was bloated with vague and labored description (like the angel whose face is “hooded with golden eyebrows”). That is the kind of writing you will find on every page, if you get through every page before gouging your eyes with a claw. I said that C. would be helped greatly by reading “Politics and the English Language” and Martin Amis’s more recent book The War Against Cliche.

Well, Mr. Amis’s title is meant to be ironic. It’s a cliché itself, if you have not noticed. They are hard to notice, we are so used to them and the lethargic blank into which they tire the brain. But if once you notice the first one, and soon find they lurk on every page, there’s a problem, and it’s called bad writing and bad thinking. The problem with clichés is that the person who uses them is not writing at all. There is nothing original or striking in the language: It is not the author who speaks, but everyone else before him. The evil of clichés is that they are a form of groupthink; and Orwell did more than anyone else to point out how easy it is to control those who mouth clichés by rote, like the mantras of the hypnotized. One seldom stops to consider what the image means or suggests in the first place (quick: what is a “rift”? Orwell asks); a cliché is a knife used by reflex because it is the closest one to you, but it has never once been resharpened and may not be the best knife for what you are trying to cut anyway.

But C. in her blog post described my attack on her writing as though it were an attack on her person. She cried in bed for two days and did not want to be wife or mother or writer. I’m just a ruthless ass, driving C. to clinical depression! But C. finally decided, as an act of defiance, to bravely continue writing, “clichés and all”! But I gather, from one particular paragraph in C’s post, that in the upcoming sequel to her novel (save us, there’s more?), I will make an appearance as a wicked book critic, against whose fiery darts (or bullets, in this case) the writer-heroine must bravely fight. Well, so it goes. I sigh. I doubt C. understands why clichés are so bad, why they are a betrayal of good writing, or why she desperately needs to read Orwell and Amis and take them to heart if she wants to be any good. Clichés are now her badge of honor. (Did you see it?)

Now, there are some circumstances under which I would never write a negative review. I write book reviews for Our Sunday Visitor, and their purpose in contacting me was to provide publicity for the books they publish. If I could not give a book a positive review, I would send it back to them. I get that.

Likewise, I used to write book reviews for Create Space, which is a company that helps authors to self-publish their books. 99% of self-published books are awful. The companies try to lure authors in by reciting all the famous writers who once self-published (while neglecting to mention, for example, that Stephen King was a fifteen-year-old at the time and wasn’t self-publishing The Shining). But when you write a book review in such a context, the author pays you for publicity; you are not at liberty to write a bad review. If you don’t think the book has any merit, you either lie or you turn down the money and let it be given to someone who has no intellect or no conscience.

But readers are deceived when a book reviewer lies, and mainly it is the author and the publisher who profit.

Do not misunderstand: Almost all book reviewers are happy to be a middleman and get the word out about a book that has real merit and is worth reading. They are book reviewers because they love to read, after all, and they want others to share pleasure. The problem is when an author looks at a reviewer as no more than someone who can bring him sales, or attention, or self-validation. In an interview back in 1985 with Don Swaim, John Irving said that negative reviews don’t really matter to authors who have a large audience anyway, but that they are malicious and harmful to unknown authors. Of course, Mr. Irving views book critics as his “inferior” (that’s his word) since he can actually write, and no book critic can. (If the critic could write, the argument goes, he would write worthy things like novels rather than book reviews, which are nothing more than ads.) As for Mr. Irving, he hasn’t written one decent novel in the last 25 years.

BuzzFeed has generated a lot of discussion in the last few months (see here and here and here and here) after its decision to ban negative book reviews. All who responded defended the negative review, but it is not the first time this discussion has been had. Most notably, in 2012, many were upset and pinpricked to cursing after the novelist and book critic William Giraldi panned Alix Ohlin in the New York Times (for clichés, of course); and Mr. Giraldi wrote a long article in the Daily Beast to defend his style of criticism. I suspect the argument will continue, because there are those who flush and sweat at the thought of being called mean; for no one must be offended or have their pretty feelings hurt.

If all the critic were was a middleman to bring a “real” book by a “real” writer to the public’s attention, then I would agree that he should write only positive reviews and leave the bad books alone. But the critic has other obligations, and one is to keep an audience from (in his view) wasting its time and money.

Another, and more important, role is to teach us how to analyze and weigh and differentiate the junk from the gold. If merit in art is a real thing, if some books are objectively better than others, then it is the job of the critic to tell us what makes good writing good and bad writing bad. And some of the best critics are no slouches at writing themselves: I’m thinking of master stylists like William Hazlitt and Virginia Woolf, Harold Bloom and Sven Birkerts, G. K. Chesterton and George Orwell, who are not only good essayists and critics but a joy to read.

Criticism would be poorer without this gem from Dorothy Parker: “This is not a book to be tossed aside lightly. It should be hurled with great force.” Or this one from Mark Twain: “Every time I read Pride and Prejudice I want to dig her up and hit her over the skull with her own shin bone.” One admires the passion in those sentences, the evidence of a reader who loves good books so much that bad books are an intolerable offense. If I hate a book, Francine Prose says, “life is too short not to say so.”

A critic who is willing to write a negative review is a critic readers will trust when he writes a positive one. The critic is not just out for his fee or his commission. A critic who is offended by trash, and has the spine to call trash by its name, is a critic whose positive judgment is worth something. He does not just indiscriminately praise, but only what merits praise. He has standards; he weighs and values. A critic who writes only positive reviews is to be viewed with suspicion.

Negative reviews are important because, while truth might sting, truth matters. Lies belittle us all.

The teachers who had nothing but praise for my writing, when I was in school, made me feel good. They were Adderall to my ego. But they never helped my writing. The teachers who helped my writing were the ones who told me what was bad about it. There are some teachers whose critical eye I long to be able to have recourse to again.

Anyway, writers who put their work out there for public consumption should be adults with tough exteriors. They are not, in Zoe Heller’s words, “kindergartners making potato prints for their parents.” If someone on a blog uses a metaphor to compare me to an assassin, that’s fairly personal (more so than just saying that someone used a lot of clichés), but I’m not going to lay supine in bed over it or acquire a complex. I’m a grown-up; I’ve got a blog; I can use words too; I keep writing, and I hopefully keep getting better at it.

I can benefit from criticism, but no matter how good I am, not everyone is going to like me or what I have to say. So what? They can say so, and I’d rather they do so than lie; and I can keep writing.

Book critics have the right and the obligation to treat authors who have published their writing as though they are adults.

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