Years ago I got an email from a friend who knew a fiction writer I’d reviewed in the New York Times. It seemed the writer was upset by the review.
“She says you’re a total shredder,” my friend reported.
Who, me? I was surprised; I had basically liked the book. Sure, my review closed on a downer note—“While there is more than a touch of magic in these graceful pages,” I’d written, “X treads perilously close to the point at which the sleight-of-hand becomes merely slight”—and rereading that line, I supposed I could hear the writer harrumphing. In the annals of shredder cruelty, however, it was an exceedingly gentle tweak. When I was a kid, my father, a neurosurgeon, explained to me the Hippocratic injunction of primum non nocere, or “first, do no harm.” I’ve been reviewing books and movies for thirty years, often right here in Commonweal, and I have tried to be a primum non nocere kind of critic.
Yet sometimes a certain amount of harm has to be done.
The history of adverse criticism extends back as far as Plato, who in The Republic rebuked Homer for disregarding truth while “roaming about rhapsodizing.” Today’s critics are a lot less polite. Maybe it’s the internet, with its rampant trollery, or our take-no-prisoners political culture, presided over by a Shredder-in-Chief given to tweeting out summary judgments—Terrible! The worst! A disaster!—that sound like Rex Reed on a particularly bilious day. We’ve come a long way from Matthew Arnold’s exalted vision, in Culture and Anarchy (1869), of critics “getting to know...the best which has been thought and said”—and doing so in “the noble aspiration to leave the world better and happier than we found it.” Better and happier? That won’t get you many “likes.” Buzz-seeking requires a buzz-saw kind of critic.
Over the course of my writing career, I’ve also published fiction of my own, so when it comes to criticism that hurts, I know what it’s like to receive as well as to give. Partly out of vicarious dread (and schadenfreude), I have kept a file of shredder greatest hits down the decades, barbed critical comments that deliver a sting of judgment. I sift through these barbs every now and then, both to refresh my own critical perspectives, and also simply because I enjoy reading them. The truth is that shredder mischief and malice make us laugh, and, as Milan Kundera once noted, “the devil’s laughter is terribly contagious.”
Some of my favorite zingers deploy an arch, Oscar Wilde–type of irony, as when critic Adam Mars-Jones asserts, of Joshua Cohen’s Book of Numbers, that “[t]here’s no inherent reason for this to be a long book, beyond the primitive equation of length with importance.” (The diss pleasingly recalls Edward G. Robinson’s matchless rebuke to Fred MacMurray’s character in Double Indemnity: “I always thought you were smarter than the rest of this outfit. You’re not smarter, Walter, you’re just a little taller.”) Similarly, many readers are familiar with Truman Capote’s haughty quip about Jack Kerouac’s oeuvre—“that’s not writing, that’s typing”—but I cherish his even snarkier comment on Gore Vidal’s move to Italy in the 1960s. “I guess Gore left the country because he felt underappreciated here,” Capote remarked. “I have news for him: People who actually read his books will underappreciate him everywhere.”
I particularly admire the shredder’s nimble way with a figure of speech. In 1940, Randall Jarrell, writing about Frederic Prokosch’s poems, commented that “they pour out like sausages, automatic, voluptuous, and essentially indistinguishable.” Jarrell may have picked up the sausage meme from Ernest Hemingway, who used it in a 1924 Transatlantic Review appreciation of Joseph Conrad, following the novelist’s death. In the essay, Hemingway inveighed against what he viewed as a pervasive highbrow error concerning the relative merits of Conrad and T. S. Eliot. “It is agreed by most of the people I know that Conrad is a bad writer, just as it is agreed that T. S. Eliot is a good writer,” Hemingway scolded. Then: “If I knew that by grinding Mr. Eliot into a fine dry powder and sprinkling that powder over Mr. Conrad’s grave Mr. Conrad would shortly appear and commence writing, I would leave for London tomorrow morning with a sausage grinder.” Zing!
In some instances, the harsh critique can be a career boon to a writer. In 1955, when Norman Mailer’s The Deer Park appeared, a depiction of oral sex aroused the ire of the New York Times’s lead reviewer, Orville Prescott, who deemed the novel “completely amoral,” “a thoroughly nasty book...obsessed with unnatural lusts.” The sales potential of such notoriety was not lost on Mailer’s publisher, Putnam’s, which three years later daringly published Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita. Once again Prescott supplied useful condemnation, excoriating the novel as “repulsive highbrow pornography”—and sure enough, Nabokov’s tale of naughty nymphet and learned lecher zoomed to the top of bestseller lists, an object lesson in how to alchemize scandal into sales, turning the zing into the ka-ching!
More often, though, the shredder’s cuts merely hurt, and frequently in an ad hominem way. The New Yorker writer Kelefa Sanneh, trashing a 2003 Fleetwood Mac concert, reported that guitarist Lindsey Buckingham “spent too much of the night showing off; when he got really carried away, he would slap at his instrument with both hands, like a dog trying to unwrap a Christmas present.” Obviously, something about the group’s performance just drove Sanneh crazy. Still, wasn’t it gratuitous and unkind, after citing the geriatric nature of the band, to observe that Stevie Nicks “spreads her arms and wiggles her fingers as if she were auditioning for a hand cream advertisement”?
Sanneh was twenty-eight when he wrote that. Perhaps he regrets it now that he’s fifty and may be using hand cream himself. Yet I still chortle over the image of that dog unwrapping a gift. Animal comparisons are a particularly effective shredder trope. “Scarlett is excruciatingly dull,” pronounced Patricia Storace in dismissing Alexandra Ripley’s 1991 sequel to Gone with the Wind. “It is pitiful to witness the tiny gnat of Ms. Ripley’s imagination beating against the impenetrable glass of fiction.”
The tiny gnat of her imagination! The insult itself—combining futility, puniness, and annoyingness—is no mere mosquito. Such sparkling disses remind us how the best critical epithets, like good writing generally, concoct unlikely admixtures (voluptuous sausages!) that give a jolt of pleasurable surprise.
But there exists another, grimmer kind of shredder action, one that turns the reviewer’s domain into a groaning abattoir, where the critic slashes remorselessly away. Recently I revisited Renata Adler’s infamous 1980 demolition of New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael, “The Perils of Pauline,” which dismissed Kael’s oeuvre as “piece by piece, line by line, and without interruption, worthless.” The vivisection operates cinematically, as a kind of lit-crit horror movie. At its outset, Adler duly summons some praise—Kael, she concedes, began her career writing “fine pieces...for a year or two”—giving us views of the doomed house in daylight. “But then,” Adler continues, “there began to be quirks, mannerisms...” Night falls; cue the ominous music; steel yourself for the sudden jump cut. Let the bloodletting begin! Not only is Kael’s writing worthless, Adler asserts, but in fact it is pathological, “a mindless, degrading travesty” that “turns out to embody something appalling and widespread in the culture.” Again and again, the hatchet flashes.
The sanguinary assault has been a specialty of novelist-critic Dale Peck, who made his name by laying waste to any writer unlucky enough to pop up in his crosshairs. Peck’s most notorious hit job began with a blunt pronouncement: “Rick Moody is the worst writer of his generation.” He went on to trash not only the writer in question, but a pantheon of twentieth-century literary titans, placing Moody in
a bankrupt tradition...that began with the diarrheic flow of words that is Ulysses; continued through the incomprehensible ramblings of late Faulkner and the sterile inventions of Nabokov; and then burst into full, foul life in the ridiculous dithering of Barth and Hawkes and Gaddis, the reductive cardboard constructions of Barthelme, and the word-by-word wasting of a talent as formidable as Pynchon’s; and finally broke apart like a cracked sidewalk beneath the weight of the stupid—just plain stupid—tomes of DeLillo.
It’s the critic as mass shooter.
This kind of Grim Shredder takes aim not merely at a particular work, but at the very essence of a writer’s art. Sometime in the early 2000s I chanced across a remarkable takedown in the Atlantic of Annie Proulx—a writer I admired—by critic B. R. Myers. Deploying a prosecutorial close reading, Myers accused Proulx of cheating the larger elements of fiction in order to indulge showoff-y writing. He decried her “lazy, inexpressive adjectives” and “faux precision,” citing a habit of listing things that “calls to mind a bad photographer hurrying through a slide show.” Proulx’s writing was little more than “fake Dylan Thomas, an effort to mystify readers into thinking they are reading poetry.”
I had never heard of Myers, so I googled him. His Wikipedia page informs us that “his book reviews have included denunciations” of Toni Morrison, Denis Johnson, and Jonathan Franzen. When he’s not busy denouncing American writers, Myers is a political scientist who specializes in North Korea, a subject that suits his ominous aspect. He’s actually pretty scary. After the Atlantic screed, his denunciations were collected in a book, A Reader’s Manifesto, that included the brief on Franzen. Titled “Smaller Than Life,” it proceeds in the manner of a public execution. Calling Franzen’s novel Freedom “a 576-page monument to insignificance,” Myers castigates Franzen for creating characters “too stupid to merit reading about”; indicts his “facile tricks” and “slovenly prose”; laments his profligate use of “the F-word”; and asserts that throughout the novel, “language vies with content to be as ugly as possible.” Off with his head!
Why do these critics engage in such annihilating actions? I’m guessing they’d say that they’re upholding standards, that their merciless mockery is punishing some significant creative sin. This impulse animates one of the all-time shredder masterpieces, Mark Twain’s 1895 essay “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses,” a hilarious deconstruction of the accomplishments of James Fenimore Cooper, creator of wildly popular frontier romances. “Cooper’s art has some defects,” Twain begins. “In one place in ‘Deerslayer,’ and in the restricted space of two-thirds of a page, he has scored 114 offenses against literary art out of a possible 115. It breaks the record.” Twain proceeds to enumerate many of them, and his point-by-point lecture, both playful and professorial, makes the implicit insistence that literary quality and values matter. To be sure, that’s an urgently needed reminder, and perhaps never more than in the United States of the twenty-first century, where a colossal entertainment industry churns out endless mediocre product.
And so a basic goal of the critic’s mission is to restore perspective, via the act of judgment. But how, and in what spirit? One way is by using the background of great art. In this way, a critic’s judgments about a contemporary work of fiction reflect his or her grounding in Melville and Twain, Proust and Dickens, Dante and Bronte and all the other artists whose enduring accomplishments form a collection of cherished literary touchstones. The perspective of the ages, in other words. It sets a high bar.
There’s also the bar set by the prior best efforts of the writer under review. In my own case, those instances where I really blasted away often involved a disappointing book by a writer whose earlier work I hugely admired. Because I revered John Updike, I found his ill-conceived novel Brazil dismaying, and said so in the pages of this magazine (“A disaster,” I wrote; “you read it and wince.”) Because Frank Conroy’s memoir, Stop-Time, had been a formative book of my young adulthood, I wanted his long-awaited novel, Body & Soul, to be just as good and as impactful; when it didn’t even come close, I needed him—or Commonweal readers, anyway—to know it (“Slack… stale…. A big disappointment”).
And because I had loved Ethan Canin’s 1988 collection of stories, Emperor of the Air, his mediocre 2000 novel, For Kings and Planets, drew from me a cascade of slights, highlighted prominently in the New York Times Book Review. “For Kings and Planets is a greedy monster of a novel that swallows up its creator’s virtues and leaves only weaknesses showing,” I wrote. “Instead of character, we get clothing.... Irony seeps away, and a gooey sentimentality oozes in.” One scene had the protagonist, a young dentistry student, kissing his girlfriend, a moment Canin rendered this way: “[T]here was an eagerness to her embrace that touched him. The small-town way she moved her feet between his own when they parted and looked up at his face; her two familiar incisors gleaming, yellowed from childhood antibiotics.” After quoting, I lowered the boom: “That sounds less like something about a dentist than something by one.”
Did I enjoy writing that sentence, with more than a touch of the devil’s laughter? I did. And did I feel a twinge of guilty pleasure when a friend of mine, at that time a student of Canin’s at the famed Iowa Writers’ Workshop, reported that Canin was so distressed by the review that he canceled class the next day? I did! Yet my underlying impulse in waxing sarcastic wasn’t simply malicious. I wrote from a belief that Canin was too good to be committing sentences like the ones I quoted. In so doing, I was asserting a relationship with his writing. I thought I knew him; I thought that, via his excellent early fictions and my passionate admiration of them, we had formed an implicit pact—writer and reader together—against the mediocrity rampant everywhere. And then he went and did that? Fetched up in a state of agitated disappointment, my review and its sarcastic jibes voice the grievance of a reader who has been betrayed. The shredding critic is a kind of jilted lover.
Here’s the thing, though. To be a jilted lover, you have to have been a lover in the first place. As a practicing critic, you need to keep in mind why you cherished books and writers back when you started out. How they expanded your sense of possibility, moved you to tears and gratitude, awed you with their insights and dazzled you with their skill, created lines and scenes that insinuated themselves deep into your consciousness. How they helped make you, in other words—and in the process turned literature into a sanctuary where you found inspiration and solace.
The curdled critic is the one who has forgotten all this—or perhaps never knew it to begin with. After Myers’s demolition of Franzen, an angry essay by novelist Garth Risk Hallberg, titled “The Soul-Sucking-Suckiness of B. R. Myers,” called out the critic for his “joyless contrarianism,” saying that “it never fails to make the heart sink.” Deriding Myers’s “dyspeptic disregard for what might be amusing, enticing, or appetizing about the world,” Hallberg observed that “he offers us, in place of insight, only indigestion.” It’s true, and it matters. My great college teacher William H. Pritchard—also a frequent contributor to these pages over the decades—identified playfulness as an essential quality of literature, and urged us to keep that playfulness in mind when we wrote our English papers. Good writing never failed to delight and surprise, Pritchard taught us; why should the critic do otherwise? Yet one searches in vain in Peck, Myers, and Adler for anything resembling humor or delight.
This doesn’t mean that the Grim Shredder’s arguments aren’t persuasive. Quite the contrary. After reading Myers, I was never able to read Annie Proulx in quite the same way as before; some residue of his diatribe stayed with me, enveloping her sentences like smog. But while such a critic may be right, right, and right, it all adds up to a cosmic wrong. Renata Adler provides copious documentation for her accusations against Pauline Kael, yet her essay, in its eight-thousand-word mammothness, looms like a monument chiseled from a mountain of spite. The critic who only chides, and never cherishes, needs a course correction, pointing back to what Wordsworth called “the grand elementary principle of pleasure…a pure organic pleasure in the lines.” Hallberg’s indignant rejoinder to Myers reminds us that adverse criticism can only be justified by the habit of judging what you don’t like by reference to what you do.
That key balance is struck almost perfectly, in my view, by chief New York Times book critic Dwight Garner. Garner is no pushover, and his recent review of a memoir and essay collection by Joseph Epstein shows that the shredder tradition is alive and well. Epstein, himself a critic known for acerbic dismissiveness, has demolished many a book over his career, and one can see Garner’s review as karmic payback. In it, Garner complains that Epstein’s prose is “bland” and his attitude “tweedy and self-satisfied.” But the Times book maven is not content to leave it at that. “Epstein favors tasseled loafers and bow ties,” he continues, “and most of his sentences read as if they were written by a sentient tasseled loafer and edited by a sentient bow tie.” The review then criticizes Epstein for triviality in his literary essays. “Nothing is at stake,” Garner writes; “We are stranded with him on the putt-putt course.” It’s a damaging metaphor, one that lingers in your mind. If you could be playing real golf, with its commanding vistas and towering drives, would you want to be stuck on the mini-golf course? Epstein’s writing, Garner declares, is the quintessence of rinky-dink.
Garner is the type of shredder who professes to be reluctant, even glum, about having to be so negative. “It’s no fun to trip up a writer on what might have been a late-career victory lap,” he writes in his review of Epstein, who is eighty. Yet Garner seems to be having quite a bit of fun. Maybe that’s why people on Goodreads call him “mean.” In my view, his wicked rhetorical flourishes make his literary judgments all the more memorable. It’s one thing to complain—as many have!—about the copious, twisty, coincidence-laden plots of novelist John Irving. But it’s far better to assert, as Garner did in his 2015 review of Avenues of Mysteries, that “summarizing the plot of a John Irving novel is like trying to divert the Nile River into a champagne flute”—and to add that his male protagonists shed “more man-tears than a John Boehner news conference.”
The crucial difference between Garner and someone like Myers or Peck is that Garner is just as capable of loving a book as he is of trashing one. His recent review of James, Percival Everett’s reimagining of Huckleberry Finn, used rave terms like “majestic,” “incandescent,” and “thrilling,” while his review of Rita Bullwinkel’s debut novel, Headshot, waxed celebratory: “Make room, American fiction, for a meaningful new voice.” Not infrequently Garner produces a sentence that’s effectively the opposite of the one-liner takedown. Years later, I still recall the closing line of his ode to Larry Brown’s firefighter memoir, On Fire: “If this book were a restaurant, I’d eat there all the time.”
I keep that kicker in mind whenever I sit down to review a book. For every three authors thrown into disgruntlement by this or that judgment of mine, there should be at least one whom I elevate, the way Garner elevated Larry Brown. I want that writer to feel not only appreciated but understood. Last year, when I reviewed Daniel Mason’s novel North Woods in the New York Times Book Review, I closed with a thrilled endorsement: “This is fiction that deals in minutes and in centuries, that captures the glory and the triviality of human lives,” I wrote. “The forest and the trees: Mason keeps both in clear view in his eccentric and exhilarating novel.” If you’re a critic like me, it’s easy to grow weary of your own seemingly perpetual state of disappointment, and you’re always relieved—and grateful—when something comes along to dispel it.
In the end, it’s all tied up together, the loving and the judging, even the shredding. We need critics willing to be that churlish audience member who remains stubbornly seated while everyone else offers a standing ovation. A default stinginess preserves the currency of a critic’s judgments—and makes it all the more meaningful when he or she does leap up to shout “Bravo!”
Fiction writers understand the dynamic interplay of “yes” and “no.” The inception of what will become a story or novel occurs in a bursting rush, and you need to let it all in and get it all down, in a fury of notetaking—allowing the cosmic “yes!” of inspiration to pile up stuff. Later, the editor in you comes along and starts tossing things, trimming things, saying “no” and “not here” and “maybe not.” Critics have their own similar drama. Every critic stands agog before the giant river of culture, where a torrent of ill-conceived, ill-constructed, and fraudulent productions streams ceaselessly by. Yes, you have to throw your “no-stones” in—yet even as you do, you need to keep in view that far bank, where literature’s luminous and immortal works stand sentinel. As Nabokov confessed in his afterword to Lolita, “For me, a work of fiction exists only insofar as it affords me what I shall bluntly call aesthetic bliss, that is a sense of being somehow, somewhere connected with other states of being where art (curiosity, tenderness, kindness, ecstasy) is the norm.” In the next sentence, with trenchant understatement, the novelist added: “There are not many such books.”
That last truth is surely the shredder’s lodestar, but it also limns the shredder’s temptation. Myers’s priggish authoritarianism, Adler’s cold hauteur, Peck’s slashing iconoclasm, and all the many other dark arts of delivering pain: these are moral hazards the critic must steer clear of, guiding himself instead by love, his discriminating judgments graced by the ghost of delight.
And now will you excuse me? I have a review to write.