Monday, May 12, 2008
From the author of "High Fidelity," a delightful celebration of the joys of reading that reminds us why most literary criticism is so bad.
Dec 9, 2004 | Nick Hornby's new collection of his essays from the Believer, the literary magazine edited by Heidi Julavits, is named in homage to the rock collective the Polyphonic Spree, who dress in choir robes and perform feel-good, orchestral pop. It's Hornby's gentle way of tweaking the magazine's earnestness. When he writes that the Believer staff's promise of a night on the town in New York resulted in their dragging him to a two-and-a-half-hour reading of the nominees for the National Book Critics Circle, you mourn for Hornby and his evening. His description of the Believer staff's behavior at the event is a gag: "They stood, and they wept, and they hugged each other, and occasionally they even danced -- to the poetry recitals, and some of the more up-tempo biography nominees." It isn't hard to believe that the event was the literary equivalent of Up With People.
Sometimes Hornby and the Believer butt heads. He writes in one column that he and the magazine's editors reach an agreement "that if it looks like I might not enjoy a book, I will abandon it immediately, and not mention it by name." Listed at the top of that column are "Unnamed Literary Novel" and "Unnamed Work of Nonfiction." In the magazine's debut issue, Julavits wrote an essay arguing that most book criticism is too snarky and negative, and Hornby has more or less been instructed to avoid negative reviews.
Julavits wasn't completely wrong; it's a snarkiness you see in film and TV and music criticism as well. Usually, but not exclusively (see Lane, Anthony), this snarkiness is expounded by younger critics who have not yet discovered that you start to do good criticism only when you realize how little you know. But I'm not sure Julavits knows that difference between deserved sharpness and showoffy meanness.
A book critic I know, someone not at all given to meanness, once confessed to me that she felt guilty when panning a book because the writer had gone to "all that work." I told her that she had gone to a lot of work as well, "the work of turning the pages." Reading a book you don't like is miserable toil; the sensible thing to do is abandon it and find something you enjoy. But a critic has to read all the way to the end -- unless you believe reviews should only be positive.
It's true that critics often do their best work when they get to write on what they love. And there's no point in knocking a small book that isn't getting any attention from the press or any publicity from its publisher. But a critic should be free to say honestly that something is bad, how bad it is and why it's bad. Even when that is gently done, it doesn't make friends, and it doesn't honor hard work or good intentions that, if the result isn't up to snuff, count for bupkis.
The Believer has made space for good critics. Where it deserves credit for bucking a trend that is harming contemporary criticism isn't in its attitude toward negative reviews but in the freedom it has given Hornby for his column.
At a time when editors are obsessed with what's hot, and with what New York Times ombudsman Daniel Okrent called "the overwhelmingly meaningless desire to be first" (as if all other reviews of a work are redundant after the first one appears), the Believer has allowed Hornby to write about whatever he's reading, whether it's the hot new novel, a classic he wants to reread or some obscure title he has always meant to get around to.
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