The Duty of Harsh Criticism, Part MCLXXVIII

Posted 29 August, 2007 in Literary Criticism |

Shane Neilson, writing in the Northern Poetry Review, lends his voice to those calling for more honest criticism in Canada:

Like Orwell, inundated with books, with books on the floor, on the desk, as doorstoppers, on the back of the toilet, I’m disinclined to praise because there is very little to praise; and so I’m left with the hard road, the one leading off into the wilderness inhabited by a “crank” and a “goon” and a “jealous wanker,” all of which I’ve been called. It’s understandable; the Canadian literary community is small, and if one is honest one inevitably insults someone, and if the insult is cutting enough it raises the ire of the reviewee’s friends, and, as I’ve come to learn, names are about the only thing these people are good at. Thankfully, their insults are as pedestrian as the book under review.

Neilson bemoans an environment in which editors refuse to run negative reviews and the recipients of criticism circle the wagons to blackball the writer responsible. This, he rightly suggests, leads to a kind of “auto-asphyxiation by the Canlit world. The conversation about a book is the fortune of a book, and in current Canada, the conversation isn’t just uninformed, it’s irresponsible.”

It may be small comfort, but Neilson can console himself that Canada isn’t the only place this kind of thing happens. In one of the most bizarre and deluded letters to the editor I’ve read recently, American author Richard Kluger takes the New York Times Book Review to task for its recent negative review of his book Seizing Destiny:

Suddenly I understood how mistaken the Book Review’s critic had been about my last book, “Ashes to Ashes,” in his highly laudatory review — and how besotted the jurors were who voted it the Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction, not usually awarded to wretched writers (I being the fortunate exception). How foolish, I thought, the Times columnist Bob Herbert had been for referring to my “Simple Justice” as a “brilliant and powerful book.” And how blind the former Times reporter Anthony Lukas, a garlanded book author, had been for stating that my book “The Paper: The Life and Death of The New York Herald Tribune” was “probably the best book ever written about an American newspaper … a brilliant piece of social history.” And how insensitive to hideous prose were the judges who placed both those books among the five finalists for the National Book Award in history for the years in which they were issued.

This is a masterpiece of faulty logic: people praised my earlier works, Kluger’s argument goes, ergo it’s impossible that the new book could be less than brilliant. QED, my good man.

Is it any wonder, given this kind of asinine response, that reviewers are hesitant to dispense negative criticism in their reviews?

3 comments to “The Duty of Harsh Criticism, Part MCLXXVIII”

Zachariah Wells, August 29th, 2007 at 2:43 pm:

• Wow, that’s stunning. Anyone that deluded has to be capable of writing a bad book…

amy, August 30th, 2007 at 10:55 am:

• that’s sad. just… sad. wow.

jpz, September 3rd, 2007 at 5:58 pm:

• It’s the way of the world now . . . we live in an age where everything is marketed to death. There is no room for honest opinion in a well nigh profit marginless industry run very conservatively by unimaginative people (for the most part, anyway).

  I will say this for Kluger: if it’s true that most authors keep penning the same book over and over again through their careers, then he may have a point.

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