I love to write criticism, read criticism, and get criticism. I even love to read criticism about criticism! I have never really spent my own time critiquing criticism, since I would usually ratherโฆ write itโฆ but lately when reading takes on the State of Criticism Today, I realized that I have some assumptions about how criticism works that are not actually self-evident. I might have made them up. They might be wrong. They might be obvious. Letโs find out.
Iโm going to reverse-engineer my thoughts about criticism. PART 1 (this part) is about the concept of a good review versus a bad review (versus the secret third option). It is also about whether there is a criticism crisis of some kind (thereโs not).
This post is about literary criticism, but I think itโs applicable to most kinds of cultural criticism. Anyway, I talk about the differences between lit crit and art crit in PART 2.
Good Faith, Bad Faith
I can tell when a writer loves or hates a book, but my first question is never whether the takeaway is positive or negative. Itโs whether the review was written in โgood faithโ or โbad faith.โ Any yea/nay conclusions are secondary to the question of whether they were arrived at in good faith. This is why Iโm often confused about the conflation between someone being โcriticalโ and being โnegative.โ These are different things.
To take a critical view, to be a critic, means to assess something carefully on its own terms, in contemporary context and in historical context. If the critic does this, and then finds everything wrong with the book, I would not call the review โnegative.โ I would call it a Good Faith Review that found the book to be bad.
On the other hand, most reviews written in good faith find successes and fails and many things between, not because the critic is copping out or is afraid to say yea/nay, but because most books worth reviewing contain aspects for someone to like or dislike โ which vary wildly depending on whoโs reading.
A Good Faith Review is one of the best things that can happen to any artist. You can be angry about the conclusions (especially if you suspect they are true) but you have to be grateful if a reviewer arrived at unflattering conclusions by taking your work incredibly seriously. Perhaps they are right, which naturally makes you feel bad, but overall this is a positive thing, because your work commanded attention and care. (And yes, in a country with 7 staff book reviewers, all press is good press.)
To be clear: your work deserves good PR paid for by someone else. Your work deserves good faith reviews. Your work does not deserve a good review. Nick Ripatrazone is right about most authors, who โwould rather have intelligent, sustained engagement with their work rather than general, superficial praise.โ You want PR, and you want criticism, and that means that you want to be able to tell the difference.
