I do think that people who are
gifted can be helped along, their
craft refined and improved, by
good teachers; so in that sense,
sure, let criticism be taught in
MFA programs. I myself never
studied writing; I just read a lot.
You start by imitating the people
you like, and soon you develop
your own voice.
What advice do you give to
young students who want to
become professional critics?
Do your homework. You can’t
sit down to review something
unless you’ve really immersed
yourself in every available
resource: You have to read—or
watch, or whatever—everything
the author or creator has done,
you have to do research, you
have to have a solid back-
ground before you even dream
of approaching the work you’re
supposed to be reviewing. This
is time-consuming, obviously, but it’s
the only way to get good results. I sup-
pose I get this from my training as a
scholar: I still vividly remember a pro-
fe s sor of m i ne at UVA saying—apropos
of a paper I was about to write about
the Odyssey, as it happens—“Well, you
can’t write anything until you’ve read
everything.” That’s my advice. Criti-
cism is serious business, and if you take
it seriously, editors will respond.
Is there ever anything from the pub-
lishing side that raises your interest
in a book or author—a sizeable ad-
vance, notable blurbs, your relation-
ship with an editor or publicist?
No. I’d be very suspicious of a critic
who had “relationships” with editors or,
God forbid, publicists. What has that
got to do with the activity of criticism?
The buzz, the hype, the cloud of excite-
ment that eager editors and publicists
want to create around a book or play
or movie are precisely what the critic
should be seeing through, should be
resisting. So why would a responsible
critic be in bed with those people?
Ugh. That said, it often happens—
certainly it does with some of my
pieces—that you’re looking at a new
book or movie or whatever as a sign of
some kind of larger cultural phenom-
enon, and in that case it’s legitimate
to cite some of the “surround”—the
sales, the public reaction, and so
forth. I wrote an analysis years ago of
Alice Sebold’s novel The Lovely Bones,
which was such a phenomenon—they
couldn’t print the books fast enough—
that it seemed important to mention
the sales, the overwhelming public ap-
petite for the story that she was telling.
But that’s the only time, I think, that a
critic should pay attention to that stuff.In your forthcoming book, Ecstasy
and Terror: From the Greeks to Game
of Thrones, you state that “any call
to eliminate negative reviewing is
to infringe catastrophically on the
larger project of criticism.” How do
you think negative reviews contrib-
ute overall to the cultural dialogue?
A culture that only cheerleads and
celebrates is a vapid culture—a culturethe practical writer REVIEWERS & CRITICSSEPT OCT 2019 122Daniel Mendelsohnmattmendelsohn