Poets & Writers – September 2019

the practical writer REVIEWERS & CRITICS

123 POETS & WRITERS^

of marketing, not thinking. With re-
spect to literature, such marketing is,
as I mentioned earlier, properly the
province of publishers and publicists—
and that’s fine. All writers benefit from
publishers’ marketing and advertising:
I have myself. No shame in that. But
precisely because the culture as a whole
is so overwhelmingly commercial, it’s
vital that professional, public, literary,
and cultural criticism remain inde-
pendent. Negative criticism is, in part,
what fights against the commercial, or
the merely stupid, or vulgar; it is a form
of resistance, a reminder that we must
think for ourselves and not have our
judgments coopted by advertising and
the ephemeral.
Having said that, I would stress ur-
gently that there is a right way to do
neg at ive c r it ic ism: It ha s to be rea soned,
it cannot be ad hominem, and so forth.
Indeed, I’d say that now, with the ex-
plosion of vituperative discourse that
is the hallmark of much Internet cul-
ture, doing proper, measured negative
criticism importantly models how not
to like something. In an era in which so
many exchanges—literary ones, too—
devolve into snark and name-calling, we
need good negative criticism perhaps
more than ever.

Have you ever changed your mind
about a book that you praised or
panned years earlier? Has a work of
criticism ever changed your opinion
of a writer’s work?
I don’t think I’ve changed my mind in
the sense of “Gosh, I was totally wrong
about that.” But I’ve been writing as a
critic for thirty years now, and as you
get older your general aesthetic can
shift; things you used to love don’t ex-
cite you anymore, or things that once
left you cold start to make sense to you.
I once wrote a Bookends column about
this for Pamela Paul at the New York
Times: I used the example of Catcher in
the Rye, which when I reread it for the
first time since I was a teenager I found
totally unbearable.
As for a review that changed my
mind: Not really. But shrewd reviews

can make you consider things differ-

ently. As many people know, I had very

s t ron g obje c t ion s t o H a ny a Ya n a g i h a r a’s

A Little Life, but when I read an inter-

esting piece in the New Yorker by Elif

Batuman about how the novel had cap-

tivated her, I could suddenly see how

an intelligent person might get caught

up in the book. I still loathe the novel,

but because of Elif’s essay I suppose I’m

much more tolerant now of people who

liked it than I was two years ago.

Has social media been helpful at all

in your role as a critic?

No. I’ve certainly had interesting and

sometimes feisty conversations with

people on social media and have even

befriended a number of people there;

and it’s often fascinating to see how

“ordinary,” in the technical sense,

readers and audiences are reacting to

something in the culture. But the fact

is that, in the end, you can only listen

to yourself. Social media for me is an

often fun distraction from real work,

and that’s pretty much it.

What books that you aren’t review-

ing are you most looking forward to

reading in the near future?

What with everything else I have going

on—my own writing, the NYRB, the

Robert Silvers Foundation, and Bard—I

have relatively little time for “pleasure”

reading: The summer is when I try to

catch up. Right now I’m dying to get

to Brenda Wineapple’s book about An-

drew Johnson’s impeachment, Andrew

Sean Greer’s Less, The Overstory by

Richard Powers, and Pat Barker’s The

Silence of the Girls—although I do wish

her editor had forced her to think of a

title a bit less Hannibal Lector-ish. I

think her Regeneration Trilogy is one of

the great works of the twentieth cen-

tury; how could I not want to read her

take on the Iliad?

PW.ORG

Read an expanded version of this

interview and the previous seventeen

installments of Reviewers & Critics.

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