On one level, reviewing and offering critical opinions on various forms of media is a task requiring patience and stamina. Deadlines, slogging through something you despise, trying to find something original to say about a work you have no opinion on, the problems pile up. But unlike a professional critic, I can take or leave something as I please and not worry about the consequences.
Why do I write criticism? I write for myself to find out what I think of something. I may have a clear opinion in my head, but until I get it down on paper and express it, I will not know what I really think and feel. That and I just enjoy it because it is just one more way of sharing my enthusiasms. I am the child forever coming up to his playmates ready to tell them, “you have to see this!”
It was the late film critic Roger Ebert who let me see the possibilities of good criticism. His whole body of work has exerted an influence over me for about half of my life, but I must single out one piece of his that has impacted me more than any other thing he wrote. In his 1991 essay, “A Memo to Myself and Certain Other Film Critics” (Which you can read in full under its original title “A Film Critic’s Modest Proposal” through the link at the bottom.), Ebert talked about the “director-oriented approach” he took to reviewing Martin Scorsese’s remake of Cape Fear (1991), and the approach he took to his job as a whole:
“Writing daily film criticism is a balancing act between the bottom line and the higher reaches, between the answer to the questions (1) Is this movie worth my money and (2) Does this movie expand or devalue my information about human nature? Critics who write so that everybody can understand everything are actually engaging in a kind of ventriloquism— working as their own dummies. They are pretending to know less than they do. But critics who write for other critics are hardly more honest, since they are sending a message to millions that only hundreds will understand.”
Concluding the essay, Ebert feels he straddles the line “halfway between what you want to know and what else I want to tell you.” This is the approach I try to take, especially in my manga reviews when I find myself debating whether I should slip in a reference that people might not get, and whether said reference enhances the piece or is just showing off. It is one thing to reference Haruki Murakami when writing for the otaku set, quite another to reference William Gaddis. I also try to estimate the knowledge base of my readers that way I do not waste space retelling details they already know, while also accounting for readers who are not up to speed. It is a balance between not treating your audience like idiots but not going over their heads.
A different difficulty arises when my feelings about a piece of art clash with the quality of the art itself. It is difficult to review something that one does not have strong feelings about, positive or negative. Even more troublesome are the books, etc., that I admire and appreciate as well crafted and good, but do not personally care for. Reading Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close in high school provoked this reaction (although I have been meaning to reread it one of these days because it seems to hold up better in my memory). In cases like that it can be difficult to divorce my personal feelings from the merits of the work. A good argument can also be made that I should not do such a thing, since no two readers will ever have the same reaction to a work of art, even if they both thoroughly enjoy it, and that the different temperaments of critics toward their subjects is what makes them unique.
John Updike discusses some of these struggles in the forward to his essay collection Picked Up Pieces (1975) while laying out his rules for book reviewing. Say what you will about his fiction, his rules are a good reference point for an aspiring critic. They are as follows:
- “Try to understand what the author wished to do, and do not blame him for not achieving what he did not attempt.
- Give enough direct quotation—at least one extended passage—of the book’s prose so the review’s reader can form his own impression, can get his own taste.
- Confirm your description of the book with quotation from the book, if only phrase-long, rather than proceeding by fuzzy précis.
- Go easy on plot summary, and do not give away the ending. (…Most ironically, the only readers who approach a book as the author intendeds, unpolluted by pre-knowledge of the plot, are the detested reviewers themselves. And then, years later, the blessed fool who picks the volume at random from a library shelf.)
- If the book is judged deficient, cite a successful example along the same lines from the author’s oeuvre or elsewhere. Try to understand the failure. Sure it’s his and not yours?”
All good practical advice, but then, Updike goes the extra mile: (the bolding is me.)
“To these concrete five might be added a vaguer sixth, having to do with maintaining a chemical purity in the reaction between product and appraiser. Do not accept for review a book you are predisposed to dislike, or committed by friendship to like. Do not imagine yourself a caretaker of any tradition, enforcer of any party standards, a warrior in any ideological battle, a corrections officer of any kind. Never, never… try to put the author ‘in his place’ making of him a pawn in a contest with other reviewers. Review the book, not the reputation. Submit whatever spell, weak or strong, is being cast. Better to praise and share than blame and ban. The communion between reviewer and his public is based upon the presumption of certain possible joys of reading, and all our discrimination should curve toward that end.”
Although he regards this as a less fully formed rule, Updike undersells himself in that last quote. Of course, he admitted that such things were “easier said than done,” and in today’s climate where liking or promoting the wrong book can be a hand grenade for people with a social media presence, one should be cautious, but not overly cautious. Nonetheless, there are certain books that while I enjoy, I would never write about on this blog, for fear of backlash, deserved or not.
This is a good transition into the question, “what do I choose to write about?” The answer is anything that provokes a reaction within me. The most trouble I had in high school in college when writing papers for English class was when I had to write about something that I had no strong reaction to, positive or negative.
Another literary mentor in criticism, George Orwell, bemoaning his profession in his 1946 essay, “Confessions of a Book Reviewer” commented that:
“[Book reviewing] not only involves praising trash… but constantly inventing reactions toward books about which one has no spontaneous feelings whatever. The reviewer, jaded, though he may be, is professionally interested in books, out of the thousands that appear annually, there are probably fifty or a hundred he would enjoy writing about. If he is a top-notcher in his profession, he may get a hold of ten or twenty of them: more probably he gets a hold of two or three. The rest of his work, is however conscientious he may be in praising or damning, is essence humbug.”
Continuing to layout the pitfalls of being a book critic, Orwell proposes a solution:
“The best practice, it has always seemed to me, would be simply to ignore the great majority of books and give very long reviews—1,000 words the bare minimum—to the few that seem to matter. Short notes of a line or two on forthcoming books can be useful, but the usual middle length review of about 600 words is bound to be worthless, even if the reviewer genuinely wants to write it.”
In the wake of reading Claudia Emerson’s book of poems, Late Wife, which was not bad, but simply did not do much for me, I now have a clearer picture of where Orwell was coming from. I will not be writing a review or commentary on everything I read on this blog, only the ones that I think are worth saying something about, quality aside.
To close this entry, I want to say a word about what my idea of a successful review is. H.L. Mencken in his early essay “Criticism of Criticism of Criticism” defines his ideal role of a critic in society:
“It is [the critic’s] business to provoke the reaction between the work of art and the spectator. The spectator, untutored, stands unmoved; he sees the work of art, but it fails to make any intelligible impression on him; if he were spontaneously sensitive to it, there would be no need for criticism. But now comes the critic with his catalysis. He makes the work of art live for the spectator; he makes the spectator live for the work of art. Out of the process comes understanding, appreciation, intelligent enjoyment—and that is precisely what the artist tried to produce.”
Most critics when they talk about their trade speak in similar terms and phrases, and while I can not say I disagree with them, I would like to add to what Mencken and laid out. For me, the greatest joy in writing a review is being able to find out what I think about [the subject] for myself and then sharing it with the people around me.
And that’s the size of my view!
Patrick Paul Barrett
Further references:
The Size of My View 
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