Tag: criticism

A Top 5 List: Books Under 300 Pages

It’s time for another list game, this one courtesy of Shanah, a.k.a. the Bionic Book Worm: top 5 books under 300 pages. In theory, this should be a very easy list for me to compile. I read a lot of poetry collections and dramatic works, both formats where even 100 pages would be considered on the long side. But I feel that to include those sorts of books would be violating the spirit of the theme: books whose short lengths are noteworthy. As such, I’m going to restrict myself to works of nondramatic prose, i.e., works of fiction and nonfiction.

That still leaves us with a wide variety of books to examine, and I hope the list is eclectic enough that at least one book here will sound appealing. We’ll be looking at experimental essays and straightforward criticism, postmodern literature and classic fantasy. Should be a fun diversion. So, without further delay: the list.

5) The Crying of Lot 49, by Thomas Pynchon (152 pages)

Let’s begin with a book I would described less as “short” than as “truncated.” The Crying of Lot 49 follows Oedipa Maas, who has been tasked with managing the estate of her ex-boyfriend. In the process of untangling his complicated assortment of assets, she stumbles upon evidence of an age-old conflict between two rival mail delivery services: Thurn und Taxis, the established corporate giant, and Trystero, the underground competitor. At least, she thinks she’s found evidence of such a conflict. For while she keeps running into signs of Trystero’s existence, Oedipa is never certain that she’s not hallucinating the whole conspiracy.

This book has all the makings of an engaging thriller, albeit one with some idiosyncratic cultural references—a working knowledge of Jacobean drama is helpful for understanding the plot, for example. But what makes The Crying of Lot 49 interesting (or, if you’re less charitable, infuriating) is that Oedipa never even comes close to uncovering the truth. Instead, it abruptly ends before the title “crying,” an auction of rare postage stamps that Oedipa believes might lead her closer to confirming Trystero’s existence. Imagine a mystery show that ended right as the detectives made their first breakthrough, and you have a good idea of how The Crying of Lot 49 operates. It’s not to everyone’s taste, of course, but if you like characters with rising, unrelieved paranoia, then this is the story for you. (Alternatively, if you like A Series of Unfortunate Events, which is clearly inspired by this book.)

4) Let’s Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste, by Carl Wilson (176 pages)

This is music critic Carl Wilson’s contribution to 33 1/3, a series in which writers analyze one album in great depth. This book is ostensibly about Let’s Talk About Love, the 1997 Céline Dion album featuring “My Heart Will Go On,” but Wilson has much broader ambitions here. He’s interested in how an artist like Dion can be so critically loathed yet so popular and beloved, and he will not be satisfied with so simple an answer as, “People have bad taste.” Wilson spends a year immersed in all things Céline, and in doing so questions the prejudices of the critical establishment.

Books in the 33 1/3 series are pocket-sized by design, and in his book Wilson doesn’t waste a single sentence. He places Dion’s work in the context of Quebecois music history, considers critics’ traditional distaste for schmaltz and sentimentality, interviews fans of Dion from all over the world—it’s a veritable greatest hits album of sociological analysis. I enjoyed Let’s Talk About Love in much the same way that I enjoyed Andy Greenwald’s exploration of emo subculture, Nothing Feels Good, in that it’s a sympathetic but still critical account of a genre of music I have little personal taste for. It’s less important that readers and critics come away thinking someone like Dion is a great artist than that they understand what others hear in her work.

3) Chroma, by Derek Jarman (160 pages)

I said at the top that I deliberately excluded poetry collections from consideration, but that doesn’t mean I can’t sneak some lyrical prose onto the list. Derek Jarman is a towering figure in the history of queer cinema, with films such as Sebastiane and his adaptation of Christopher Marlowe’s Edward II addressing queer themes in an era of heavy social stigma. But he also wrote several books, the last of which was Chroma, a series of freewheeling essays on color. Jarman, with a tight yet expressive prose style, explores all possible avenues into the concept of color: scientific, historical, cultural, and personal.

Indeed, while Jarman’s writing often resembles the fragmentary style of pre-Socratic philosophers, Chroma is an intensely personal work for Jarman: he began writing these essays on color as he was going blind from AIDS-related complications. There’s a sense of both urgency and resignation behind all of these essays, for he must enjoy the sensation of color while he can, while still accepting the inevitable with dignity. These themes come to a head in the essay “Into the Blue,” which includes a tender tribute to his past lovers who have lost their lives to AIDS, and which served as the basis for the narration in Jarman’s final film, Blue. In part because it’s the most obscure book on this list, Chroma is the book I most recommend.

2) The Tombs of Atuan, by Ursula K. Le Guin (146 pages)

So far, the books I’ve included on this list have have been dense affairs, compressing a lot of themes, motifs, and ideas into a small package. The Tombs of Atuan, the sequel to Ursula K. Le Guin’s fantasy classic A Wizard of Earthsea, goes in the opposite direction. It tells the story of Tenar, a girl who was taken from her family at young age to serve as a priestess to dark gods in the Tombs of Atuan. When Ged, the protagonist from the first book, breaks into the tombs to steal a piece of a magical amulet, Tenar traps him in the underground labyrinth and contemplates how best to dispose of him. But slowly, she forges a personal connection with Ged, which allows her to start recovering her past identity.

The Tombs of Atuan is such a pleasant swerve as a sequel. Whereas A Wizard of Earthsea takes Ged across countless islands across Le Guin’s fictional world, The Tombs of Atuan almost completely confines itself to one location. And that setting suits the novel perfectly, as Le Guin is aiming for a work of great psychological insight. The cavernous, intricate layout of the tombs is symbolic of Tenar’s journey of self-realization, and on a logistical level it works well in literally trapping two characters in conflict together. The Tombs of Atuan also holds the distinction of being the only novel I can remember reading in one sitting, so if that’s not an endorsement, I don’t know what is.

1) Silas Marner, by George Eliot (230 pages)

Let’s close this list with a real classic, shall we? Like The Tombs of Atuan, this is another story of intense personal transformation. The title figure of George Eliot’s Silas Marner is a miserly old weaver living in rural England. He has little contact with broader society until two life-changing events happen in quick succession. First, someone steals all the gold he’s been hoarding; second, a blond-haired infant wanders into his little cabin. Silas resolves to raise the child himself, and in doing so slowly finds happiness greater than all his lost wealth.

In one sense, Silar Marner is a proudly unsubtle story: the connection between Silas’s gold and Eppie (as he names the girl) is so obvious that Silas literally mistakes Eppie for the gold when she first crawls into his hut. But there’s actually lot going on underneath the surface here. Eliot uses this fable-like story to explore a number of social themes relevant to Victorian England, from the vagaries of religion to the effects of industrialization of rural English life to the public and private foibles of the aristocracy. In short order, Silar Marner stirs up the sentiments, then spurs one into thought—exactly what one is looking for in a book by Eliot. It’s almost like reading Middlemarch in miniature.

Thus endeth the list. What are your thoughts on these picks? Anything that sounds especially enticing, or am I completely off-base with these? Let me know in the comments! If you’re still looking for book recommendations, then check out my response to the Literary Fiction Book Tag.

And, as always, thanks for your time.

My Thoughts on Nicholas Dawidoff’s Edits to Stephen Jay Gould’s Review of Michael Seidel’s Book

As I start writing this post, I’m about halfway through Stephen Jay Gould’s posthumous collection of baseball writings, Triumph and Tragedy in Mudville: A Lifelong Passion for Baseball (W. W. Norton, 2003). At this point the weaknesses of the book have become quite apparent to me: Gould has a habit a reusing the same anecdotes across multiple pieces, the length restrictions of newspaper columns prevent him from fully developing ideas, and the introductory memoir—in fairness, written during the author’s terminal illness—suffers from incredibly stilted syntax.

Nonetheless, Triumph and Tragedy in Mudville shines with Gould’s amateur passion for baseball; I feel the pleasure he gets in taking a break from paleontology to wax rhapsodic about his favorite players. It doesn’t quite work when read straight through, but this seems like a pleasant book to dip into and out of for a few minutes at a time.

I first became aware of Gould’s baseball writing while I was preparing to teach a class on sports literature (something that, in a shamefully Gouldian fashion, I’ve mentioned several times on this blog). His essay on DiMaggio’s 56-game hitting streak during the 1941 season, entitled “The Streak of Streaks,” was included in one of my main source books for the class, Baseball: A Literary Anthology (edited by Nicholas Dawidoff). The essay is among the highlights in Dawidoff’s anthology, and it was one of the last pieces I cut from my syllabus before I had to submit it for approval.

Gould’s focus in “The Streak of Streaks” is on probability, specifically how people have difficulty analyzing things like hitting streaks in probabilistic terms. He cites Amos Tversky’s research on shooting streaks in basketball, which found that the “hot hand” phenomenon doesn’t actually exist: players who make a basket on one shot are no more likely to hit on the next, and players’ “hot” streaks can be predicted entirely based on their overall shooting percentages. Gould doesn’t bring up this research to denigrate athletes’ accomplishments, though. In fact, it serves as the context in which to celebrate DiMaggio’s hitting streak. Gould also cites Ed Purcell’s research on baseball streaks and slumps, and Purcell found that DiMaggio’s hitting streak was the “one sequence so many standard deviations above the expected distribution that it should not have occurred at all” (p. 177).

That revelation honestly shocked me when I first read it, as I had regarded DiMaggio’s streak record as a vulnerable one. Beating it would be mighty difficult, yes, but surely a batter just would need to get “hot” for nine or ten weeks. But if, as Purcell found, baseball would need 52 career .350 hitters for even a 50-game hitting streak to be likely (actual number of such hitters: 3), then DiMaggio’s accomplishment is truly incredible. In his characteristically statistical way, Gould finds a way to place his baseball hero into the realm of the divine. As baseball has become ever more analytic, as launch angles and exit velocities and wins above replacement increasingly dominate discussions of the sport, the fact that DiMaggio’s hitting streak is nigh inexplicable becomes all the more important to me: there is still mystery in this weird little game.

I had gone back to Dawidoff’s anthology to re-read “The Streak of Streaks” multiple times. It was only when I got to that essay in Triumph and Tragedy in Mudville, however, that I learned that the essay was originally a book review. Specifically, “The Streak of Streaks” reviews Michael Seidel’s book Streak: Joe DiMaggio and the Summer of ’41, which purports to cover precisely that. Had I read the acknowledgments section of Dawidoff’s anthology, which mentions that the review portions of the essay had been omitted, this would not have been a surprise to me. But alas I had not, and I could not help but think: why would Dawidoff choose to cut such a significant chunk of the original piece?

It seems especially strange to make such an edit in a book called Baseball: A Literary Anthology, as Gould’s original review makes a point of placing Seidel’s book in the context of baseball’s literary history. Gould sees Streak as part of a trend of “serious, scholarly books treating baseball as something that might even get you tenure at a major university (as something other than an athletic coach)” (pp. 178-179). It’s as though Gould went out of his way to justify Dawidoff’s efforts over a decade before the anthology came out.

One may argue that removing the book review passages from the “The Streak of Streaks” makes the piece more accessible for general audiences, who are statistically unlikely to have read, or even have heard of, Seidel’s book. Better to leave the intertextual elements for the Gould completionists, no? But if that were indeed the goal, Dawidoff doesn’t fully commit to it, because Gould’s review is also a response to an article by John Holway called “A Little Help from his Friends: Hits or Hype in ’41,” which ran in a 1987 issue of Sport Heritage. Readers probably have as much knowledge of Holway’s article as they do of Seidel’s book—less, even, because Gould devotes less time to summarizing it.

Yet, having now read the original version of Gould’s essay, I do think that Dawidoff’s edits make the piece stronger. For one thing, the review portions include some rather self-indulgent quotations from Omar Khayyam and Alexander Pope, in an attempt to link sports streaks to our quest for meaning in a world dominated by chance. I appreciate the effort, but even as a baseball fan I find there’s something bathetic in Gould’s sincerity here. We are still talking about grown men playing a children’s game in oversized pajamas, and I’m not sure the subject can support a straight-faced digression on Absurdism.

More importantly, Gould’s discussion of probability with regards to DiMaggio’s hitting streak has little bearing on his review of Seidel’s book. Seidel, from how Gould describes his work, seems more interested in placing DiMaggio’s streak in the context of then-current events; Gould likens the book’s weaker passages to “reading old newspapers and placing the main events in order” (p. 179). The most Gould can do to make Seidel’s book relevant to his main point is to say that it “will help us to treasure DiMaggio’s achievement by bringing together the details of a genuine legend” (p. 181), which is about the vaguest praise possible. I do get the sense that Gould enjoyed Seidel’s book, but I get a stronger sense that Gould saw this review as an excuse to publish a different article that he was actually excited about writing.

For comparison, I would look at something like “The Cruelest Sport” by Joyce Carol Oates—which, coincidentally, did make the cut for my sports literature syllabus. “The Cruelest Sport” is a review of two books about boxing by Thomas Hauser, but it begins with a gripping discussion of the aesthetics and ethics the sport. Oates is simultaneously entranced and repulsed by the cruelty inherent to boxing. She spends the first six pages of that review exploring the tension between our humanitarian impulse that wants to abolish the deliberate violence of boxing and our spectator’s desire to see a satisfying, consciousness-crushing KO.

That tension is clearly what animates Oates to write that essay, but what makes “The Cruelest Sport” successful as a whole piece is that the opening discussion ties into the books that Oates is reviewing. The first is a biography of Muhammad Ali, an all-time great performer whose well-being boxing devastated; the second is an account of the grimy underbelly of the boxing establishment that belies the Las Vegas glitz surrounding the sport. Whereas Gould’s statistical discussion of DiMaggio’s hitting streak is at most tangential to the book he’s reviewing, Oates makes a persuasive case that her pet interest is central to the works before her. It’s true that someone like Dawidoff could easily excerpt those first six pages as a stand-alone essay, but they would not be improving the piece by subtracting from it.

It’s not as though I’m disappointed that Triumph and Tragedy in Mudville retained the review elements of “The Streak of Streaks”. That book is meant to be a compendium of Gould’s career work on baseball, so the need to accurately reflect his work ultimately trumps aesthetic considerations. Dawidoff’s anthology, meanwhile, is free of such requirements, and so it can tinker with pieces as much as it likes. There may inevitably be some hubris to that endeavor, but at least in this instance, it works out for the best.

I would love to hear your response to my thoughts on Nicholas Dawidoff’s edits to Stephen Jay Gould’s review of Michael Seidel’s book, if only to put as many brackets around this discussion as possible. What do you think about making cuts to essays for inclusion in anthologies? Do you have a favorite piece of baseball writing that you’re dying to share? Let me know in the comments!

If, on the other hand, you’d prefer to read more of my thoughts on Stephen Jay Gould’s work, I have a very old piece about his essay “Dr. Down’s Syndrome” that might interest you.

And as always, thanks for your time.

Brandon Flowers Is “The Man”—Whatever That Entails

In a 2017 interview with NME, Brandon Flowers, the lead singer of The Killers, was asked about the origins of “The Man,” the lead single from their then-upcoming album Wonderful Wonderful. According to Flowers, he wrote the song to “hearken back” to his public persona during the band’s heyday in the early-to-mid-2000s, when songs like “Mr. Brightside” and “Somebody Told Me” made them one of the biggest musical acts in the country. Flowers admits to enjoying slipping back into that past version of himself, but he says he looks back on that period of his life with more than a little embarrassment:

I’ve been cleaning it up for a long time. I don’t think that was really a great representation, an honest representation of who I am. It came from a place of insecurity and I would just puff my chest out and say things and put a lot of negativity out there. I basically came to regret that and I’m sure a lot of people can identify with that.

Based on Flowers’s comments, it is tempting to read “The Man” as a partial critique or parody of masculinity. Critics generally seemed to have reached that conclusion when discussing the song. Writing for Pitchfork, Ryan Dombal argues that “The Man” is the product of the conflicting urges to celebrate and mock traditional masculinity; the song is “poking fun at dick-swinging supremacy while serving up something that could reasonably soundtrack a rough-and-dusted pickup truck commercial.” More directly, Chris DeVille wrote in a (very short) piece for Stereogum that he likes “The Man” because the song “knows it’s ridiculous and it relishes that ridiculousness.” And in Spin, Anna Gaca suggests that the song “gets a lot better when you start believing that it’s narrated by the villain, and that the Killers are subtly shimmying some kind of truth to power.”

I understand the impulse behind these readings, but I’m not sure the text of “The Man” supports them. For one thing, to read “The Man” as a critique of masculinity feels like an excuse for enjoying a song with frankly uninspiring lyrics (“I’ve got gas in the tank, I’ve got money in the bank,” “Don’t try to teach me, I’ve got nothing to learn,” etc.). Gaca, to her credit, considers that very point in her review, conceding that “the lyrics are pretty cliché” and “not exactly something you’ll find yourself searching for deep-seated meaning in.”

But even if the lyrics were technically stronger, I still don’t think they’d support such a reading, because the content of every element of the song celebrates the subject matter. Every line is a boast of the speaker’s manliness; even a bizarre line like “USDA-certified lean” only sticks out because it’s novel, not because it’s skeptical of the song’s core conceit. The groove is infectious, an immediate call to the dance floor, and the roboticized backing vocals during the chorus are pure cheesy fun. Whenever I hear this song, the first thought that comes to mind is, “Hell yeah, I’m the man! This is awesome!” The fact that I’m not wholly comfortable with that response is the only reason I have for looking for critique within the song itself; it’s the natural way to reconcile my conflicted feelings about it.

At this point, I’d have to conclude that if Brandon Flowers wanted “The Man” to be an expression of regret or skepticism about his past as a performative stud, then it simply didn’t make it through the process. But I can’t say that Flowers is being disingenuous in that interview, either, because while the song does not effectively critique that persona, the music video most certainly does.

The video for “The Man” (dir. Tim Mattia, 2017) sees Flowers take on the roles of various caricatures of American masculinity: a Vegas lounge singer, a playboy, a daredevil motorcyclist, a greaser at a karaoke bar, and a high-roller in a cowboy get-up. Like the song itself, the video depicts these paragons of manliness at their most pumped-up, as they strut down the Strip, entertain the ladies, and lay down the big wagers. Unlike the song, though, the video does not leave those depictions unchallenged, but instead shows the consequences that such approaches to masculinity have.

Admittedly, the video’s skeptical outlook is gradual and at first rather fleeting. It’s not until the first chorus that we see some push-back against the characters that Flowers portrays: some eye-rolls behind the playboy’s back, a yawn from someone watching the lounge singer. In a video that’s driven by montage and built around five different plotlines, it’s easy to miss those first little jabs; I’ve had to watch it several times over while writing this review to catch as many of them as possible. They’re important, though, because they lay the groundwork for the later (and grander) declines these men experience. Without the eye-rolls and yawns, their downfalls might seem like sudden calamities; with them, and those falls become more and more inevitable.

Take this shot of an audience member for the lounge singer’s act. There’s nothing especially dramatic happening in the frame, but his facial expression conveys quite a bit. He’s not sold on the performance; if anything, he looks confused, as though he’s wondering why Vegas is still staging shows ripped from the days of Busby Berkeley or Flo Ziegfeld. This fellow resembles nothing if not the critic listening to “The Man” and asking himself, “Are these guys for real? This has to be a joke, right?” A shot like this is not essential to the video when considered in isolation, but as such moments accumulate the effect gets stronger and stronger. The viewer is left with the gut feeling that something eventually must give.

And, boy, do some of these guys fall hard. The high-roller goes on tilt at the roulette table and loses everything he has, before the casino tosses him out into the parking garage. The motorcyclist, haunted by footage of debilitating crashes (possibly his own highlights?), rips up his tapes in a self-pitying fit. After his karaoke set, the greaser starts flirting with a woman in the crowd right in front of her boyfriend, who proceeds to beat the snot of him. Even when the fall is comparably mild, there’s still a noticeable sense of dejection: the playboy on his knees when the ladies leave him, the lounge singer packing his glittery costume in a storage locker. To me, at least, the message of the video is clear and distinct: the version of masculinity presented in “The Man” is at best unfulfilling and at worst self-destructive. Turns out, you can in fact “break me down.”

This leads us to the question: if the video for “The Man” is a clear critique of traditional masculinity, does that make the song itself a critique as well? I’m still not convinced the answer is yes, but I can’t definitively say no, either. The music video is paratext for the song; it brings the reader to the text and offers some information for interpreting it, but it does not constitute the text. And given how most songs are heard without the context of the video, it’s not even a piece of paratext that people are necessarily likely to encounter (unlike, say, the cover a book or the title of a film). But I do think the video demonstrates that “The Man” can be employed in the context of critique, especially in the way that it asserts the speaker’s manliness to the point of insecurity—the singer doth protest too much, methinks.

Granted, that “The Man” is amenable to critical usage is not necessarily a point in its favor. It’s not like Negativland’s album Dispepsi proved that soda commercials were secretly subversive, just that they’re banality was amusing. But then again, it’s not like PepsiCo and The Coca-Cola Company were involved in the making of Dispepsi, either. The video for “The Man” was made with the band’s participation, and that does lend some extra weight to its reading of the song. Ultimately, I’m unable to find a clean resolution to this tension.

I think Dombal is on the money when he calls the song “a particularly phallic ink blot”: it provides a lot of potential answers, but no definitive ones. Alternatively, we could give Gaca the last word: “”The Man” is a bop. It would sound fan-fucking-tastic in a roller rink.” Somewhere between those two, you’ll find me.

But that’s enough from me. What do you think of “The Man” (either the song or the video, or perhaps the union of the two)? Can you think of any works of art you feel similarly conflicted about? Sound off in the comments below!

Normally this is where I would plug some previous piece of mine which is tangentially related to the one you just read, but this time I’ll instead link to a video essay by YouTuber Sarah Z entitled “The Politics of Dr Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog”. Her video also dives into the question of how to approach a work which appears to both endorse and critique the same idea. If you at all found this post interesting, I’d give her video a watch.

Take care, and thanks for reading!

Classics Club #1: “The Dyer’s Hand” by W. H. Auden

For a number of reasons, I knew that I wanted to start my Classics Club project with a look at W. H. Auden’s The Dyer’s Hand. For one, of all the books on my list, it’s the only one that I’d read any part of; during the first semester of my MFA program, I had to read several essays from the book and then write poems inspired by them. For another, as a work of literary criticism, I thought that The Dyer’s Hand might provide a high-level view from which to consider the rest of the books on the list. And for a third, it just happened to be next on my queue regardless.

But while I was reading it, I found it difficult to settle on a direction to take this post. After the first three or four essays, I thought about comparing Auden’s fragmentary style to the philosophical inquiries of Ludwig Wittgenstein, but then Auden’s style became more streamlined and structured as the collection went on. I thought about comparing my thoughts on various artworks to Auden’s, but let’s just say that he’s seen Don Giovanni infinitely more times than I have. And I thought about discussing the Ariel/Prospero distinction he mentions in his essay on Robert Frost, until I remembered that I wrote such an essay in grad school and decided I didn’t want to repeat myself.

I was completely stuck, until I happened upon a discussion that has apparently been raging across the internet: the state of the negative review. It’s a topic that the book-blogging community raises frequently (see, for instance, this post from Krysta of Pages Unbound), but of late the topic has come up more in the popular press. In recent months we’ve seen Kyle Paoletta decry the overly-celebratory nature of TV criticism for The Baffler, Rob Harvilla contemplate the role of the take-down in the age of social media for The Ringer, and sci-fi author John Scalzi defend the virtues of the pan on his blog. And I found all this fascinating in the context of The Dyer’s Hand, because if high-brow W. H. Auden were to walk into this conversation that’s been going on, he’d actually be the most skeptical of the negative review’s value.

In the first essay in The Dyer’s Hand, entitled “Reading,” Auden says that a critic ought to perform at least one of the following tasks when discussing a work:

1) Introduce me to authors or works of which I was hitherto unaware.

2) Convince me that I have undervalued an author or a work because I had not read them carefully enough.

3) Show me relations between works of different ages and cultures which I could never have seen for myself because I do not know enough and never shall.

4) Give a “reading” of a work which increases my understanding of it.

5) Throw light upon the process of artistic “Making.”

6) Throw light upon the relation of art to life, to science, economics, ethics, religion, etc.

The Dyer’s Hand, pp. 8-9

Looking closely at this list, one can conclude that Auden doesn’t really see aesthetic appraisal as a vital role for the critic. Auden’s ideal critics should provide context, draw connections, share discoveries, and reveal truths, but it’s not clear that they should provide up-or-down judgments as to whether a book is good. The task which comes closest here is the second, and even there, it would seen that Auden wants the critic to go in a specific direction: to show that a work is better (or perhaps just more interesting) than the audience had given it credit for. He does not advocate that critics tear down works which they believe have been wrongly praised.

Indeed, throughout “Reading,” Auden is skeptical of the notion that writing bad reviews serves any purpose, and he addresses either directly or implicitly some of the common arguments in favor of the practice. An obvious argument would be that writing a negative review will persuade readers not to waste their time on a given work. But Auden reminds us that even a negative review acts as publicity and keeps a work in the current conversation. “Had Macaulay never written his review of Robert Montgomery,” he writes, “we would not today be still under the illusion that Montgomery was a great poet” (p. 10). Instead, Auden would have advised Macaulay to remain silent on the matter, allowing Montgomery’s work to fade into obscurity.

I’ll admit, I find this argument to be Auden’s weakest, or rather the least generally applicable. Being a poet, Auden naturally has poetry on his mind as he’s writing this essay. Even by the standards of book publishing, the poetry market is incredibly small; one could probably count on one hand the number of people making a living solely off revenue from writing poems. There aren’t any big marketing campaigns to smear the latest chapbooks across the public consciousness, so reviews are basically all the advertising a poet may get. Thus, if their collection is terrible and no one wants to review it, then it will almost certainly be forgotten for all time. But the same rules don’t apply to Hollywood films and popular TV shows. The machinery supporting those cultural products is so large and powerful that there is little chance of them simply withering in the darkness.

But at other points, Auden’s critique of the negative review seems not only reasonable, but also insightful. For example, he takes up the notion that one must critique bad works of art, lest those works inspire artists to make even more inferior pieces. The problem with that argument is that influence doesn’t necessarily work like that. Those who make bad works of art often draw inspiration from masterpieces; they simply lack the skill or vision to duplicate their forebears’ successes. Think about how many terrible student films come from kids who fashion themselves the next Quentin Tarantino or David Fincher. “The more powerful and original a writer,” says Auden, “the more dangerous he is to lesser talents who are trying to find themselves. On the other hand, works which were in themselves poor have often proved a stumulus [sic] to the imagination and become the indirect cause of good work in others” (p. 10). That last point rings especially true for me: I find I have far more success in writing when I use mediocre poets as a model, rather than trying to write something like Milton or Dryden.

This is not to say that Auden sees no value in the take-down. First, he concedes that in practice, critics often can’t just refuse to review a bad work. The terms of their employment may require them to write something, and if they can’t stay silent then they’ll at least be honest. Second, Auden still believes that the “corruption of the language” should be “continually publicly attacked,” but even then he says the true culprit is not the work in question but “the misuse of language by the man-in-the-street, journalists, politicians, etc.” (p. 11). But that’s about as far as Auden is willing to go in this essay. Personally, I’d carve out a larger space for the negative review. In particular, the belief that one should connect a work “to life, to science, economics, ethics, religion, etc.” requires that a critic call out harmful or dishonest artworks when they encounter them, lest we pretend the realms of art and life are somehow separable. And the more prominent a work is in the culture, the more harm it can do, and the less compelling Auden’s arguments seem to become.

It will be interesting to see whether I can, or whether I should, keep to the spirit of Auden’s position for the rest of my Classic Club posts. At the very least, I always want to keep those six tasks he listed in mind when writing a post. I’m certain that I’ll dislike at least some of the next forty-nine books I read for this project, but whatever I write about them should have some substance beyond mere vitriol. It may be true that, as Auden claims, [o]ne cannot review a bad book without showing off” (p.11). But I’m sure one can do so without just showing off.

Please feel free to share your thoughts on The Dyer’s Hand or on negative reviews in the comments below. If you’d like to get a sense of what’s on the horizon for my Classics Club project, you can access my list of fifty books here. And as always, thank you for reading.