Trust the Critic?

The book review's tenuous state

I have a working theory that honest criticism, when it comes to new fiction, is getting more difficult to find. This is the fault of institutions—professional book review sections, magazines, and journals. As the mainstream media withers, so do book reviews and broader arts coverage, and there are fewer institutional voices to turn to, critics who are paid a living wage to make sense of what is newly published. New novels from prestige presses have been hyped since time immemorial. What is changing, I believe, is that fewer and fewer of these books warrant the hype. Many of them just aren’t very good.

This becomes apparent when dissent, increasingly rare, is registered. Brandon Taylor and Dwight Garner have reached points in their careers where they can risk writing honestly about books they view as artistic failures. Garner, in particular, is an uncommon specimen—the professional, well-compensated book critic. Most critics now are freelancers, and often working novelists themselves. This sets up an obvious conflict of interest that has only worsened over the last decade as full-time critics vanish; a novelist looking to advance their own career is only going to review a new book so honestly. The reviewer understands the careerist incentives at play. Lavish praise and find a new ally. Pan a book aggressively enough and the writer’s own book, when it eventually appears, could face a similar reception. Lauren Oyler’s new essay collection may have, in fact, been lackluster, but the critics reviewing her were not going to pretend it was good since Oyler had been the rare critic to brandish a blowtorch. She had not been kind. Hence, her reviewers wouldn’t be kind to her. Editors commissioning reviews appeared to authorize honesty. A critic-novelist treads lightly around new fiction because they may operate in the same professional class circle as those getting reviewed. Write negatively enough of your peers, and face a kind of social death. The literary world, less robust than it once was, traffics on performative niceties, with a river of passive-aggression coursing below. There are few open feuds anymore. The literary magazines, journals, and review sections rarely greenlight clashes along the lines of aesthetics; certain novelists, once lionized enough, cannot be lashed, even if their output slackens.

This is a demented state of affairs, and a poor reflection of our culture. I sincerely cannot tell, from reading most reviews, if a novel is actually up to snuff. I can only guess. Novels reviewed rapturously, even a decade ago, could be quite successful on their own terms, existing as works of art that at least earned some of their praise. The old publicity machine minted many literary stars. For all its faults, that literary hivemind’s track record was rather strong: the novels of Zadie Smith, Jonathan Franzen, and Donna Tartt, for example, all endure, and it’s difficult to argue that The Secret History or The Corrections aren’t aesthetically superior to most of the competition. They warranted their accolades. And all of these writers, as well as many of their contemporaries, couldn’t expect only rote praise. The critics, in an economically stronger and ideologically richer institutional environment, would not hesitate to skewer the titans. Plenty of critics treated Franzen’s Purity and Tartt’s The Little Friend with skepticism. Earlier generations knew a similar terrain. In Blake Bailey’s fraught if fascinating biography of Philip Roth, the star novelist is shown to be a hustling careerist of the first order, straining to game out what critics might say of him and even trying to cajole a few, like Anatole Broyard, ahead of publication. Even after winning a National Book Award and achieving a number-one bestseller, Roth could not rest easy. The critics would not reflexively celebrate every effort. Many of his novels of the 1970s were met with lukewarm reviews.

Acclaimed writers today enjoy far more deference, as well as those the publishing industry has designated the breakout stars. Praise is numbingly uniform. There are a few exceptions, like Sally Rooney, but she is sui generis as the rare celebrity-literary force. The literary establishment has recently decreed that James, Percival Everett’s latest novel, is his magnum opus. It has won the National Book Award and could win the Pulitzer Prize. James, a reimagining of Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of Jim, is plainly inferior to several other novels Everett has published, including Erasure, So Much Blue, and Telephone. The critics who have read these novels with genuine consideration would probably agree. Everett is one our great living writers, but James is not a great novel. It is, at best, a good and flawed one, and I predict, like the critic who is currently reviewing it for a magazine I plan to launch next year (more on that later), it will not be read widely a decade from now. Everett’s other novels might. Why, then, were so many hosannas sung for James? The discerning reader senses a certain kind of politics taking hold, or groupthink. For many decades, Everett was an underappreciated author, and typically published with academic and independent presses. He was quietly brilliant, and didn’t receive acclaim commensurate with his talents. In the last few years, that has all changed, thanks in part to “American Fiction,” a middling if lauded film based on Erasure. The closest historical parallel to Everett might be William Faulkner, who won Pulitzer Prizes for two novels, A Fable and The Reivers, that virtually no one reads today. These Pulitzers were handed out after Faulkner had already won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Few literary critics in the 1950s, though, argued A Fable and The Reivers were two of Faulkner’s best books. Malcolm Cowley’s The Portable Faulkner had already rescued Faulkner from obscurity, and novels like The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, and Absalom, Absalom! were already assessed as modern classics. Novelists themselves, along with the critical establishment, championed those works. None of the young writers coming to the fore in the 1950s and 1960s were looking to The Reivers for inspiration—or even pretending to.

Is it too harsh to liken James to late innings Faulkner? Perhaps. But the laudatory surge, like that around Rachel Kushner’s Creation Lake, begins to seem suspect. Not to belabor a recurring theme of mine, but this is where Substack will prove to be the disruptive and necessary force. Critics like Naomi Kanakia, Sam Kahn, and Celine Nguyen write honestly about literature. There is no question, reading them, you understand exactly what they think about a given book, and their budding readership clearly trusts them. Consuming mainstream literary coverage can feel like wading into a fog of war, straining to discern what is real and what is theater. A critic today doesn’t perform for their readership so much as seek approval from literary peers, hunting for the “correct” positioning and remaining there. It all makes for tedious reading. Once, critics would bitterly battle one another over the merits of certain literature, and even the laureled had to beware; acid pens really were everywhere, to the point where some fretted that critics could be trying to chase clout by writing exceedingly venomous reviews. Friends didn’t even spare friends. Mary McCarthy’s status as a New York intellectual didn’t save The Group from withering reviews from her close colleagues and friends. If they were ultimately wrong—as plenty of contemporary critical coverage can be—the barrage still spoke to a willingness to challenge the consensus. I don’t miss much from the 1950s, but I miss that. I sense, at least, a revival may be forced from the outside. The literary world is not as charming as it once was, and the insurgents know that. They’ve got the means now to speak out.