Weighing in on the critics, in the New York Times

Isn't Charles McGrath a right voice in our time?

(Wait. Did that sound critical?)

This week the New York Times Book Review asked Charles McGrath and Adam Kirsch the question: Is Everyone Qualified to Be a Critic? It's a question I often ask myself. A question I've been asking myself for the past 20 years, in fact—throughout my reviews of many hundreds of books for print and online publications, my jottings on behalf of the competitions I've judged, and my meanderings on this blog.

What makes me qualified? Am I qualified? And do I do each book—whether or not I like it—justice?

I do know this: If my mind is dull, if I am distracted, if I feel rushed, if I've grown just a tad weary of this trend or that affect, I won't review a book, not even on this blog, where I own the real estate. Writers (typically) work too hard to be summarily summarized, falsely cheered, unhelpfully glossed. Reviews should only be treated as art (as compared, say, to screed or self-glorification). It's important, as McGrath notes, that we reviewers keep reviewing ourselves.

His words:

It’s surprising how much contemporary critical writing is a chore to get through, not just on blogs and in Amazon reviews but even in the printed paragraphs appearing below some prominent bylines, where you find too often the same clichés, the same tired vocabulary, the same humorless, joyless tone. How is it, you wonder, that people so alert to the flaws of others can be so tone deaf when it comes to their own prose? The answer may be the pressure of too many deadlines, or the unwritten law that requires bloggers and tweeters to comment practically around the clock. Or it may be that the innately critical streak of ours too frequently has a blind spot: ourselves.

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a brief appreciation of William Gass: Prague, years ago

Years ago, as I have sometimes written, I set off to Prague with my family for a writer's workshop.  It was my second experience among writers; my first had taken place the year before in Spoleto.  This is how it was, then—me sneaking my literary education into a family vacation.

Jayne Anne Phillips led my workshop, and when Jayne Anne announced the names of two writers selected for an individual consultation with William Gass, I found myself among them. 

I was working on a novel that took place in El Salvador.  I had brought twenty pages with me.  This was duly submitted to Mr. Gass in advance of my consultation, and as I climbed the many stairs to our meeting room, my heart was (as they say) in my throat.  I did not know the language of literature then.  I hardly knew what I was doing.  The stairs were narrow.  The room, in memory, was empty but for him—such a head of white hair—and a spill of yellow sun.  I sat across from him—I must have sat, though I can't recall a second chair—and waited for word.

I waited.  And I waited for word.

It seemed that an hour passed before Mr. Gass spoke.  When he did, he said (and about this I'm certain):  "There is a typo on the top of page 13."

I nodded, duly.  Waited for more.

"Otherwise," he finally said, "this is very good."

And that was it.  That was the consultation.  That was all I had and everything I had as I continued to work on that book.

Later that night, Mr. Gass would read at a bar in the center of Prague—a long passage about a candy shop.  My son, seven or so at the time, was sitting on my lap in well-behaved silence.  When the story stopped, and before the applause could begin, my son announced to the jam-packed room:  "That was waaaaaaaaaay too long."  Mr. Gass looked our way through the dark and slightly smiled.  My son, the young critic.

My Salvador novel was never published, by the way.  After 15 years of work I stripped away the fiction and wrote the Salvador memoir that became Still Love in Strange Places (W.W. Norton).  Sometimes very good is simply not good enough.

I write all of this today in honor of Mr. Gass, whose new book, Life Sentences, about language and style, is so intelligently reviewed by Adam Kirsch in the New York Times Book Review.  Mr. Gass cares about sentences, and so, frankly, do I, as I indicate in my own Chicago Tribune Review today of American Dervish.

Call it a bad habit, this caring about sentences. But it's not one easily shrugged away.

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The critics among us

A few weeks ago, as readers of this blog know, I sat down to read James Wood's How Fiction Works and reveled in its elucidations and provocations, its lusty, kinetic, uncompromising language, its call to writerly action:

Realism, seen broadly as truthfulness to the way things are, cannot be mere verisimilitude, cannot be mere lifelikeness, or lifesameness, but what I must call lifeness:  life on the page, life brought to different life by the highest artistry. 

I got the same charge early this morning reading "Why Criticism Matters," the cover story of this weekend's The New York Times Book Review, which yields the floor to literary critics Stephen Burn, Katie Roiphe, Pankaj Mishra, Adam Kirsch, Sam Anderson, and Elif Batuman, all of whom have been invited to report on "what it is they do, why they do it and why it is important."  Alas.

There is much value in the whole, much in the way of substance and fine thinking, a little necessary historicism, not too many bricks thrown at the obvious.  I am particularly fond, in this sequence of essays, of the emphasis that both Katie Roiphe and Adam Kirsch place on the essential eloquence of the literary critic—on the responsibility the critic bears to write well and meaningfully.  Here, for example, is Roiphe:

Now, maybe more than ever, in a cultural desert characterized by the vast, glimmering territory of the Internet, it is important for the critic to write gracefully. If she is going to separate excellent books from those merely posing as excellent, the brilliant from the flashy, the real talent from the hyped — if she is going to ferret out what is lazy and merely fashionable, if she is going to hold writers to the standards they have set for themselves in their best work, if she is going to be the ideal reader and in so doing prove that the ideal reader exists — then the critic has one important function: to write well.

By this I mean that critics must strive to write stylishly, to concentrate on the excellent sentence. There is so much noise and screen clutter, there are so many Amazon reviewers and bloggers clamoring for attention, so many opinions and bitter misspelled rages, so much fawning ungrammatical love spewed into the ether, that the role of the true critic is actually quite simple: to write on a different level, to pay attention to the elements of style. 

Kirsch concludes his essay like this:

Whether I am writing verse or prose, I try to believe that what matters is not exercising influence or force, but writing well — that is, truthfully and beautifully; and that maybe, if you seek truth and beauty, all the rest will be added unto you.

Perhaps I focused most intently on these passages because I keep discovering, at the age I have become, how little good writing is starting to matter to an alarming number of people—to those holding to the notion that grammatical errors (not witty errors, mind you, just plain mistakes) make writing more "hip," to the celebrants of books that are plied with all manner of (unintended) language abuses, to those who declaim against masterful books with sentences riddled with prepositional failures and astonishing noun-verb mismatches. We need standard bearers in times like this, intelligence on the page (and screen), and when I read Wood or Roiphe or Kirsch or the others featured in the Times today, I am elevated. These aren't blustering writers, or showy ones.  They are well-read critics with capacious minds who teach not just through the substance of their sentences, but by the very form of them.

I thought of myself as a critic once, writing for Salon.com, Chicago Tribune, Philadelphia Inquirer, Book, so many others.  I don't see myself as a critic any longer, forswearing reviews, on this blog, in favor of reflections, and still seeking to learn from the masters.

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