In Defense of Negative Criticism

Why critics should write negative reviews

There are many reasons for reviewers to be generous. I believe in most of those reasons, which I’ll put in a separate post, “In defense of positive criticism.” Substack has its sour spots, but my sense of it is that mainly it’s supportive. I’m an art historian and critic by profession, and most of what I write is neutral or descriptive. But when I write about fiction, I write almost exclusively negative pieces.

I think there are good reasons for doing so, and I think more people should write negative reviews, and more editors should solicit and publish them.

I particular negative judgments can help writers. By that I mean they can help all writers, including the ones under review. It’s always painful to get a negative review of your own work. I’ve gotten quite a few quite painful ones myself, and I’ve seen artists and writers get fiercely negative reviews in critiques. The difficulty of learning from those moments is real, and it’s a complicated subject, and it’s not my subject here. When I say that more reviewers should write negative reviews, I mean for the community of readers and people who make art.

So I am also not concerned, in this essay, with the authors’s reaction to a negative review of their work, and I also won’t be saying anything about how the best reviews and critiques balance positive suggestions with negative ones, or how empathy is both crucial and problematic from a reviewer’s or teacher’s point of view, or how it would be good if reviewers or teachers were trained in the psychology of trauma, or how reviwers who aren’t writers or artists can remain alert to the effects of their words, or how ideas about race, gender, identity and other personal qualities can smother and ruin the coherence of reviews.

Those are all important subjects, but in order to make the case for negative reviews in general, it’s helpful to suspend them for a few minutes and consider the negative review as a text that is read by people other than the writer being reviewed.

And—sorry—one more disclaimer. When I talk about negative reviews here I don’t mean the brief, often violently negative reviews, and their Doppelgängers the contentless and effervescently positive reviews (❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️ OMG love this book!!!), which together are the broken state of public discourse on art. They have nearly made the internet into a Manichean shouting match between hysterical pleasure and howling hatred. “Está chulo,” reads one five-star rating of Finnegans Wake on Goodreads. There’s also a one-word one-star review: “No.” Someone else calls Joyce a leprechaun. There seems to be a consensus, among one-star reviews, that Joyce was a condescending elitist snob.

Sometimes the negative reviews gather in swarms. In my experience a reliable way to find clouds of negative reviews is to look at the comments on contemporary classical music on YouTube, where you’ll almost always find people who feel it’s necessary to inform everyone that the piece in question isn’t music: an opinion that is no more helpful now than it was 110 years ago at the premiere of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring.

The problem with these is not that they are violent, but that they are unreasoned. In an essay in The Point called “Negative Criticism,” Sean Tatol notes that “writing about art can have any number of objectives, but lurking behind any analysis is the question of judgment.” Critics who avoid evaluation, he says, “won’t be able to help their readers learn how to judge art or to understand it.” Thoughtful judgments can start conversations, rather than ending them.

When I defend negative criticism I mean reasoned criticism, which is not just a compilation of opinions (“personally, this isn’t for me”) or assertions (“Está chulo”) but opinions with justifications and assertions with explanations.

Criticism means writing that offers reasoned judgments. The crucial difference is that criticism includes not only the judgment (“This book is appalling nonsense”) but the reasons for the judgment (“because the sentences don’t follow from each other”) backed up by specific examples (“on page 31, paragraph one”) and historical comparisons (“unlike, for example, the intentional chaos of B.S. Johnson or William Burroughs”). There is a large literature on this distinction between reasoning and hurling opinions. If the one-line takedowns on YouTube and elsewhere were augmented by just a few lines of explanation, public discourse might be miraculously restarted.

As long as “our dissent and assent” are “proportionable to the evidence,” as the critic Jonathan Richardson said back in the 18th century, we can have a fully engaged conversations on art and not just one-star reviews and lonely assertions.

Jonathan Richardson

All this goes for positive reviews as well: a short deliriously happy positive review without reasoned justifications and specific judgments is no more useful than a brief negative review.

And now on to my defense of negative reviews.

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Writing involves an ongoing negotiation with the past. Unlike academics, historians, and critics, people who make art have to continuously assess how they stand in relation to other art. Judgment is essential for orientation, and it can’t always be positive—otherwise you’d like everything, and you wouldn’t be able to guide your own work.

From an artist’s point of view history is a vector field, with arrows pointing toward or away from other artists’ practices. When it comes to navigating through the many possibilities it’s essential to have art and literary criticism that include negative judgments. A practice of criticism that does nothing but praise or describe can encourage and nourish a writer but it can’t help orient practice.

I’ve been writing experimental fiction for over fifteen years now, and I have found it very useful to write negative criticism. As I read novels, I post on sites like Goodreads, and now on Substack. Over the years I’ve accumulated about 900 pages’ worth of these essays.

I write to guide my own writing choices, and I try to make each book the occasion for considering a particular problem. Each novel or story teaches me something about my assumptions about what counts, for me, as good or successful fiction. If you’re a writer there’s a moment that you’re likely to feel at some point while you’re reading a new novel: no matter how absorbing the book is, no matter how wonderful the reading experience may be, you realize that you wouldn’t want to write a book just like the one you’re reading. That moment is the opening of critical distance. It may be that the author made a poor word choice, or an awkward transition, or they lost their focus at a crucial juncture—no matter how trivial, that’s the moment you can ask yourself: Why do I wish this had been different?

The essays I write come out of that moment, and they end up being about general ideas and theories: What does it mean to be a “rum” writer? What are the limits of the very long sentences some writers like? What’s the difference between intuitive writing and sloppiness? In what sense is metafiction a way of avoiding the depiction of suffering? What are the limits of unreliable narrators? What counts as a misunderstanding of current fiction? What makes writing too polished? How is it possible to write characters who have no motivation? What’s the difference between obsessive-compulsive narration and a simulation of it? Is the novel becoming uniform around the world? Do the mental states of characters always need explaining? What is imagination in literature? What counts as psychological complexity?

And so on, over hundreds of short essays, virtually all of them negative. Each of these questions developed from a dawning sense that the novel I was reading was going wrong, and that if I read closely enough I could understand why I felt that way and how the book might be written differently.

If I gave them stars, Goodreads fashion, only two or three of the three hundred reviews would have more than two stars. I don’t think this is unrealistic. My training as an art historian has alerted me to the fact that most examples of any given art, whether it’s painting, music, or fiction, are not successful. “Failure” sounds dramatic in our success-driven culture, but it is simply the usual condition of artwork, especially when there are so many tens of thousands of writers. (Remember Randall Jarrell’s overquoted line that a novel is a “prose narrative of some length that has something wrong with it.”) A failed novel in this sense is an average novel. It can still give pleasure and be memorable and moving, but it also fails, and the questions it raises can be very helpful. A review that focuses on that “something wrong,” and tries to understand it in a larger context,

Adam Mars-Jones

In this way of thinking the best reviews are fiercely independent and consistently critical, and they are written by people who have written fiction and poetry. An example of an excellent negative review is Nabokov’s one-page critique of Sartre’s Nausea, which is a perfect crystallization of the elements of interesting reviews and a cogent philosophic argument against philosophic novels. Everything Nabokov says is reasoned, specific, and historically contectualized. It’s almost entirely negative but informed and, I think, persuasive. I love Gary Indiana’s review of Thomas Bernhard’s sometimes intensely annoying work, and many pieces by Tim Parks and Adam Mars-Jones. All of them are writers of fiction. Mars-Jones produces long reflective essays that read, not so secretly, as diaries for his own use. He wrote me after his review of William Gaddis—an astonishing uninvited invective against an author who died in 1998—saying essentially he’d written quickly, and too much, but it was necessary at the time: a characteristically artistic, rather than journalistic, impulse. Essays like these are evidence of ongoing acts of discrimination, hopefully helpful to their authors, and possibly also models, for other people, of how judgment works.

Gary Indiana

Conclusion

That’s my argument in favor of writing reviews that may not be generous. Reviews that include reasoned, specific, historically indexed negative judgments can help artists and writers make their own work, and they can help readers and viewers find common ground. If half the reviews in the New York Times Book Review were negative in the way I’ve been describing, there might suddenly be more conversation about the directions and potential of contemporary fiction. We wouldn’t have to try to live on a nutrient-poor diet of superlatives like “compelling,” “moving,” “wonderful,” and “stunning”—they are the sugar of our critical diet. Reasoned, closely quoted, and historically informed judgments, no matter how negative, are what keep writing healthy.

Writing negative reviews has helped me enormously: I have a large collection of themes and problems in contemporary novels, and I know where I stand in relation to many of the current possibilities of the novel form. Reading with a negative critical eye has given me a landscape full of warning signs: I know how to steer around problems and what paths seem to lead forward.