On Nasty Reviews

I don't like writing them. Sometimes they're warranted.

Readers who’ve read my other work (which at this stage is most of you) might know that I started my freelancing career writing nasty reviews of right wing books. I was writing for a left wing publication at the time, but we were aiming at a non-leftist audience, so “why this right wing book and its worldview are both bad” was at least plausibly productive. But as fun as reviews like that can be to read, I don’t actually like writing them very much. But I find myself trying to finish up perhaps one of the most negative reviews I’ve ever written, and this strikes me as a good opportunity to talk about why I don’t like writing them, what leads me to do so anyway, and what (in my estimation) makes for a good pan.

I’m not against the negative review as such, and I love a good hatchet job. I think that overall there are probably too few negative reviews out there: not necessarily of books, because there are lots of books out there and you do hope, most of the time, that a book you chose read is going to be good. But the video game press, for example, is notorious for being in the pockets of the major studios. IGN’s review of Harry Potter: Hogwarts Legacy turned a lot of heads for admitting that, J. K. Rowling aside, the game is full of basic mechanical problems, dramatically narrows the world that so many readers came to know and love, and generally only barely lands on the right side of playable, and after all of that giving the game 9/10, because the studio expected a rave review for their AAA game and they were going to get what they (implicitly) paid for. Gaming needs more negative reviews. Opera absolutely needs more negative reviews, because what’s generally being served up at the Met these days is a crime against art, against taste, and generally against everybody who thinks music should sound good. Negative reviews are, ideally, a feedback mechanism that’s part of a larger artistic ecosystem. A negative review doesn’t have to be a true pan: sometimes an attempt just doesn’t work, and in a healthy artistic and intellectual culture there’s nothing wrong with saying so.

We, of course, live in a deeply dysfunctional artistic and intellectual culture, so it behooves us to take a more circumspect approach. And that’s really one of the reasons I don’t like writing them: because there are so many factors that militate against writing such a review—things like someone’s job security or my own, or the inconsequentiality of the work, or the work’s naïve ambition as contrasted with knowing ineptitude—I’m generally only writing bad reviews for things I find truly repulsive. A certain amount of dislike, then, is tied up in the experience of having read or seen something I despise and can’t just ignore. I’m also not entirely comfortable with the position that the negative review has come to occupy in a culture industry focused on consumption. There’s always a risk that an audience’s takeaway from a negative review will just be “don’t read/watch/play this one thing; spend money elsewhere,” and I don’t want to be read that way. Failure is often extremely interesting: I explicitly tell my students that I find a failed attempt at an ambitious paper far more interesting and productive than a safe, boring, “successful” paper. A paper that fails in interesting ways has succeeded as a learning exercise and probably deserves a pretty high mark. A book that fails in interesting ways has provided an opportunity for reflection: the resulting review may be in one sense negative (in that I don’t recommend the book) but will hopefully make an interesting essay in and of itself.

But sometimes one’s back is against the wall. For whatever reason—usually the prospect of getting paid—a given book must be written about, and the book is either manifestly wicked or perfectly useless. The latter is really another kind of wickedness, but more widely dispersed than the tight clustering of authorial and editorial will. The writer of a useless book would like to be seen acting without action, to seem learned without acquiring learning, and to seem adventurous while shunning even the taste of adventure. Above all this, of course, they would like money. The object of a true pan review is to deny them this as much as possible, using every unfair and illogical device that the powers of rhetoric will allow in order to appear more authoritative, more learned, and more interesting than the book in question could ever hope to be. If a pan is successful, the reviewer will be paid more and the author less than if it had not appeared; if it is wildly successful, the author’s reputation may suffer lasting damage. If you do not think it just that your subject should incur such damage, you should not pan their work.

When it works as it should, a good pan functions much the same as plague or famine in an unbalanced ecosystem. It puts participants in the artistic community on notice that there are critical eyes and ears in the world who expect good artistic and intellectual value from the books they read, the concerts they hear, the galleries they visit. And inevitably, the message of every good pan—those that are functioning well in this ecosystem—is that someone has gotten high on their own supply: they have lost touch with the moral, intellectual, or artistic community that provides both the background and the reason for their work. A critic who delights only in writing such reviews deserves one of their own: they have lost touch with the purpose of criticism, which is to invite people to look with loving attention at the creations of the human imagination. God desires not the destruction of His people but their wholeness; not exile but fellowship; not the lamentations of the lost but the bridal feast of the Lamb. Who are we critics to want otherwise?