Rant: The Death of Criticism (Yes, Again)

This post by Amitava Kumar reminded me of a debate that happened in several tents at the Jaipur Litfest, and that's been continuing in several virtual tents for the last decade in India. It's second only to the Whither? (Whither the Novel? Whither writing in English in India?) questions in the persistence with which it comes up, and can be summarised as Criticism in India is Dead, Let The Lamentations Begin.

I've always maintained, and continue to maintain, that we're wrong to say that there are no good reviewers left in India; personally, I look forward to reviews by Manjula Padmanabhan (trenchant and always honest), Chandrahas Choudhury, Anita Roy, Jai Arjun Singh and Sanjay Sipahimalani, to name just a few, as well as the old stalwarts. (All of them are friends, which may be seen as yet another pointer to the incestuous circles of Ind.Lit--but it may also be revealing that all of us became friends through our work. The bylines came before the coffees and the lunches.)

But Amit Chaudhuri captured one glaring absence in the Indian scene when he said that we have no Indian-grown magazine that has the authority--or the readability--of a NYRB, a Paris Review or of, say, the Far Eastern Economic Review.

Biblio and The Book Review have been soldiering on for years, and offer excellent reviews; but both operate under severe budgetary constraints, which limits the kind of reviewers they have access to (neither has the budget needed to dispatch books to reviewers outside India, for instance, or can match the kind of payments an NYRB or Granta might make), and the kind of articles they can commission (chiefly book reviews--no original reporting, limited fiction, etc). Civil Lines looked as though it might fill this gap for a while, but the gaps between issues are now chasm-sized; Caravan is promising, but it's just two issues old. The Little Magazine carries respectable book reviews, but where it scores is in offering essays and fiction in translation--it doesn't position itself as a literary magazine so much as a magazine of ideas.

The politics of book reviewing have changed over the last five or six years. We've contended with not just shrinking book review pages, but shrinking space for reviews: as I've often said, a 400-word 'review' is a blurb, and the most generous magazine spaces seldom go beyond 800 words, which is adequate for a book notice--it doesn't really allow for a serious review. The Hindu Literary Review comes out just once a month; Tehelka and The Calcutta Telegraph are unusual in that they often offer classic "editorial" space to book reviewers, but they remain rare examples. Most newspapers and magazines in India ghettoise books; it's rare to find writers (including historians and non-fiction writers) offering opinions or commentary on the editorial and op-ed pages.

Books page editors struggle to balance the political needs of their editors: several of the more respected publications use the books pages as a kind of social gossip section. This is actually quite fascinating. It makes the books pages a great way to track who's in and who's out, as though it were a kind of Sensex of the social world, but it doesn't do much for books pages as literary pages.

Many of the old conventions--a full disclosure on the part of the reviewer of biases, the practice of not assigning a book to a hostile (or an eager-to-please-the-author) reviewer, even the practice of assigning books to experts in the field--are observed only by a tiny handful of reviewers and books page editors. And as many of us know, this *is* an incestuous circle: the worlds of publishing and writing are still very small in English-speaking India. This has its benefits--it's easier for young or emerging writers to find space in the circle, but it turns into a kind of Indian joint family system after a while, where everybody knows why Cousin x has a blood feud on with Maasi y. Many of us have also watched the disappearance of some of our best reviewers off the books pages with some alarm: as Arvind Krishna Mehrotra said, there's no satisfaction to writing a blurb-sized book review with just a week in hand to consider the book, and you see far fewer reviews by the likes of Mukul Kesavan, Ram Guha, Sunil Khilnani and company than you might have just a few years ago.

Up to this point, what I've offered are the old, familiar lamentations. This often turns into a pointless, circular argument. Reviewers in India often admit that they hold Indian writers to a lower standard--or expect less of their work--than they have for the Junot Diazes and Lorrie Moores of the world. And of course, reviewers blame books page editors; editors often cite the relative pusillanimity of today's reviewers, who won't give a negative review to a Big Name Author, and many editors also say that there are very few reviewers with the right reading credentials. Everyone blames publishers for highlighting and pushing trivial books; publishers blame the media for concentrating on the fluff instead of on works of substance. Faintly, in the distance, a few voices lament that no one pays any attention to poetry, works in translation and children's books, but no one pays any attention to them. And we can continue like this ad infinitum ad nauseum.

I don't have solutions to offer, just a few questions.

1) Might it change the situation if publishing houses fill the gap between mainstream media and literary magazines by continuing to publish anthologies of new writing, and to commission anthologies of short stories etc? Several of them are experimenting with new forms: Penguin and Tranquebar have commissioned novella-length work recently, marketing them as Metro Reads and as easy, accessible reading.

For this to work, though, gatekeeping standards need to be much higher than they've been, and I say this as someone who's committed my fair share of sins by letting average work through the gates, both in publishing and in journalism, because of deadline pressures and other exigencies. It would be great to have more ruthless editors; to have anthologies so good that writers would mudwrestle each other just to get their bylines in the Table of Contents.

2) Is part of what we're lamenting part of a wider decline in the quality of our public intellectuals? Ram Guha gave an interesting talk recently about the demise of the bilingual intellectual--in passing, he mentioned that he had trouble naming the next generation of public intellectuals with all-round interests under the age of 40. This might be part of a slow degeneration in the overall quality of debate in the public sphere: I would love to see more dissent and informed response, not just in the field of books and writing, but in a wider sense.

3) And an aside to published writers: when was the last time you had fun writing a review? Do most published writers feel free to criticise a "colleague", and would they spend as much time crafting a truly entertaining, thoughtful review as they would on turning a piece of fiction? (Damn, I miss Dom Moraes: one of the last of the grand old school of reviewers, absolutely fearless, absolutely honest and such an entertainer.)

End of rant, back to the deadlines, and thank you for listening.

The BS Column: Gunfight at the I'm-Not-OK Corral

(Published in the Business Standard, 8th July, 2009)


"Roberta Silman in the Boston Globe is a moron.” It was the first of 27 tweets—short, messages uploaded on a Twitter feed—that the writer Alice Hoffman posted last week, in response to an unenthusiastic review of her book by Silman. Over the next few hours, Hoffman fumed, ranted, and then published Silman’s email id and phone number on Twitter, inviting her fans to “tell Roberta Silman off”.

Apres le deluge, le backlash. Hoffman’s tweets went viral on the Net; facing a growing tide of criticism, the author attempted to defend herself, then pulled her Twitter feed, then issued a grudging, lame apology. Next up was Alain de Botton, reacting to a negative review of his book, The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work. His infamous post on reviewer Caleb Crain’s blog: “I will hate you till the day I die and wish you nothing but ill will in every career move you make.”

For both authors, these episodes were harsh training in the nature of the Net. Hoffman was unprepared for the public disapproval she encountered. De Botton, not accustomed to blogs, assumed that his bitter, angry message was more in the nature of a private email or letter. General rule of thumb for authors: assume that anything you post on the Net is public. Including emails. And if you think you can post-and-delete, two words: Google cache.

Beyond the question of whether it’s wise to share your reactions to a review on the world wide web (short answer: no) is the issue of whether it’s wise to react to a review at all. In 1951, Joseph Stern wrote a dismissive review of Catcher in the Rye for the New York Times Book Review: “This Salinger, he’s a short-story guy. And he knows how to write about kids. This book, though, it’s too long. Gets kind of monotonous. And he should’ve cut out a lot about these jerks and all that crumby school. They depress me.” J D Salinger never responded, and never needed to. Catcher in the Rye has lasted; Stern’s opinion is more or less forgotten.

It is so tempting to respond, though, and between them, Hoffman and de Botton have the traditional reasons for calling out a reviewer who’s displeased an author. There’s the “Who the hell is X?” argument, often used by an author who says s/he deserves to be reviewed by a peer/fellow writer. This is just plain wrong for books of general interest; your readers are not going to be limited to a circle of your peers, and most decent reviewers have built their own set of critical skills.

There’s the “I put in so much hard work” argument, also specious—the reviewer or reader is not obliged to note the quantity of blood, sweat and tears that go into a book; it will always be the quality of the work that counts. And there’s the thing that gets to a lot of authors, and publishers—it hurts to be criticised. Most authors want approval, period; and many publishers have to work hard to reign in the impulse to defend the author from what they see as an unfair or specious review.

The single biggest complaint authors make is that the review is somehow slanted, a personal attack—the reviewer has reacted more to the author’s reputation, his or her fame, his or her personality, than to the book. A fascinating experiment from Fourth Estate, The Anonthology, offers a look at what might happen if you read a story just as a story, with no reference to the author.

The Anonthology is a selection of stories written by various authors—Joyce Carol Oates, Chimamanda Adichie, Philip Hensher among them—and invites you to guess who wrote what. It changes the reading experience, to read without prejudice or expectation, to see each piece as unfamiliar, contextless. However, the one time a publisher attempted to ensure fair reviews by sending out books in plain black covers, without blurbs or authors’ names, the experiment failed—neither reviewers nor authors would back it.

So how does an author deal with an unfair book review? In Reading Myself and Others, Philip Roth includes a letter he wrote to Diana Trilling after she reviewed Portnoy’s Complaint. Roth’s letter is 2,000 words long—and he never sent it. He offers five reasons for not mailing the letter—the author does not wish to appear to be piqued, writing the letter is sufficiently cathartic, it is unlikely that the critic will change her mind, loved ones suggest you shouldn’t.

It’s Roth’s fourth reason that should be memorised by all authors, even the genuinely aggrieved: “Where is it engraved in stone that a novelist shall feel himself to be ‘understood’ any better than anyone else does?”