Review of a review of the reviewers

The dwindling prestige of the critic
The palming off of reviewing as a side-gig is a sign of the dwindling status and prestige of
the role of the critic and there are some regrettable unintended consequences. Indeed,
some of the stories that Chong tells suggest that President Biden should sign an executive
order forbidding the practice.
You see, novelists, when reviewing someone else’s efforts, often have more skin in the
game than a professional critic and arguably can muster less distance. They know how
hard it is to write a novel, and how devastating and embarrassing a snarky review can feel.
More selfishly, why would a novelist give a bad review to someone that might be
reviewing their novel the following week? What if that writer is a judge on a prize
committee? What if others judge the negative review to be motivated by malice or envy?
There are unpredictable and even long-term consequences. Chong records one instance
when a reviewer was confronted, years later, at a party by the wife of someone who had
been on the receiving end of a bad review: “You know, you’ve ruined his life!”
So instead of writing bad reviews, reviewers tend to “play nice” or couch what they feel.
What if they really loathe the book? They can talk around it, giving a plot summary or
reflecting on the wider literary field of which the book forms a part, maybe throwing in
some tempered evaluation in the final paragraph.
However, all these considerations disappear when
reviewing the book by a really famous author. You
should never go hard on a first-timer, but big game is fair game. There is an unspoken
rule that you can punch up, but not down. The celebrities can take a bit of rough handling.
It won’t have the same effect on their sales and they go to different parties to you anyway.
Bad reviews and contrarian takes can get people talking, which is why the hatchet jobs
end up getting anthologised.
That readerly pleasure is far less guilty if aimed at a tall poppy. If you’ve decided to let
loose in your review on the latest Franzen, there is a bit of incentive to go in hard and not
to be mealy mouthed. It’s a good way of getting noticed. Franzen doesn’t rely on reviews
for his success, the way a fledgling novelist might, and look at the amount of space that
gets devoted to him in the books section, space that might be nurturing up-and-coming
talent.