hatchet job essay

Edgar Allan Poe’s Hatchet Jobs

In October 1845, a short-lived New York magazine called the Aristidean published a review of Edgar Allan Poe’s story collection Tales . The article spouted praise like a dancing fountain. Poe’s detective story “The Gold-Bug” “perfectly succeeded in his perfect aim.” “The Fall of the House of Usher” was “grand and impressive.” “Murders in the Rue Morgue” was marked by “profound and searching analysis.”

And, overall, Poe wielded the kind of literary power that “can only be possessed by a man of high genius,” according to the anonymous reviewer—who was almost certainly Edgar Allan Poe himself.

Poe’s reputation as a major American writer is unassailable. He invented the modern detective story, successfully transported the gothic tale across the Atlantic, and wrote classic dark poems like “The Raven,” “Annabel Lee,” and “The Bells.” But, during Poe’s lifetime, such high points were intermittent, hard-fought, and rarely financial successes. More often, Poe made his living by toiling at now-forgotten magazines like the Southern Literary Messenger , Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine, and Graham’s Magazine .

This struggle to make art amid his struggles—he was an orphan, an alcoholic, an academic bust at the University of Virginia and West Point, and often on the run from creditors—is the crux of the American Masters documentary Edgar Allan Poe: Buried Alive , which airs on PBS October 30. Through dramatic readings of Poe’s work and a moody performance of Poe himself by Denis O’Hare, the film captures an author scrabbling for a place in the literary world. His gloom, the film suggests, became a kind of asset for Poe, providing a tone for his stories and poetry as well as a means of attack against the “puffing” of American authors that defined much literary criticism at the time.

Poe churned out reams of puff-free reviews—the Library of America’s collection of his reviews and essays fills nearly 1,500 dense pages. Few outside of Poe scholarship circles bother reading them now, though; in a discipline that’s had its share of so-called takedown artists, Poe was an especially unlovable literary critic. He occasionally celebrated authors he admired, such as Charles Dickens and Nathaniel Hawthorne. But, from 1835 until his death in 1849, the typical Poe book review sloshed with invective.

Tackling a collection of poems by William W. Lord in 1845, Poe opined that “the only remarkable things about Mr. Lord’s compositions are their remarkable conceit, ignorance, impudence, platitude, stupidity, and bombast.” He opened his review of Susan Rigby Morgan’s 1836 novel,  The Swiss Heiress , by proclaiming that it “should be read by all who have nothing better to do.” The prose of Theodore S. Fay’s 1835 novel,  Norman Leslie , was “unworthy of a school-boy.” A year later, Poe doomed Morris Mattson’s novel  Paul Ulric  by pushing Fay under the bus yet again, writing, “When we called  Norman Leslie  the silliest book in the world we had certainly never seen  Paul Ulric .”

Such candor did Poe’s career no favors. Fay was the editor of the  New York Mirror , where Poe would later go begging for a job in 1844, landing only a low-level copyediting gig. Three years earlier Poe had declared H. T. Tuckerman, editor of the  Boston Miscellany , an “insufferably tedious and dull writer,” a statement that haunted Poe a year later when he submitted “The Tell-Tale Heart” to Tuckerman for publication. “If Mr. Poe would condescend to furnish more quiet articles,” Tuckerman wrote in his icy rejection letter, “he would be a most desirable correspondent.” Upon Poe’s death, critic Rufus Griswold wrote an obituary for the  New York Tribune  of surprising meanness. Griswold claimed that Poe “had few or no friends” and that “few will be grieved” by his passing—perhaps an act of revenge for Poe’s own cruelties toward Griswold as a rival critic. Poe once dismissed him as a “toady” destined to “sink into oblivion.”

For some writers, such salvos might be a badge of honor of a sort, examples of a nervy truth-teller unafraid to call out bad books and overrated writers. No doubt, Poe was moved to puncture what he saw as the overinflated literary egos of the East Coast. He spent years writing harsh sketches of them for a series called “The Literati of New York City”—a supremely bad move for a writer hoping to make a living there. The twist, though, is that as a critic Poe often treated ethics as disposably as we do coffee filters. That self-dealing rave review is just one example. Poe plagiarized multiple times early in his career (most notably in  The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym  and “Usher”), but still spent much of 1845 leveling plagiarism accusations against Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Poe delivered his attacks under his own name, but also anonymously, and through an imaginary interlocutor named “Outis.” But for all of Poe’s bluster, evidence of Longfellow’s thievery was thin, and the poet, wisely, didn’t respond. “Poe’s Longfellow war,” said publisher Charles Briggs, who’d hired Poe at the  Broadway Journal , “is all on one side.”

Poe’s obscurity as a critic is the reward of the hatchet-job man, some might say—conducting ill-tempered attacks on writers is an ugly and karmically inadvisable practice. (Just ask the ones who’ve been stung by a negative review.) But if the proper fate of the so-called hatchet job is to be banished to the memory hole, why are there so many enduring examples of the form? To highlight just a handful: In 1865, Henry James declared Walt Whitman’s  Drum-Taps  “an offense against art.” In 1895, Mark Twain savaged James Fenimore Cooper, stating that his work “has no order, system, sequence, or result; it has no lifelikeness, no thrill, no stir, no seeming of reality.” In 1959, Norman Mailer swung at his contemporaries in an essay titled “Quick and Expensive Comments on the Talent in the Room,” aiming at the likes of J. D. Salinger (“the greatest mind ever to stay in prep school”) and Jack Kerouac (“pretentious as a rich whore, as sentimental as a lollypop”). Dale Peck opened his 2002 review of a Rick Moody book by writing, “Rick Moody is the worst writer of his generation.” It went downhill from there.

Such pieces come quickly to mind to critics like myself, because the truth is—and it was a truth often lost on Poe—the critic who’s accused of flinging hatchets is usually wielding a scalpel. The critic’s job, in one regard, is to bring a sense of order to a chaotic literary world. Thousands of books are published every year, and somebody must do the job of sifting, sorting, and judging them with authority but without an agenda. That task has democratized in recent years, as readers on sites like Amazon and Goodreads hasten to champion a book or one-star it into the ether. But the old-fashioned critic has stuck around: A front-page rave on the cover of the  New York Times Book Review  can vault a book into the cultural conversation, and the literary prizes that critics are often called upon to judge can elevate a writer’s reputation or cement it.

But it doesn’t follow that a negative review is the opposite of a rave, at least from the perspective of that literary ordering; it’s simply an inverted way of accomplishing the same task. That is, so long as it’s done well, and to a purpose. Mailer’s pronunciamentos in “Talent in the Room” were indisputably condescending and macho; absurdly, he found no women writers worth his attention. But there was no mistaking that he was tub-thumping for an American literature that took risks and emphasized hard realities underneath America’s postwar largesse. Twain’s takedown of Cooper, in both its content and form, was a pleading for American fiction to find its sense of humor and lose its clichéd ideas about wilderness writing, or writing in general. James disapproved of a poet who aspired to national stature via what James saw as Whitman’s narcissism; Peck resented a writer so seduced by metaphor that it smothered intellectual precision.

And Poe—what mission stoked the fire of his negative reviews? Had he lived to read it, Poe might have appreciated Elizabeth Hardwick’s 1959 attack on the timidity of book reviews at the time: “Sweet, bland commendations fall everywhere upon the scene; a universal, if somewhat lobotomized, accommodation reigns,” she wrote. But the urge to fearlessly criticize is not the same thing as having strong ideas about what makes for good literature, and the frustrating thing about reading Poe’s criticism is how often it is a closed circuit, concerned only with itself. The idea that a review might be a launchpad for broader statements was foreign if not offensive to him. “Criticism is  not , we think, an essay, nor a sermon, nor an oration, nor a chapter in history, nor a philosophical speculation, nor a prose-poem, nor an art novel, nor a dialogue,” he wrote in 1843. “In fact, it  can be  nothing in the world but—a criticism.”

A number of his reviews open with a complaint that American writers were overly praised so as to distinguish them from the British colonizers from whose rule they had been free for only a few decades. Poe bemoaned “the gross paradox of liking a stupid book the better, because, sure enough, its stupidity is American.” But thoughts about what would make for a distinct American literature didn’t flow from Poe’s busy pen. In the context of his reviews, such statements were usually throat-clearing before what he saw as the matter at hand: nit-picking about meter and rhyme in poetry, plot points in fiction, and word choice and grammar in both. Critics make arguments; Poe registered complaints. An extended 1837 essay on William Cullen Bryant’s poetry finds Poe counting syllables and fussing over whether he might have better used the word “tomb” instead of “womb.” Poe’s own assessment of James Fenimore Cooper in 1843 turned literary criticism into a variant of an autopsy, assessing the sentence structure of one page of the book’s preface, line by tediously palpated line. Where Twain was witty, Poe was charmless. Where other critics might look for themes and innovations in poetry, Poe assigned himself the job of America’s toughest spondee cop.

Poe, in private, may have had a sense that this approach to criticism was fruitless. In an unfinished essay titled “A Reviewer Reviewed,” one Walter G. Bowen, a pseudonym for Poe, critiqued Poe’s reviewing style. “[His reviews] seem to me bitter in the extreme, captious, fault-finding, and unnecessarily severe,” he wrote. “Real, honest, heartfelt praise is a thing not to be looked for in a criticism by Mr. Poe.” Poe never finished the essay: It was found in a trunk among his possessions after his death. Perhaps a completed version would have revealed this display of self-loathing as just a performance, yet another example of Poe's piercing sarcasm. Yet it’s hard not to think of Poe’s classic story “The Tell-Tale Heart,” where the narrator’s urge to suppress the evidence of a violent past wars with his urge to confess it.

Originally published as 'Edgar Allan Poe's Hatchet Jobs' in the Fall 2017 issue of  Humanities  magazine, a publication of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

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Lauren Oyler’s defence mechanisms

Can the master of the hatchet-job place herself beyond criticism?

By Lola Seaton

The American critic Lauren Oyler is fun – very fun – to read. Not just because she is funny, although she is, nor because she is mean, which she can be, though her reputation for viciousness is overstated: her fabled takedown of the New Yorker writer Jia Tolentino indulges in mockery, and although this is surely partly why the essay allegedly crashed the London Review of Books ’ website, it is not wanton. The fun to be had reading Oyler owes something to her mastery of the internet, as does her popularity. She cut her teeth writing for Vice and her career has been distinguished by “lily-pads of semi-viral critical articles”. A self-described internet addict with a sizeable Twitter/X following, Oyler is fearsomely fluent in digital culture, especially the idioms and humour of social media. She knows how to sound interesting online and this has left its mark on her style. Her prose has the taut, incessant wit of repartee, as though each sentence had to be worthy of a tweet.

The other quality bequeathed, or at least heightened, by social media – where unselfconscious speech, difficult at the best of times, is impossible – is what she describes, in the introduction to her new collection of essays, No Judgement , as “anxious self-awareness”. To be precise: Oyler is not simply obsessively self-aware, which needn’t be particularly entertaining. Rather, she specialises in the performance of self-awareness, and it is her inventive experiments with this that make her prose exhilarating and original.

She is given to addressing her audience, deploying various kinds of arch self-reference, and ploughing through the fourth wall. Consider her new book’s first words: “Well, well, well. The book has started. There’s no turning back.” The joke, of course, lies in the playful misapprehension of the way books work: not only can the reader easily put the book down, but writing, too, is distinguished from speech by the possibility of turning back – of rephrasing and redacting. When Oyler first typed those words, when she revised them, even when she signed off the final proofs, she could turn back. Yet what was originally a pretence has become a reality; the sentences faked it till they made it. It’s a silly joke that brings with it serious metaphysical excitements. As Oyler observes of the “autofictional voice” in No Judgement , it “creates the illusion of a thinner boundary between the author and the reader”.

The new collection, subtitled On Being Critical , is certainly that. Of the six essays (plus an introduction and short epilogue), three are defences of commonly disparaged phenomena – gossip, autofiction, negative book reviews – and one is a critique of something it has become fashionable to celebrate: vulnerability. The other essays – the best – are personal. The first, about living in Berlin, ends, very effectively, on a winsome, “badly sentimental” note; the other, a racing inventory of the miserable symptoms of Oyler’s anxiety (from teeth-grinding to insomnia), is equally effective because it is entirely unsentimental.

The book takes a while to warm up. The opening pair of long essays, on gossip and reviewing, contain potted histories of Gawker.com and Goodreads, the latter including a digression into the origins of star ratings, which feels uncharacteristically formulaic; Oyler’s lively summary of her evidently diligent research didn’t convince me that she was truly interested in 18th-century guidebooks. Yet such moments are scarce. I found myself marvelling at the strenuous task Oyler had set herself: to write a book’s worth of essays – all “brand new and never published before”, as the press release crows – forgoing the discrete deadlines, fees and the imminent sense of a well-defined audience provided by magazines.

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Oyler has spoken of feeling “limited, particularly stylistically” when writing for publications, and relishes “the relative freedom a book” offers. Yet freedom, famously, often doesn’t feel very freeing. Here, it imposes the burden of self-propulsion, and the challenge of imagining and summoning one’s own readership. On a few occasions I wondered if Oyler misjudged hers. In the course of her essay about criticism, she refers to herself as a “snob” for, among other elitist misdemeanours, enjoying movies with subtitles and disliking happy endings. The essay is a defence of difficult art, and of the importance of distinguishing this from “popular forms of entertainment” such as “unimaginably dumb movies”. It’s a worthwhile argument eloquently made, but I suspect Oyler will be for the most part preaching to a choir of snobs. And the word itself, though funny, risks reproducing the cultural populism she is critiquing.

Also less present in the new book, now Oyler is setting her own homework, is the faintly disobedient boundary-pushing – the subtle violations of decorum – which gives much of her writing for magazines its gleam. The author of an autofictional novel, Fake Accounts , Oyler is increasingly a practitioner of what one might call autofictional criticism. Her essays frequently double as personal-romantic quests – there are often boyfriends in the background and allusions to melancholy – and are ingeniously self-reflexive: they partly tell the story of their own making, showing readers under the hood of her assignments in a mildly scandalous way.

Oyler’s “editor” is a recurring minor character. A long dispatch, for Harper’s , from aboard a nine-day “Goop” cruise – Gwyneth Paltrow’s wellness company, of vagina egg fame – alludes to the genesis of the piece (which is also an ultimately moving reflection on a stressful-sounding love triangle): “Last summer, I got an email from my editor asking, sneakily, among the how are you’s, ‘Have you ever thought about writing on wellness??’” Midway through an essay for Tank magazine about deadlines, Oyler confesses that she is “about three weeks late on this essay. There was a day last week when I told the editor I’d send it the next day, and then I didn’t… Then I didn’t send it ‘this week’, either. As I write I fear the editor has moved on without telling me.”

The technique gives her essays a titillating immediacy and almost illicit candour. If I didn’t enjoy the daring involved, however, part of me might resent it. “OK, that’s enough. I don’t want to write a book review without quotation marks…” Oyler writes, in a piece about WG Sebald for Harper’s , in lieu of a transition between an introduction about travelling to the German writer’s home town and discussing his work. Not only can these blunt gestures seem a little like cheating, but they are short cuts that arguably rely on the rest of us lumbering conformists continuing to take the long way round, persevering with our square openers and bland segues. The fourth wall can only be thrillingly torn down because some laboriously maintain it.

Self-reflexiveness is also a defence, of course, against being boring or predictable or clichéd. Oyler doesn’t simply avoid clichés; she names, shames and makes a show of sidestepping them (“Explaining why would fall into the cliché category, but basically…”, she writes in a typical passage in her Berlin essay). You could say clichés of writing, and the stylised experiences of contemporary life more generally, are Oyler’s material: like writing about a cruise for Harper’s , which David Foster Wallace famously did in the Nineties, or living in Berlin (and writing about living in Berlin).

As a strategy, it works. Clichés identified and ostentatiously averted – or, sometimes, indulged – can become springboards for fresh observations, just as warning readers that an upcoming metaphor may not land allays our complaints. Yet are there drawbacks to such relentlessly well-defended prose? Self-referential banter produces a conspiring sense of immediacy, but flagging artifice also establishes a kind of distance, as if keeping you at arm’s length. In Oyler’s novel especially, which, for all its unremitting cleverness and amusements, left me a little unmoved, I was undecided about some of the jokes, such as when the narrator reveals that she intends to “write a novel [NOT this one]”. It’s funny and audacious but part of what it risks is defiling the novel, contaminating it with a kind of speech that perhaps doesn’t belong there. In a virtuosic passage, the narrator sets up a profile on the dating site OkCupid, composing answers to prompts: “A perfect day (A day you’d feel great about): ‘i’ll know it when i see it’.” It struck me that the compulsive pleasures of these delectably witty responses – I felt like I could read reams of them – were not so different from the pleasures of reading the rest of the novel. Is this pleasure more of an internet pleasure than a literary pleasure? Is Oyler too fun to read?

Oyler’s overt self-awareness – which is of course awareness of us, her readers – makes us self-aware. We are constantly reminded we are an audience, plural. Like followers of a Twitter account, we are glad to be entertained but we rarely feel intimately addressed. In the passage about how the autofictional voice thins the boundary between author and reader, Oyler suggests this “is similar to the effect created by social media”. It’s an intriguing, not altogether convincing analogy, which applies to her autofictional novel – in which the narrator’s Twitter profile picture resembles Oyler’s real-life one – but less so to others. I’m not claiming to have never googled Ben Lerner or Sheila Heti, both of whom Oyler discusses a fair amount in No Judgement , but the illusory access their books provide to their real-life authors is not their primary appeal (Heti’s work especially feels blissfully offline). The interest of autobiographical novels, including Oyler’s own, has much more to do with the vitality and intelligence of the prose. To compare autofiction to social media, where intimacy is decidedly fake and self-scrutiny rampant, is to diminish the kind of intimacy voices in literature can provide. Such intimacy is always in a sense fictional but that doesn’t mean it’s false.

In her infamous essay for the LRB , Oyler mocks Tolentino for boasting: she “enjoys recreational drugs and straightforward books, and has so many friends that she is simply drowning in wedding invitations”; she attended “a ‘rowdy’ music festival with nine people (good for you)”. It sounds like she’s irritated by Tolentino’s obliviousness, but it may be more accurate to say she’s provoked by the chinks in Tolentino’s self-aware armour. After all, gloating – about having friends or doing drugs – is a mixture of self-aware and un-self-aware. It’s self-aware in that you want people to know something flattering about you; it’s un-self-aware in that you can’t see, or don’t care, that people discern this impulse and find it unbecoming. What Tolentino’s case reveals, in Oyler’s court anyway, is that self-awareness, which can never be complete, cannot control or prevent others’ judgement of you.

At the beginning of her Goop cruise essay, Oyler reveals that she’d “spent the summer engaging in polyamory and doing unanticipated quantities of drugs, and everyone agreed I needed to get away from my two boyfriends, who were providing me with an endless supply of suffering and stimulants”. I must admit the riposte “good for you” does come to mind. Yet I suspect Oyler wouldn’t be perturbed by it. In fact arguably she has got there first: her tone, though frank, is slightly inscrutable, the air of boastfulness expertly blended with a trace of self-mockery (“suffering and stimulants”). Besides, she knows that “public writing”, as she observes in the LRB piece, “is always at least a little bit self-interested, demanding, controlling and delusional”. The question is whether the writer can “add enough of something else to tip the scales away from herself”, which Oyler surely does, or it wouldn’t be so fun to read her.

At one point, she accuses Tolentino of “getting in ahead of criticism”. This sounds rather like Oyler’s own strategy: “make the book good enough so people can’t hatchet-job you, right? That’s what everybody is going for, I hope.” To strive to place yourself beyond criticism: it’s a startlingly defensive, and self-conscious, take on literary success. Something about the notion of hatchet-job-proofing makes it sound as though a good book is one to which readers can’t get too close (so they can’t reach you with their hatchets).

Oyler once wisely observed in an interview that, “There’s no shortcut to intimacy, which develops from letting yourself be interpreted over a period of time.” At one point early on in Fake Accounts , the narrator expresses “horror at being read too well”. There are, it would seem, worse fates, and more terrifying prospects, than hatchet jobs.

No Judgement: On Being Critical Lauren Oyler Virago, 288pp, £20

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[See also: Jon Fosse and the art of tedium ]

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This article appears in the 13 Mar 2024 issue of the New Statesman, The battle for Keir Starmer’s soul

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Edgar Allan Poe’s Hatchet Jobs

The great short story writer and poet wrote many a book review..

Tony Award-winning Denis O'Hare portrays the author in  Edgar Allan Poe: Buried Alive , an  American Masters  documentary.

— Photo by Liane Brandon

In October 1845, a short-lived New York magazine called the  Aristidean  published a review of Edgar Allan Poe’s story collection  Tales . The article spouted praise like a dancing fountain. Poe’s detective story “The Gold-Bug” “perfectly succeeded in his perfect aim.” “The Fall of the House of Usher” was “grand and impressive.” “Murders in the Rue Morgue” was marked by “profound and searching analysis.”

And, overall, Poe wielded the kind of literary power that “can only be possessed by a man of high genius,” according to the anonymous reviewer—who was almost certainly Edgar Allan Poe himself.

Poe’s reputation as a major American writer is unassailable. He invented the modern detective story, successfully transported the gothic tale across the Atlantic, and wrote classic dark poems like “The Raven,” “Annabel Lee,” and “The Bells.” But, during Poe’s lifetime, such high points were intermittent, hard-fought, and rarely financial successes. More often, Poe made his living by toiling at now-forgotten magazines like the  Southern Literary Messenger ,  Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine,  and  Graham’s Magazine .

This struggle to make art amid his struggles—he was an orphan, an alcoholic, an academic bust at the University of Virginia and West Point, and often on the run from creditors—is the crux of the  American Masters  documentary  Edgar Allan Poe: Buried Alive , which airs on PBS October 30. Through dramatic readings of Poe’s work and a moody performance of Poe himself by Denis O’Hare, the film captures an author scrabbling for a place in the literary world. His gloom, the film suggests, became a kind of asset for Poe, providing a tone for his stories and poetry as well as a means of attack against the “puffing” of American authors that defined much literary criticism at the time.

Poe churned out reams of puff-free reviews—the Library of America’s collection of his reviews and essays fills nearly 1,500 dense pages. Few outside of Poe scholarship circles bother reading them now, though; in a discipline that’s had its share of so-called takedown artists, Poe was an especially unlovable literary critic. He occasionally celebrated authors he admired, such as Charles Dickens and Nathaniel Hawthorne. But, from 1835 until his death in 1849, the typical Poe book review sloshed with invective.

Tackling a collection of poems by William W. Lord in 1845, Poe opined that “the only remarkable things about Mr. Lord’s compositions are their remarkable conceit, ignorance, impudence, platitude, stupidity, and bombast.” He opened his review of Susan Rigby Morgan’s 1836 novel,  The Swiss Heiress , by proclaiming that it “should be read by all who have nothing better to do.” The prose of Theodore S. Fay’s 1835 novel,  Norman Leslie , was “unworthy of a school-boy.” A year later, Poe doomed Morris Mattson’s novel  Paul Ulric  by pushing Fay under the bus yet again, writing, “When we called  Norman Leslie  the silliest book in the world we had certainly never seen  Paul Ulric .”

Such candor did Poe’s career no favors. Fay was the editor of the  New York Mirror , where Poe would later go begging for a job in 1844, landing only a low-level copyediting gig. Three years earlier Poe had declared H. T. Tuckerman, editor of the  Boston Miscellany , an “insufferably tedious and dull writer,” a statement that haunted Poe a year later when he submitted “The Tell-Tale Heart” to Tuckerman for publication. “If Mr. Poe would condescend to furnish more quiet articles,” Tuckerman wrote in his icy rejection letter, “he would be a most desirable correspondent.” Upon Poe’s death, critic Rufus Griswold wrote an obituary for the  New York Tribune  of surprising meanness. Griswold claimed that Poe “had few or no friends” and that “few will be grieved” by his passing—perhaps an act of revenge for Poe’s own cruelties toward Griswold as a rival critic. Poe once dismissed him as a “toady” destined to “sink into oblivion.”

For some writers, such salvos might be a badge of honor of a sort, examples of a nervy truth-teller unafraid to call out bad books and overrated writers. No doubt, Poe was moved to puncture what he saw as the overinflated literary egos of the East Coast. He spent years writing harsh sketches of them for a series called “The Literati of New York City”—a supremely bad move for a writer hoping to make a living there. The twist, though, is that as a critic Poe often treated ethics as disposably as we do coffee filters. That self-dealing rave review is just one example. Poe plagiarized multiple times early in his career (most notably in  The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym  and “Usher”), but still spent much of 1845 leveling plagiarism accusations against Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Poe delivered his attacks under his own name, but also anonymously, and through an imaginary interlocutor named “Outis.” But for all of Poe’s bluster, evidence of Longfellow’s thievery was thin, and the poet, wisely, didn’t respond. “Poe’s Longfellow war,” said publisher Charles Briggs, who’d hired Poe at the  Broadway Journal , “is all on one side.”

Poe’s obscurity as a critic is the reward of the hatchet-job man, some might say—conducting ill-tempered attacks on writers is an ugly and karmically inadvisable practice. (Just ask the ones who’ve been stung by a negative review.) But if the proper fate of the so-called hatchet job is to be banished to the memory hole, why are there so many enduring examples of the form? To highlight just a handful: In 1865, Henry James declared Walt Whitman’s  Drum-Taps  “an offense against art.” In 1895, Mark Twain savaged James Fenimore Cooper, stating that his work “has no order, system, sequence, or result; it has no lifelikeness, no thrill, no stir, no seeming of reality.” In 1959, Norman Mailer swung at his contemporaries in an essay titled “Quick and Expensive Comments on the Talent in the Room,” aiming at the likes of J. D. Salinger (“the greatest mind ever to stay in prep school”) and Jack Kerouac (“pretentious as a rich whore, as sentimental as a lollypop”). Dale Peck opened his 2002 review of a Rick Moody book by writing, “Rick Moody is the worst writer of his generation.” It went downhill from there.

Such pieces come quickly to mind to critics like myself, because the truth is—and it was a truth often lost on Poe—the critic who’s accused of flinging hatchets is usually wielding a scalpel. The critic’s job, in one regard, is to bring a sense of order to a chaotic literary world. Thousands of books are published every year, and somebody must do the job of sifting, sorting, and judging them with authority but without an agenda. That task has democratized in recent years, as readers on sites like Amazon and Goodreads hasten to champion a book or one-star it into the ether. But the old-fashioned critic has stuck around: A front-page rave on the cover of the  New York Times Book Review  can vault a book into the cultural conversation, and the literary prizes that critics are often called upon to judge can elevate a writer’s reputation or cement it.

But it doesn’t follow that a negative review is the opposite of a rave, at least from the perspective of that literary ordering; it’s simply an inverted way of accomplishing the same task. That is, so long as it’s done well, and to a purpose. Mailer’s pronunciamentos in “Talent in the Room” were indisputably condescending and macho; absurdly, he found no women writers worth his attention. But there was no mistaking that he was tub-thumping for an American literature that took risks and emphasized hard realities underneath America’s postwar largesse. Twain’s takedown of Cooper, in both its content and form, was a pleading for American fiction to find its sense of humor and lose its clichéd ideas about wilderness writing, or writing in general. James disapproved of a poet who aspired to national stature via what James saw as Whitman’s narcissism; Peck resented a writer so seduced by metaphor that it smothered intellectual precision.

And Poe—what mission stoked the fire of his negative reviews? Had he lived to read it, Poe might have appreciated Elizabeth Hardwick’s 1959 attack on the timidity of book reviews at the time: “Sweet, bland commendations fall everywhere upon the scene; a universal, if somewhat lobotomized, accommodation reigns,” she wrote. But the urge to fearlessly criticize is not the same thing as having strong ideas about what makes for good literature, and the frustrating thing about reading Poe’s criticism is how often it is a closed circuit, concerned only with itself. The idea that a review might be a launchpad for broader statements was foreign if not offensive to him. “Criticism is  not , we think, an essay, nor a sermon, nor an oration, nor a chapter in history, nor a philosophical speculation, nor a prose-poem, nor an art novel, nor a dialogue,” he wrote in 1843. “In fact, it  can be  nothing in the world but—a criticism.”

A number of his reviews open with a complaint that American writers were overly praised so as to distinguish them from the British colonizers from whose rule they had been free for only a few decades. Poe bemoaned “the gross paradox of liking a stupid book the better, because, sure enough, its stupidity is American.” But thoughts about what would make for a distinct American literature didn’t flow from Poe’s busy pen. In the context of his reviews, such statements were usually throat-clearing before what he saw as the matter at hand: nit-picking about meter and rhyme in poetry, plot points in fiction, and word choice and grammar in both. Critics make arguments; Poe registered complaints. An extended 1837 essay on William Cullen Bryant’s poetry finds Poe counting syllables and fussing over whether he might have better used the word “tomb” instead of “womb.” Poe’s own assessment of James Fenimore Cooper in 1843 turned literary criticism into a variant of an autopsy, assessing the sentence structure of one page of the book’s preface, line by tediously palpated line. Where Twain was witty, Poe was charmless. Where other critics might look for themes and innovations in poetry, Poe assigned himself the job of America’s toughest spondee cop.

Poe, in private, may have had a sense that this approach to criticism was fruitless. In an unfinished essay titled “A Reviewer Reviewed,” one Walter G. Bowen, a pseudonym for Poe, critiqued Poe’s reviewing style. “[His reviews] seem to me bitter in the extreme, captious, fault-finding, and unnecessarily severe,” he wrote. “Real, honest, heartfelt praise is a thing not to be looked for in a criticism by Mr. Poe.” Poe never finished the essay: It was found in a trunk among his possessions after his death. Perhaps a completed version would have revealed this display of self-loathing as just a performance, yet another example of Poe's piercing sarcasm. Yet it’s hard not to think of Poe’s classic story “The Tell-Tale Heart,” where the narrator’s urge to suppress the evidence of a violent past wars with his urge to confess it.

Mark Athitakis is a Phoenix-based journalist and critic whose work has appeared in the New York Times Book Review , Washington Post , Virginia Quarterly Review , and numerous other publications.

Funding information

Edgar Allan Poe has been the subject of many NEH-funded projects, including  Edgar Allan Poe: Buried Alive ,  an  American Masters  documentary which airs October 30 on PBS. The film received $560,000 in development and production support. In 1984, the Library of America published  Edgar Allan Poe: Essays and Reviews , one of the hundreds of volumes of American literature that LOA has published since 1979 when it received its first NEH grant of $1.2 million. The Poe Foundation in Richmond, Virginia, received an NEH preservation assistance grant of $4,992 to assess the collection at the Edgar Allan Poe Museum, and the late Kenneth Silverman, author of  Edgar A. Poe: Mournful and Never-ending Remembrance , 1991, received an NEH grant that aided him in his book research.

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This article is available for unedited republication, free of charge, using the following credit: “Originally published as 'Edgar Allan Poe's Hatchet Jobs' in the Fall 2017 issue of  Humanities  magazine, a publication of the National Endowment for the Humanities.” Please notify us  @email  if you are republishing it or have any questions.

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Cutting ’Em Down to Size

A new dismantling of freud shows the value of a critic’s well-honed hatchet..

Lisa Larson-Walker

Every critic knows that readers love a spirited hatchet job, whether or not the author being chopped is one whose work they’ve hated—or even read. Much of the public seems to possess an ambient belief that the literary world is filled with frauds and self-styled geniuses whose reputations have been propped up by venal publishers and the reviewers who toady up to them. In this light, anyone who dares to challenge the allegedly phony consensus by ripping apart one of the unjustly elect gets hailed as a hero. Every so often, a particularly harsh review will prompt an outcry; recently this happened after William Giraldi’s slashing , in the New York Times Book Review, of two books by the relatively unknown novelist, Alix Ohlin, whom he damned for embracing “the bland earnestness of realism.” But Ohlin was small fry, and much of the outrage Giraldi’s review ignited—he was accused on Twitter of failing to perform a critic’s basic duties and of producing a “pretentious, vicious and self-regarding” piece of work, among other offenses—seemed to arise from the sense that he was an insufferable blowhard while she was nice, or at the very least, harmless.

Yet surely sometimes a hatchet job is called for. The target needs to be big enough, as when David Foster Wallace, in 1997, eviscerated John Updike as emblematic of a band of “Great Male Narcissists” who flourished in the mid-20 th century. (The two others were Norman Mailer and Philip Roth.) Wallace’s case against Updike claimed moral weight; the novelist, he argued, while a ravishing stylist, was a “solipsist” who endlessly embroidered the “joyless and anomic self-indulgence of the Me Generation.” Wallace made himself the spokesman for a younger cohort picking its disconsolate way through that generation’s stained and sordid leavings.

And then there are those authors who pose a genuine threat to the public welfare. That’s how Frederick Crews, distinguished literary critic and professor emeritus of English at the University of California at Berkeley, views Sigmund Freud. Crews is a shrewd, puckish, incisive writer, particularly when it comes to the excesses of his fellow academics. In the ’60s he published a best-seller, The Pooh Perplex , that parodied the most popular strains of literary criticism at the time by applying them to A.A. Milne’s bear of very little brain. (A sequel, Postmodern Pooh , published in 2001, deftly updated the exercise to account for the latest theoretical developments.) But for the past 20 years, Crews has been largely occupied, both between hard covers and in the pages of the New York Review of Books , with dismantling the reputation of Freud and with debunking what he views as one of the most dangerous manifestations of the psychoanalyst’s legacy: recovered memory therapy. His new book, Freud: The Making of an Illusion , is the culmination of this campaign, 700 pages of closely argued indictment intended to definitively bury what Crews regards as the myth of Freud as an innovative and insightful thinker. By the time he’s done, the legendary Viennese doktor has been reduced to not much more than a rag, a bone, and a hank of hair.

Crews goes gunning for two distinct Freuds: the doctor/scientist and the man. The former, as Crews acknowledges, has suffered a steep fall in reputation over the past 45 years. The biological model on which psychoanalysis was based has been superseded by newer discoveries, particularly in neurochemistry. Freud published the works that would establish his reputation as a savant of humanity’s unacknowledged inner life in the early 1900s; over the subsequent century, it has become ever harder to ignore the lack of empirical evidence for the effectiveness of psychoanalysis as a therapy. Our growing understanding of the complexity of consciousness and the dizzying variety of human experience makes Freud’s rigidly universal model of the unconscious and its drives—from the Oedipus complex to penis envy—seem laughable, blinkered by his background as a patriarchal, bourgeois 19 th -century Viennese.

But to Crews’ annoyance, these erosions haven’t done enough to wear down Freud’s reputation as a bold, original thinker who revolutionized our understanding of the human mind. He knows that nearly all his readers, “believing that Freud, whatever his failings, initiated our tradition of empathetic psychotherapy,” will “judge this book to have unjustly withheld credit for his most benign and enduring achievement.” But Crews will have none of that. Instead, he aims to prove that Freud not only had “predecessors and rivals in one-on-one mental treatment” but that he also “failed to match their standard of responsiveness to each patient’s unique situation.” Whatever is good in psychotherapy, he insists, is due to other pioneers and the psychologists who steered the profession away from Freudian principles after his death.

Without a doubt, Freud was a terrible doctor. Anyone who reads his case histories or has more than a passing familiarity with the real events on which they were based can only pity those individuals unfortunate enough to come under his “care.” As Crews painstakingly documents, using Freud’s own letters and clinical notes (many of which were, until recently, published only in bowdlerized form by his acolytes), Freud disliked medicine, was revolted by sick people, and held his patients in contempt. “I could throttle every one of them,” he once told a shocked colleague. Although he often claimed to have cured people of hysteria, neuroses, or other ailments, those claims were almost entirely false. He helped very few—quite possibly none—of his patients, and spectacularly harmed several.

While Freud’s inadequacy in helping the people who paid him to help them frequently gets treated as an unfortunate footnote to an otherwise brilliant career, Crews aims to carry the observation further. Freud was a bad doctor, he argues, because he was a bad scientist and furthermore a weak and unethical man. Crews’ Freud is first and foremost dishonest, misrepresenting his past, his data (when he bothered to collect it), his results, his patient’s life stories, the contributions to his theories by friends and colleagues. Animated by “a temperament and self-conception” that “demanded that he achieve fame at any cost,” Freud concocted theories about the human psyche based on his own idiosyncratic past and personality and attempted to force his patients to corroborate them. He pressed them to confirm the often preposterous suppressed “memories” he claimed to have deduced from their symptoms and, when they stood firm, interpreted their very resistance as confirmation. (Many of his early, and therefore least awestruck, clients laughed outright in his face, or even parodied his more bizarre scenarios.) He hero-worshipped a series of male mentors and collaborators, ignoring their shortcomings to the detriment of their patients (who were sometimes his own), then turned on them later, often viciously. He was an autocrat who bullied his wife, compelling her to choose between him and her family, then cheated on her with her own sister. He set up psychoanalysis as a self-enclosed, self-verifying cult of personality, playing his followers off against each other to safe-guard his own supremacy. All these claims Crews backs up in exhaustive detail: If Freud had so much as stiffed a waiter and left a record of it, you’d find it in Freud.

None of this automatically invalidates everything Freud wrote or said. Many bona fide geniuses are dreadful people who mistreat those around them and cut corners in their professional lives. Both Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Bob Dylan have plagiarized, yet both are still brilliant. A proper hatchet job—and that is exactly what Freud is—should be directed at a tall tree, preferably one that towers, or at the very least looms. But it takes a lot of muscle to fell such a tree, and that sometimes includes ugly details from the subject’s personal life. Crews maintains that all of the transgressions he documents are relevant to his case against psychoanalysis. Freud made arguments that he claimed, falsely, were based on real-world observation. He pretended to have cured patients who showed little improvement or actually got worse. He presented himself as a scientist without meeting even the modest standards of late-19 th -century empirical rigor. His personal problems (homoerotic crushes, impotence, cocaine abuse) affected his work because he insisted on projecting them into theories that he applied to everyone. And those theories affect the real lives of many people.

Nevertheless, a hatchet job is always at risk of being read as evidence of a vendetta, motivated by a suspiciously personal dislike or rivalry. Wallace’s takedown of Updike has been called “Oedipal,” so picture how thick and fast the Freudian interpretations fly when the target is Freud himself. He is the figure most closely associated with the idea that people don’t always understand their own motives, especially when they pursue seemingly trivial goals with great passion.

It must be exasperating for Crews to have his vehemence again and again greeted with raised eyebrows and a nudge to the reader’s ribs. “Paraphrasing Voltaire,” wrote the historian George Prochnik in a recent review of Freud , “if Freud didn’t exist, Frederick Crews would have had to invent him. In showing us a relentlessly self-interested and interminably mistaken Freud, it might be said he’s done just that.” In other words: Surely an animus so implacable makes the critic untrustworthy? Crews justifies his zeal by extending his attacks to the quasi-Freudian recovered memory therapy—a practice that is already discredited and banished from the DSM-V —as well as the general notion that our psyches are shaped by traumatic memories to which we have no conscious access. There will always be a few diehard believers in psychoanalysis and practitioners of bogus derivative therapies to push back against Crews’ crusade, and they give Crews a rationale to persist. Freud’s reputation isn’t trivial, but then neither is Crews’ career, and a lover of cogent, witty literary criticism could be forgiven for wishing that Crews had more often found other themes to write on over the past two decades.

Yet the missed opportunity of Freud isn’t Crews’ refusal to scrutinize his own motivations in damning Freud. It’s not even obvious, as Prochnik seems to believe, that his scorn is over-the-top. On occasion in Freud, Crews touches on the most fascinating aspect of Freud’s reputation: why he still retains the image of a seminal thinker when he doesn’t seem, after all, to have earned it. In his preface, Crews lists some of the cultural waves Freud fortuitously caught, from “a backlash against scientific positivism” to a “waning of theological belief.” Later, in one of the book’s most intriguing chapters, he notes how Freud patterned his case histories after Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories, crafting his notes into “cunningly plotted works that create and then resolve suspense.” Alert readers of this review might be wondering if it makes sense to liken a hatchet job on a novelist like Updike to an assault on a thinker, like Freud, who made claims of fact. But Crews insists that psychoanalytic theory is not science, but fiction, and that Freud’s literary prowess is precisely the secret of its success.

According to Crews, Freud’s sense that psychoanalysis would rise and fall on the quality of the stories it told extended to his own autobiography, which he presented as a “serial adventure of the intellect” pursued by a lonely, Promethean hero. This yarn, fused with psychoanalytic theory itself, became one of the dominant intellectual fictions that presided over the heyday of Updike’s career. Furthermore, Crews accuses Freud of the same primal sin—an inability to see beyond himself and his own interests—that Wallace levels against Updike. This, surely, is no coincidence. These narratives have endured for so long because so many people prefer them to the truth. Why? That’s a question Crews touches on in Freud, but only lightly. If the book fails, it is not in pressing its cause so fiercely but in mistaking who deserves the lion’s share of his scorn. The best hatchet jobs don’t just assail an author or thinker for shoddy or disingenuous work. They also indict the rest of us for buying in.

Freud: The Making of an Illusion by Frederick Crews. Metropolitan Books.

Read all the pieces in the Slate Book Review.

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The dying art of the hatchet job Film critics have never been so weak or timid

Dorian Lynskey

September 6, 2021   8 mins.

A few weeks ago, the New Statesman writer Sarah Manavis steeled herself for a backlash. “It’s always fun to post an article that you know beforehand will get very badly ratioed,” she tweeted after linking to a piece in which she called Apple TV+’s feelgood soccer sitcom Ted Lasso “the most overrated show on TV”. And so it came to pass. Three weeks later, she tweeted: “Despite spending most of my career writing about online radicalisation and disinformation, I’ve never received more abuse than when I criticised T*d L*sso.”

This is far from uncommon, for it’s increasingly common for critics to adopt the brace position before daring to dislike something that many people enjoy. Back in May, the Guardian’s Scott Tobias became Twitter’s baddie of the day for battering Shrek on the occasion of its 20 th anniversary: “Shrek is a terrible movie. It’s not funny. It looks awful.” I found the reaction extraordinary. Tobias was called, at best, a cynical, click-hungry contrarian; at worst a twisted, misanthropic snob. “Shrek Fans Diss ‘Joyless Chud’ Guardian Critic Who Called Film ‘Unfunny and Overrated,’” reported The Wrap . His crime, let’s say it again, was hating an old, animated movie about an implausibly Scottish ogre and his donkey friend.

Critics have never been the world’s most beloved people. Almost exactly 100 years ago, the Czech author and sometime critic Karel Čapek wrote about the consequences of a harsh review: “I’m reconciled in advance to the fact that [the author] considers me unfair, cliquey and incompetent. It’s definitely his right. I, too, use this right when an unfair, cliquey and incompetent critic, who gives my book a bad press, hurts me. To cut a long story short, there’s an eternal conflict between artist and critic. ‘Praise me, or I’ll hate you.’”

Nonetheless, there used to be an understanding among readers that any worthwhile critic, whether it be William Hazlitt, Kenneth Tynan or Pauline Kael, would need to hate as well as to love. As the late Clive James (who was skilled on both counts) wrote in a 2013 defence of hatchet jobs : “You can’t eliminate the negative. It accentuates the positive.”

Now critics are often up against readers who resist the very notion of criticism. A few popular lines of attack pop up regularly. There’s faux-objectivity: You said this movie wasn’t funny but I laughed, ergo it is you are factually wrong and unprofessional. Taking offence: How dare you imply that everyone who likes this movie is a tasteless dolt? Assumption of bad faith: You’re only saying this for clicks and notoriety.

Character assassination: You’re a vindictive killjoy who’s no fun at parties. Moral disapproval: Why would you waste your precious time being mean about something when you could be praising something else? Some people mix and match these accusations into strange hybrids like the schoolmarm-turned-troll: Why can’t you be more positive, you dumb piece of shit?

What these responses all have in common is not so much disagreement with the critique but fury that it was written at all. Thumper the rabbit’s famous maxim, “If you can’t say something nice, don’t say nothing at all,” might have been good advice for Bambi but it’s fatal for the appreciation of art. “Criticism is not nice,” writes AO Scott of the New York Times in Better Living Through Criticism . “To criticise is to find fault, to accentuate the negative, to spoil the fun and refuse to spare delicate feelings.”

For an entertaining reminder of a more knockabout era of criticism, I recommend the Ringer’s current podcast series Gene and Roger, presented by Brian Raftery. Between 1986 and 1999, when they hosted the half-hour TV show At the Movies , Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert were the most (and perhaps only) famous film critics in America, appearing on David Letterman and Saturday Night Live as celebrities in their own right and introducing many viewers to the concept of film criticism itself.

Central to their appeal was the intensity of their opinions, which often clashed. The show turned disagreement into entertainment. While they were both important champions of overlooked or misunderstood movies, one of my favourite comfort reads is Ebert’s 2000 anthology of pans, I Hated, Hated, Hated This Movie. It is an unfortunate truth that it is much easier to be funny when you’re being mean, but Ebert wasn’t just going for cheap laughs; he knew how wonderful cinema could be and was indignant when millions of dollars were squandered on crud.

Why has negative criticism become so contentious? One factor is the growing vulnerability of both journalists and the artists they cover. When there is less space for book coverage, it makes sense to foreground good work than cackle over the bad, except when a real stinker from a big name hoves into view and critics can take the gloves off with a sigh of relief. Smaller journals can be a little spicier, though: Becca Rothfeld’s masterly evisceration of Sally Rooney’s “riskless and conciliatory” novels in The Point last year was a bracing antidote to Rooneymania.

In the world of music, when most albums don’t make money, it is understandable for critics to pull their punches. The world of album reviewing now is so much more collegiate than the knives-out music-press culture that I grew up on. I’m glad that young critics no longer have to make their names with an act of ritual cruelty towards a soft target, but the really thoughtful takedown is an endangered species without which music journalism is merely PR. Older critics tend to lose their taste for blood while, as Clive James wrote, “among young writers, there seems a shortage of critics unhampered by excessive good manners.”

Nirvana's teen spirit will never get old

By Dorian Lynskey

I would suggest, though, that it’s as much a question of self-preservation as good manners, due to social media’s abolition of context. When Siskel and Ebert panned a movie, regular viewers knew that that was not all they did. In fact, the duo might well rave about another film in the same episode. But when a review goes viral now, most of the people reading it (provided that they do actually read beyond the headline) will have no idea who the writer is, so he or she is reduced to the status of an HM Bateman caricature: The Man Who Hates Shrek, The Woman Who Hates Ted Lasso. Scott Tobias, for example, has written dozens of anniversary pieces for the Guardian , the vast majority of which are celebratory. I suspect he would have been delighted if his ode to, say, Alan Pakula’s 1971 thriller Klute had gone viral and Klute had become a trending topic, but of course it didn’t, because nothing fuels virality like outrage. Thus a negative piece is damned as “clickbait” by the angry people who are clicking on it while ignoring all the positive pieces. Whose fault is that?

Social media has also given us the militarisation of fandom. Major artists and franchises attract armies of fans who demonstrate their fealty by mobbing naysayers. There are DC fans who genuinely believe the conspiracy theory that critics are secretly paid to praise Marvel movies and denigrate their DC rivals, but then Marvel fans are no more reasonable. No movie that Martin Scorsese has made in recent years has generated as much attention as his mild dismissal of the MCU two years ago. Fortunately, the world’s most profitable movie franchise has survived his lack of interest.

All of this makes criticism an increasingly hairy business. Woe betide the outlier who costs a film its 100% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes . When the critic Ann Powers published an ambivalent essay about Lana Del Rey in 2019 , it was denounced by Del Rey herself to her 9.5 million Twitter followers, thus sending an avalanche of abuse in Powers’ direction. Complaints to employers are common, as are death threats. It’s hard to imagine a review of a major artist as famously scathing as Greil Marcus’ take on Bob Dylan’s 1970 album Self Portrait (first line: “What is this shit?”) in the age of Twitter. You want to take an axe to Korean boy band BTS and their ride-or-die followers? Lock your account first.

The instinct to abuse critics is justified by the idea that it is “punching up” at elitist gatekeepers. But unlike Siskel and Ebert, modern critics are neither famous nor wealthy nor powerful. They may have influence en masse, via review aggregators such as Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic (there is safety in numbers), but the days when one critic could make or break a movie, album or anything else are long gone. Yet fans still see them as dream-crushing monsters from which million-selling musicians and billion-dollar movies must be defended at all costs.

Why we love to hate Imagine

Perhaps there is so much ambient hostility online that critics are too easily lumped in with the trolls and “haters” who plague your timeline. There are of course some contrarians, bullies and attention-seekers who have built a brand on performative contempt but they are not typical. The author Matt Haig is nonetheless adept at painting his detractors as bitter, shrunken souls whose arguments are therefore invalid. Last weekend, the Thumper of British publishing crystallised the Haigist theory of criticism in a tweet that was ostensibly about Sally Rooney’s sceptics but implicitly about his own: “There is so much jealousy of Sally Rooney. If you don’t like her books, don’t read them. The great thing about books is there are lots. There have literally never been more books. Why spend your time dissing authors other people like when you could be championing ones you do?” It’s all there: the unfounded assumption of jealousy; the nonsensical idea that you can know you don’t like a book before you’ve read it; the suggestion that negative criticism is simply a waste of time. To voice disappointment or antipathy, in Haig’s world, is a moral failing.

Similarly, anyone who resists the gentle charms of Ted Lasso, which received a Peabody Award for “offering the perfect counter to the enduring prevalence of toxic masculinity, both on-screen and off, in a moment when the nation truly needs inspiring models of kindness”, risks being accused of hating kindness itself. The success of the show, so unlike caustic 2000s sitcoms such as Extras or Curb Your Enthusiasm , is itself symptomatic of a general desire for more warmth and less cynicism.

But the Peabody citation acknowledges that the premise “has all the markings of a formulaic cornball dud,” so it is inconceivable that some people, not all of them unfeeling bastards, wouldn’t indeed find it a formulaic cornball dud. It’s particularly tricky right now for black critics who dislike politically well-intentioned work by black creators. After Angelica Jade Bastién caught flak for shredding the generally well-received new Candyman movie, another writer responded: “one of the frustrating things about this era of didactic capitol b Black art is the idea that serious criticism amounts to some kind of disloyalty.”

I suspect that this hypersensitivity to critical voices has been compounded first by the ugly intensity of politics and then by the pandemic. If you think Candyman was made by good people with timely things to say about racism in gentrification, then you might be inclined to forgive its didacticism. And if Ted Lasso or Shrek made your lockdown a little more cheerful, then you might overreact to someone stomping all over them. But I worry that enthusiasm is being mistaken for a moral virtue, and negative criticism for a character flaw: What’s wrong with you? Why can’t you just like things?

Quentin Tarantino's mummy issues

By Tanya Gold

We all know, in our own lives, that everything isn’t for everybody. Any night of the year there are heated disagreements in living rooms and cinema lobbies, and negative reactions are no less worthy of representation in public discourse than positive ones. Disliking certain things is not just normal but essential. Hate is the back of the mirror, without which you would just have a piece of glass. “It can be positive,” Neil Tennant of the Pet Shop Boys wrote in a terrific 1992 polemic on the virtues of hate. “It throws into relief all the things you know you like. It tells you, by elimination, what you’re about… To hate a lot of things is tantamount to really caring about others. If you like everything, you deal with nothing.”

Personally, I find that the act of disagreeing with a sharp takedown sharpens my appreciation of the work in question. If I have to think a bit harder about what I like and why I like it, that’s fine by me, especially when it’s something that has been almost universally acclaimed. I was wowed by Jia Tolentino’s essay collection Trick Mirror but I got a kick out of Lauren Oyler’s brilliant demolition job in the London Review of Books last year, as did Tolentino, who gamely retweeted it. “I’ve been idly waiting since my book came out for a truly scathing review of my bullshit, which seemed inevitable given the rest of my good luck & also like it could be useful,” she wrote. “It finally came: a cleansing, illuminating experience to be read with such open disgust!”

Tolentino’s suggestion that negative criticism is not just valid but useful would have surprised Karel Čapek. In the current climate, it verges on the saintly. It’s not that I long for an epidemic of gleeful brutality but I will always cherish the right of critics to express their hate, hate, hate in the ultimate service of what they love, love, love.

Dorian Lynskey is an author, journalist and  UnHerd  columnist.

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Having made a couple of tiny movies myself and been eviscerated and celebrated by critics, your article is a beautiful cleansing of the personal palate and a joy to read, so thank you for that, but I would question your suggestion that critics have no power.

Recently I was asked to speak at a lockdown protest in Dublin. I was a little afraid of the inevitable canceling but I was also shamefully aware of the acquiescent silence from our nation’s artists so I agreed. The speech was embraced by some and rejected by others, both of which are valid. But a film critic from one of the major national newspapers used his Twitter feed – endorsed by his newspaper – to portray the thousands of people at the protest, (many of whom were families with young children), as far right rabble. Then he insisted that all state funding should be pulled from any future projects of the filmmaker who spoke.

This critic has interviewed me in the past. Written articles. Reviewed my work. He has my number in his phone. But he wasn’t at the protest. He met none of the people there. Didn’t watch the speech. Never spoke to me about any aspect of it.

Yet, backed by multi-millionaire bosses of a newspaper, he demanded that my work be defunded. Not my speech. Or my politics. But my work. And among the tiny coterie of critics that keeps this culture in a politically paralysed stranglehold, he was hailed as a hero for doing so.

When a protected critic is celebrated for cancelling any powerless artist on the grounds of disagreeing with a speech then the beauty of constructive criticism becomes just another exercise in destructively ugly power.

“Yet, backed by multi-millionaire bosses of a newspaper, he demanded that my work be defunded.”

Naturally he did – or those MSM multi-millionaire bosses would have defunded him. For the most part the MSM are sheer evil, and are colluding with the Ne-Marxist Left to destroy the middle Class led Democracies. You spoke as a Conservative voice, and so are the enemy of their system.

I think the outrage might have something to do with the fact that people watch in silos now. If Ted Lasso were on terrestrial TV in the past it would be loved by some viewers, liked by many, and disliked by some who watch it anyway as that’s what is on. Any criticism isn’t personal.

To watch Lasso now is to make a decision to watch it, you have to be an apple user (which is itself often tribal), then you have to sign up for the package, and since Apple+ isn’t full with content, Lasso might be the only reason to subscribe. Having made that decision you are literally invested. Criticism becomes personal.

It is probably largely economic. The incestuous relationship between advertisers and the media and the fact that mainstream media is dying a slow death makes publications hyper sensitive to upsetting the advertisers themselves, their agencies, their lawyers, etc. If you are a critic and you plan on thrashing the latest offering from Netflix or Sky or Marvel you better check with your Chief Financial Officer before you do that because you might be giving him or her a very big headache.

Great article. It’s hardly surprising, in our hypersensitive, outrage-driven world, that critics of any art form had better moderate their opinions–at least if they want to make a living from criticism. “ Smaller journals can be a little spicier, though: Becca Rothfield’s  masterly evisceration  of Sally Rooney’s “riskless and conciliatory” novels in The Point last year was a bracing antidote to Rooneymania. ” And I would add the ever-acerbic Sarah Ditum’s review of Rooney’s latest novel here on Unherd last week. “ Alan Pakula’s 1971 thriller Klute ” If I was inclined to hate this article (which I’m not), all would be forgiven for reminding us of Pakula’s masterpiece.

Excellent piece and some genuine belly laughs too, thank you. In my humble opinion, self-preservation is the more powerful force behind mediocrity and playing it safe. It was also quite ‘popular’ under Stalin.

One of the problems for critics is that they have to make a living. In days gone by, once a critic had secured a berth at a national newspaper or magazine, they could pretty much write what they liked, without too much fear, and could live off their earnings as a critic. Freed from the need to please, critics could be as honest – or as venomous – as they wished. Now, if you want to make a living you need to be writing in dozens of different places and you are taking a huge risk if you savage a particular actor, movie, writer, book, restaurant – whatever it is you’re critiqueing – because a bad review, if taken badly, can seriously damage your career. As a freelancer, it only takes one publicist to take your name off the roster for an interview junket, or to mention your name to an editor as persona non grata, and suddenly one of the handful of publications that take your stuff no longer does – it can seriously damage your income. Thus savage reviews become mixed, ambivalent reviews become great, and good reviews become gushing.

I rarely bother reading film critics these days. Their judgements are not particularly interesting and certainly not to be relied on. The worst film I’ve seen in the last couple of years (and I’ve seen Cats) was The Souvenir. Yet the critics unanimously adored it. Many amateur reviewers on IMDb and elsewhere are more informative and perceptive. There still seem to be plenty of forthright book critics, however.

My mum let me watch Klute when I was 12 (there’s a long story about that for another time), and I found it puzzling, but when I later watched it as an adult I found it boring. I loved The Parallax View both as a teenager and an adult. I watched All the President’s Men when I was 13 and loved it, but when I saw it as a grown up I thought it was pretty good but I realised Redford is a terrible actor.

I’m sure this article will ring true with anyone who’s ever reviewed anything in the public media. A lot of the outrage expended by third parties on behalf of poorly-reviewed authors can be seen as a kind of reverse logrolling, with the outraged wishing to be seen rising to the defence either of their friends or of well thought-of people in their own field in the hope of the favour being returned. Even in the tiny and recondite world of poetry, where I did most of my own reviewing work a few years back, a negative appraisal of the work of X would invariably attract furious responses from Y or Z. There are poets and editors I considered friends who simply stopped talking to me, far less offering commissions, after someone else they knew had been criticised, however vaguely or constructively. And I was far from being a Roger Ebert or Clive James, even in that closed, obscure world!

I struggle to believe that any rational person would take a blind bit of notice of anything most critics write/spout.

Ted Lasso is a fine fairytale fantasy. Uncomplicated in plot and theme. All about redemption through kindness. Personally I love it, especially for the occasional pure football jokes – for example Ian Wright appearing as a pundit with the words: “I hate to say it but Tottenham are a top top team”. That episode released on the day Spurs went top of the table and Arsenal slumped to the bottom. And the “top top” angle, as football fans will know, relates to a snide remark by Alex Ferguson that Stephen Gerrard “isn’t a top top player”. If Sarah Manavis didn’t like it, so be it. I’m puzzled that anyone would bother to berate her – as her review seemed to bear little relation to the show that the rest of us enjoy.

Good and timely article. I am not sure which “sin” is worst: to have a critical opinion or to have an opinion at all – beyond the banal and subjective like/dislike dichotomy. Probably the biggest “sin” is to have an opinion which you hold to be more than a matter of “free choice”. You, the critic, may like what you like, but don’t try to make ME feel less free to choose at will what to like.

UnHerd has an amazingly strict banned keyword filtering set, considering you’re supposed to be such an ‘antiWoke’ medium. I’m reposting this without the apparently offending word, because ‘approval’ is just another name for one of Dante’s infernal levels of limbo. You forgot to mention Barry Norman, master of the subtly damning movie review for a couple of decades from when Film 74 burst onto our small screens. Of course it is so much easier to post a reply to any article these days, and so the unimaginative, reflexive, ad hominem reaction looms large in every comments section. But the thing is, there aren’t that many daring movies and it is harder to find out what’s on since the demise of the local print media, which always had potted summaries of films that were on at the local screens so you could know what to go out and see. There is however a much broader range of media, including many many online genres, and so discerning audiences are getting fragmented. Followers of niche music videos on YouTube were just treated to a killer takedown of the “Unison MIDI Chord Pack” by Tantacrul. Go watch it, it’s very entertaining.

Stephen, I spent 4 very enjoyable years as a Producer/Director of Barry Norman’s Film Night – when he left the Beeb and joined Sky. He was indeed the master of the subtly-damning review – but even a critic as redoubtable and long-established as Barry would sometimes have to pull his punches, due to the realities of the business. If we managed to secure a studio interview with a director or star of a film that he might otherwise have savaged, he would take a much gentler tone in his criticism or we’d not get the interview next time. If we couldn’t get them into our studio then I would often do the junket interviews and sometimes would have a very friendly and positive interview with someone whose film Barry would then go on to maul in his review. It would always seem a little unfair to intercut those intvw soundbites with Barry’s criticism, as the interviewee would thus be denied a right-to-reply to the critcism. Nothing one could do about it as my interviews often predated his review by a week or so. I once fell foul of a publicist for writing a one-line critique (for the Top 10 rundown so, although spoken by BN, not really part of his review) and she ensured I missed out on a few choice intvws as a result. It wasn’t even that bad a line – I wrote of a not very funny Jim Carey vehicle called “Me, Myself & Irene” the following: “Jim Carey plays good cop and bad cop in a film that’s not much cop”. Yet even a throwaway comment like that had a negative impact on what we were “given” as a show. I was working for a broadcaster, so they kind of needed us to promote their films, but a freelancer has no such cover – as i referred to in my earlier comment down the page.

I think even Carey himself would get a belly laugh from, “Jim Carey plays good cop and bad cop in a film that’s not much cop.”

To me it’s about fairness. I’ve written reviews for the disability press and on one occasion when I found a comedy show a tad ho-hum it seemed only fair to acknowledge that my fellow audience members appeared to enjoy it far more than me – even while acknowledging that like me and like the performer on stage they were visually impaired so maybe somewhat partisan. As for Greil Marcus’s Dylan review, he could only get away with that rudeness because of his stature and the fact that his review would exist alongside other reviews or articles by him on Dylan.

My favourite demolition job is still Terry Eagleton’s magnificent takedown of The God Delusion in the London Review of Books.

Yes, absolutely wonderful. He completely demolishes Dawkins. ‘Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is the Book of British Birds, and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology.’ ‘He seems to imagine God, if not exactly with a white beard, then at least as some kind of chap, however supersized. He asks how this chap can speak to billions of people simultaneously, which is rather like wondering why, if Tony Blair is an octopus, he has only two arms.’ ‘On the horrors that science and technology have wreaked on humanity, he is predictably silent. Yet the Apocalypse is far more likely to be the product of them than the work of religion. Swap you the Inquisition for chemical warfare.’

New owner takes over team hoping to wreck it or sell it – now, where have I heard that before? Oh, that’s right – Major League (which is great) and Any Given Sunday (which is slop, and right in the massively overrated wheelhouse) and Slap Shot (which is an all-time top 10 sports movie) and there are probably more. Did The Manageress have the same lead-in plot? I forget. Was Warren Clarke trying to sell the club?

I hope at least some of the criticism Sarah Manavis received for not falling in line with the deification of Ted Lasso had to do with the quality of her contrarian undergrad-writing-her-first-movie-review vibe. I’m in agreement with the author’s concerns about the dying art of the hatchet job. But my goodness, Sarah Manavis should be an emblem of the dying art of readable prose. She’s a right awful composer of sentences.

Sarah Maravis: Why Ted Lasso is the most overrated show on TV As an American living in Britain, I should love Ted Lasso . When you first move, it’s fun to compare what’s different in the UK and the US. You talk to new friends about cereals that have different names; funny idioms that sound Midwestern; the things you’re taught at school, such as skewed versions of revolutionary history and, in Ohio, abstinence.  But then you get bored – because it’s boring. You quickly realise that there’s only so much mileage you can get out of compare and contrast, especially when trying to form real bonds with new friends or make romantic connections. For this reason, it should be obvious that Ted Lasso , Apple TV’s fish-out-of-water series about an American managing a British football team, has no legs. And yet, it’s one of the most celebrated shows running today – with near-universal critical acclaim – for reasons I couldn’t tell you.   The very premise of Ted Lasso makes no sense: Ted is an American football coach (played by Saturday Night Live alumni Jason Sudeikis) who has only ever worked at university level. But despite this inexperience, he has just been hired to manage the made-up Premier League team, AFC Richmond, as it faces relegation. The viewers soon discover that his controversial hire – the fan uproar over which is portrayed with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer – was the conniving plan of the club’s new owner, Rebecca Welton (her cheating ex-husband supports the team: she hopes to punish him by destroying the thing he loves most). The show was originally based on  a promotional video Sudeikis created for NBC Sports entitled “An American Coach in London” (an idea that is fine for a four-minute clip and works less well stretched out in 40-minute stints over ten episodes a season). It has an audience rating of 96 per cent on Rotten Tomatoes – a status reserved for Oscar winners and timeless classics – and has been nominated for a gobsmacking 20 Emmy Awards for its first season. It is near-impossible to find a review that isn’t glowing, all commending its “joyous”, “heartwarming”, “honest” approach to the trials and tribulations of sport and life (“especially what we need during these unprecedented times!”). This praise should suggest that Ted Lasso clears the obvious hurdles its hokey premise presents. Watching it, I was baffled to find this was far from the reality. Much of the plot, jokes, and dialogue revolves around the fact that Ted is from Kansas (similar to Sudeikis himself, who created and writes the show) and is folksy – cloyingly warm with a hammy Southern accent and a cartoonish moustache. He approaches the players with kindness and empathy; a contrast from what they’re used to from typical Premier League managers. The rest of the cast – footballers, WAGs, management staff and sport reporters – are archetypes seemingly written by Americans whose only brush with present day Britain is through viral Lad Bible videos, The Crown , and Love Island (even setting aside the borderline offensive portrayal of Nigerian players and British curry houses). These characters behave according to an American understanding of how awed and inspired Brits must be by American insight and perseverance.  The show is clearly built for an American audience. Any British swearing is assumed to get a laugh: “tits” and “wanker” are thrown around in nearly every episode. (American exceptionalism creeps in as well – in the first season’s finale episode, the team scores a last-minute goal by adopting American football positioning out on the pitch.) It’s hard to get through a scene without a joke about how the US is simply different from the UK (“You don’t know who Jimmy Buffet is?”; “Tea is horrible!”) or a bit of dialogue purely written so that Ted can say an idiom that will sound hick-ish to his British colleagues (“When it comes to locker rooms, I like ’em just like my mother’s bathing suits. I only wanna see ’em in one piece.”) The plots are ludicrous – which would be fine, if they were funnier. The opening scene of series two sees the team’s mascot – a dog – inexplicably on the pitch during a match and killed during a penalty. Another character – a player for Manchester City – leaves his club to go on a Love Island knock-off because his dad said he wasn’t scoring enough goals.  If the humour falls flat, viewers should at least be left with the deeply moving character development fans and reviewers rave about. But each episode functions like a predictable sitcom – all of its emotional moments are sewn up quickly, and there is not much of a continuous narrative arc across the series. In the first episode of the new season, player Dani has his “yips” cured after a single session of therapy, while club owner Rebecca realises what she needs from dating (after a traumatic, publicly humiliating divorce) in just one instance of watching couples in a coffee shop. Ted Lasso  almost exclusively leans on sudden epiphanies for all of its emotional development – a lazy choice that ultimately makes for jarring viewing.  Already, the second season of Ted Lasso has managed to top the slavering praise it acquired for its first. It has a Rotten Tomatoes critic rating of 99 per cent , with most reviews arguing it has built on what was good in season one, but made it better . Constantly praised for celebrating the best of human nature, for me this series shows nothing close to the reality of kindness and kinship at all. If Ted Lasso did what reviewers promised then it would be great. But all I saw was passable television that relies on hackneyed tropes to fool audiences into thinking their hearts are warmed, when really they have only been numbed.

*deleted, re-edited, re-posted*

I know of a book review here in Australia a few years ago where an author sought the advice of another author about how best to approach the topic in question. When the book was written and published the advice-giving author gave a book a dismal review. They haven’t spoken since.

My sense has always been that the review tells one more about the reviewer than the work reviewed. Only a handful of reviewers shed light upon the work itself, and this by virtue of their heightened understanding, even profound insight, which in turn heightens one’s own enjoyment or edification by revealing what isn’t commonly seen or intuited.

Shriek is brilliant. I’ve watched it with grandchildren, nieces, nephews and their little friends. All have been spell bound even ifs it the fourth or fifth time of watching. It takes a Guardian critic to miss the essential point of the film, Kids Love It! As my children used to tell me Get a Life.

You need to watch The Critical Drinker on youtube, he rips it out of films he doesn’t like.

The digitising of thought and creativity is a double edged sword. It’s democratic but also a kaleidoscope in fragments.

This article is 22 paragraphs long! And the paragraphs are three times the length of those used by your better writers like Franklin, West and Chivers.

UnHerd: please remember that we pay for this service. This sort of thing is better suited to the Guardian or the other free sheets. Tight, well-argued and sub-edited stuff in the future please.

Inclined to agree. Some interesting points but then it drags on way too long

It is a joy to read 1000 well-chosen words. Nowadays, it also serves as a lead into the comments section – the best bit of any article. (If I ran UnHerd I would oblige my writers to engage BTL -as some already do). To engage a reader over 5000 words is impossible for all but the very best writers.

Btw I was being a bit tongue-in-cheek criticising this writer so vehemently because he says how much he values negative criticism in the article.

Disagree. The article sets out the main ideas – at which point, I start planning the brilliant comment I could add…. but as so often happens on Unherd, the piece develops both the argument and the counter positions. My point, trivial or superficial as it undoubtedly was, then goes unwritten. Unlike yours 🙂

Keep it up, Unherd.

You are a gentleman and a scholar.

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Hatchet Job by Mark Kermode – review

I 've seen Mark Kermode about the place over the years and he's always seemed to me to be a fairly good thing: a passionate film enthusiast with an affable blokeish manner who dishes out serviceable commentary on new releases, and involves himself in what we must, per the modern idiom, call "the film community". But until reading this book I'd never actually read any of his film criticism – at least not knowingly – and it certainly came as a surprise to discover with what high regard he holds his profession, even if in respect of his own output he is annoyingly self-deprecating. Throughout Hatchet Job , Kermode keeps up a steady stream of asides of the kind my mother used to call "don't‑mind-little-me"; either because he is indeed ever-so-'umble, or – more likely – he's self-aware enough to feel the need to correct an innate arrogance. Either way, it's irritating, as are his cutesy anecdotes about the family dog, and his lexicon that draws heavily not on Americanisms per se, but on movie Americanisms – "doozey", "dopey", "kinda dopey" – that bespeak a lifetime spent in Soho preview theatres listening to execrable committee-penned dialogue.

Hatchet Job also contains some howlers: such as an Alanis Morissette -level misuse of "ironic" and all its cognates, and an "inchoate" for "incoherent" solecism that I found hard to square with Kermode's quarter-century hacking away at the typeface, and harder still to take given his view that film criticism can be a craft that in the right hands rises to the status of an art form. Ah, well, no need to worry, I'm not about to continue this hatchet job on Hatchet Job ; after all, to write a book about film criticism is in the first place a little too much, but to critique such a work strikes me as altogether surplus to requirements.

But Kermode's book, as a sustained cry from the heart that over some 300 pages oddly modulates into melioristic mooing, is worth discussing. His anxiety that in the age of the internet and the worldwide web the role of the serious critic may be becoming otiose speaks to the contemporary condition. That he's unable to grasp the full extent of the change that's upon us cannot altogether be held against him; after all, very few people can look a wholesale social, cultural and psychological transformation taking place on an unparalleled scale steadily in the eye, especially if they're under a professional obligation to wear 3D spectacles a lot of the time.

Kermode certainly understands that change is afoot: he looks back over his own career, which began with manually typing copy and then delivering it to Time Out by public transport, with a certain nostalgia. He holds as integral to the business of proper criticism – and while he's talking about film this could certainly apply across all the arts – that its practitioners should be considered in their verdicts, be prepared to accept personal attribution, and should respect the production exigencies of their chosen art form. In the case of film this means observing embargoes and not "reviewing" work in progress. His mistake is to imagine that simply by transposing these diktats from the printed page on to the web the kind of culture he has commented on for so long can be preserved in virtual aspic. Kermode grasps, rightly, that the problem for contemporary writers of all stripes (film-makers and musicians as well), is that the fundamental link between words/images/sounds and money has been severed by the web; what he doesn't get is that this severing is irrevocable. He writes breezily about monetising web content, but really he's like a little Dutch boy with his finger stuck in a hole in the paywall, while over the top thunders a mighty inundation of free content.

The root of Kermode's confusion lies, I think, with another solecism. In discussing the demise of the film projector's profession he glosses a well‑worn media studies shibboleth thus: "when it comes to the inevitable change from analogue to digital, the medium is not the message – at least, not in its entirety." This is an observation Kermode wishes to extend to every aspect of the web revolution, but I somehow doubt that he's ever actually read Marshall McLuhan 's Understanding Media ; or, if he did, he simply cannot have understood it. McLuhan's point is that when it comes to the impact of new media on the human consciousness – both individual and collective – content is an irrelevance; we have to look not at what is on the screen, but how the screen is used. McLuhan saw in the early 1960s that all the brouhaha about what imagery was shown on television and what words were spoken was so much guff; the transformation from what he termed "the linear Gutenberg technology" to the "total field" one implied by the instantaneity of electricity was all that mattered, and this was a change in the human mind as well as the human hand. McLuhan's global village is indeed all about us now, and it already exhibits social, psychological and cultural behaviours that are entirely different from those implicit in the technologies of mass broadcast and individual, concentrated absorption.

Film is far more akin to the printed book than it is to the web page; and as for the criticism that accompanied it, this too owed its cultural traction to top-down and one-way technologies of dissemination. Kermode expends a lot of Hatchet Job on explaining that phenomena such as audience test screenings effecting change in movies are as old as the medium itself, while the auteur theory of film-making was always suspect and fragmentary. But what he wants to preserve against all comers is the work of narrative art as something that is given entire and unchangeable by its makers to its receivers. Unfortunately, like all Gutenberg minds, Kermode can only have an inchoate understanding of what's going on – but what he does get is that if film itself ceases to exist in its traditional form then film critics like him have their necks on the block.

And of course film has already changed a great deal: streaming is not analogous to the videocassette or DVD. Now we have instant access to an unparalleled library of films, books and recordings, we are wallowing about, really, in an atemporal zone of cultural production: none of us have the time – unless, like Kermode, we wish to spend the greater part of our adult life at it – to view all the films, read all the texts, and listen to all the music that we can access, wholly gratis and right away. Under such conditions the role of the critic becomes not to help us to discriminate between "better" and "worse" or "higher" and "lower" monetised cultural forms, but only to tell us if our precious time will be wasted – and for this task the group amateur mind is indeed far more effective than the unitary perception of an individual critic. In my working lifetime I've already seen the status accorded to book and film reviews undergo a tremendous decline – not, I hasten to add, because there aren't good reviews being written (this one is especially good), but because the media they are reviewing and the medium by which they themselves are delivered are both in a state of flux. All sorts of cultural production that was concerned with ordering and sorting – criticism, editing and librarianship – can now be seen for what it always really was: the adjunct of a particular media technology.

Kermode, himself an enthusiastic blogger, concedes that film criticism under the aegis of the web has become more a conversation than a series of declarations; what he can't bear to contemplate is that films also may become dialogic. Why not? For those who think that narrative art forms are in a state of crystalline stasis it's worth taking a slightly longer view: film is only just over a century old, the novel as we commonly understand it a mere two centuries old – the copyrights that protected them are about 150 years old. At the moment, the wholesale reconfiguration of art is only being retarded by demographics: the middle-aged possessors of Gutenberg minds remain in the majority in western societies, and so we struggle to impose our own linearity on a simultaneous medium to which it is quite alien. The young, who cannot read a text for more than a few minutes without texting, who rely on the web for both their love affairs and their memories of heartache, and who can sometimes find even cinema difficult to take unless it comes replete with electronic feedback loops, are not our future: we, the Gutenberg minds have no future, and our art forms and our criticism of those art forms will soon belong only to the academy and the museum. Bracing, isn't it, Mark?.

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Incandescence

Anatomy of a hatchet job.

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Spoiler Warning

This essay contains spoilers for my novel Incandescence , and probably won’t make a lot of sense to anyone who hasn’t read the book.

“This room smells of mathematics! Go out and fetch a disinfectant spray!” [1]

— A.H. Trelawney Ross, Alan Turing’s form master

I n the two decades or so during which I’ve been a professionally published author, my work has received many generous and perceptive reviews, alongside a number with precisely the opposite qualities. I’m grateful for the first kind, and not greatly surprised by the second. As with the wider population, the people who read, write, edit and review science fiction include a significant proportion with no knowledge of, or interest in, the universe they inhabit — and within that group, a smaller but still substantial number who treat any such interest with contempt. Given that much of what I write is coming from the position that mathematics and the natural sciences are intrinsically interesting , and are as suitable as the central concerns of fiction as anything else, when the result is reviewed by someone who has about as much passion for these things as I have for opera or baseball, a clash of expectations is inevitable.

Of course, I find it easy to arrange my life to avoid opera and baseball, whereas professional science fiction reviewers might not always have the luxury of choice. In rare cases, the result can be a gracious admission by the reviewer that they’re in no position to say anything relevant about the work – much as I’d have nothing to say, myself, if I’d been mistakenly assigned to review Elke Neidhardt’s Adelaide production of the Ring Cycle (don’t worry, I had no idea there’d been any such thing until a spot of Googling a few seconds ago) or to give a running commentary on this year’s World Series championship. More often, though, human nature being what it is, a reviewer in this situation will be obliged by their ego to start hallucinating genre-spanning competence, and will emit various kinds of bluster or venom as compensation for the unwelcome experience they’ve been forced to endure.

This can be entertaining at times. The various spiritual heirs of A.H. Trelawney Ross have convinced themselves that the particular set of half-digested factoids in their possession perfectly delineates the proper amount of science that can be known by a truly civilised person and discussed in polite company — where “polite company” might mean “among Doctor Who fans down the pub” or “in the English Department common room” or whatever particular social milieu the reviewer identifies with most strongly. Anything else is beyond the pale, and the heirs of AHTR have developed a whole elaborate demonology to deal with work that oversteps these boundaries, and the people who want to foist too much science into the brains of pure and decent science fiction readers. These days there’s often ranting about “nerds” and “geeks” – terms that the world would be better off without, though I have to admit there’s something gloriously awful, in a Love And Death on Long Island kind of way, when would-be sophisticates who spend half their time discussing Joyce or Sophocles switch to a vocabulary whose current usage was largely forged in the supremely inane universe of American high school cliques.

I f hostility is only to be expected, a quality I find far more disillusioning in reviews is sheer carelessness. About half the reviews of Incandescence made at least one of the following false assertions:

• The Splinter orbits a neutron star.
• Rakesh visits the Splinter.
• The relationship between the novel’s two threads is never revealed.
• The reader learns nothing about the Aloof.

One reviewer even stated confidently that the Splinter was facing a cataclysmic collision with “a rock”. Remind me not to go within a hundred million kilometres of anything this man calls “a rock”.

Many of these reviews were actually quite positive, and some that weren’t were clearly written in good faith, so these mistakes were not (or not mostly) a matter of deliberate misrepresentation. Some reviewers might be under absurd time pressures, or face various distractions and obstacles that prevent them from giving a book the attention it requires. But I believe the bottom line is this: If someone starts a book, gets bored, skims it, and ends up knowing absolutely nothing about the denouement, then of course they’re entitled to have a whine on their personal blog about how tedious the whole experience was. But if someone aspires to be taken seriously as a reviewer, they either need to read the entire book, carefully, and give at least as much thought to what they’ve read as a twelve-year-old would when sitting a reading comprehension test, or – if that prospect is far too unpleasant to bear – they should decline to review the book.

O f all the reviews of Incandescence rendered irrelevant by hostility or carelessness, one stands out from the rest. In fact, I believe this particular review is probably the first genuine hatchet job I’ve ever received.

There is no precise, generally accepted definition of the term hatchet job , so I’m going to feel free to specify my own. The distinguishing quality, I’d contend, is not the intensity of the review’s invective, but rather the degree to which the reviewer attempts to bolster their position by mounting culpably weak arguments against pretty much everything in the book. No matter how much the reviewer loathes the book, if they possess the self-discipline (and the logical and rhetorical skills) to state the reasons for their verdict honestly and precisely, the result is not a hatchet job; it’s simply a negative review, and there are no circumstances when a reviewer is not entitled to write a negative review. A hatchet job results only when the reviewer is so unsatisfied with the actual reasons for their loathing that they start scrabbling around desperately and finding fault with everything in sight, regardless of merit.

Of course, there might be books where everything from the typeface to the character’s names really is worthy of derision, but a good rule of thumb remains: if the reviewer employs special pleading – appealing to tendentious “rules” or logically spurious arguments that not only lack general support, but that even the very same person would be unlikely to invoke in any other case – you have a hatchet job.

The remainder of this essay won’t make much sense unless you read the review in question by Adam Roberts, on the Strange Horizons web site.

First, Roberts tells us that the central flaw of Incandescence is that “everything is explained all the time all the way through”. It’s certainly true that nothing that is known to the protagonists is withheld from the reader, and Roberts – who makes it plain that he has no knowledge of or interest in science – finds a transparent, unobfuscated view over the shoulders of characters who are struggling to uncover the nature of their world enough to bore him out of his skull. Roberts would prefer a long, convoluted narrative strip-tease, as in Lost (which for all its virtues is not many people’s model of judicious revelatory pacing); he’s entitled to his preferences, of course, but the irony is that the reader ends Incandescence knowing several crucial things that remain hidden from the protagonists. No doubt Roberts would be uninterested in these revelations too, but from his comments it seems unlikely that he was ever aware of them.

So far, so ordinary; an heir of A.H. Trelawney Ross collides with a book “to which adheres the odour of fourth-form school physics labs”, proclaims in scandalised tones that “the novel’s real interest is the process of enquiry itself ” (emphasis in the original), and declares with pompous finality:

Science is the enemy of mystery. Fiction, however, requires a degree of negative capability immiscible with the scientific method.

In short, Roberts has as much of a good time as I’d have at the Bayreuth Festival, and as little worth reporting about the experience. The mystery is why he bought the ticket in the first place; a previous encounter with Schild’s Ladder should have warned off any but the most masochistic of science-haters.

W hat turns the review into a hatchet job, though, is that Roberts seeks to shore up his negative opinion of the book by finding as many other things to complain about as he can. This is where a penchant for special pleading comes in handy.

The Amalgam, Roberts tells us, is a “rather dental name”. But even this lame bitchiness is a distinctive form of contrivance; it’s a common strategy in populist anti-intellectualism to pretend that a term has only one, maximally mundane, meaning. Don’t hold your breath waiting for Roberts to apply the same rule to Christopher Priest’s corpus. I was waiting for him to show some consistency and declare that the Splinter was “rather wooden” ... but it turns out he’s written an entire novel with that title; obviously, grounds to suspend the rule.

Roberts makes a stab at trying to insist that the narrative of the Splinter should have been stripped of phrases like “a whirlwind tour of history” or “armed with the map of weights” when the Splinter has neither whirlwinds nor armies. The endpoint of such a strategy would be to leave virtually nothing of the English language behind, since the vast majority of English etymology ultimately refers to objects that do not exist in the Splinter. Roberts realises his suggestion is untenable and backs away, but then decides that the policy I’ve actually adopted of translating alien thoughts and words into ordinary English should have turned four of the directions used by the Splinterites into “north”, “south”, “west” and “east”.

If Roberts had given a moment’s serious thought to this framing issue – as opposed to just groping around for things to which he could object – he would have understood why the Splinterites’ direction words could not be translated into the English compass points. Zak has come to realise that the Splinter is moving in a circle around a distant point, the Hub. Once this celestial geometry has been spelt out to us, we might usefully visualise the situation by imagining the Splinter’s orbit as the equator of a vast sphere, to which we attach analogous directions to those we attach to the surface of the Earth. But that’s not how ordinary Splinterites think.

To the Splinterites before Zak, the concepts shomal , junub , rarb and sharq refer solely to the pattern of weights, because they know about nothing else; if these terms had been presented to the reader instead as north , south , east and west , it would have strongly suggested either of two false things: that the Splinterites had some pre-existing concept of their world lying on an orbit-embracing sphere, or — even more confusingly to the reader – that the sphere spanned by these directions was the Splinter itself, and if you kept going east in the Splinter you would, as on the Earth, end up where you started. On the Splinter, if you keep going rarb you hit the Incandescence.

A few reviewers complained that they had trouble keeping straight the physical meanings of the Splinterites’ directions. This leaves me wondering if they’ve really never encountered a book before that benefits from being read with a pad of paper and a pen beside it, or whether they’re just so hung up on the idea that only non-fiction should be accompanied by note-taking and diagram-scribbling that it never even occurred to them to do this. I realise that some people do much of their reading with one hand on a strap in a crowded bus or train carriage, but books simply don’t come with a guarantee that they can be properly enjoyed under such conditions.

Roberts goes on to tell us how ugly he finds the choice of direction words; I don’t expect someone with his limited cultural horizons to recognise the joke behind them, but the hundreds of millions of humans who would might raise an eyebrow at the claim of ugliness. (I’ve transliterated as “rarb” a word that is usually rendered “gharb”, but you can imagine how Roberts would have gagged on that. And be prepared for some he-couldn’t-possibly-have-meant- that moments if you Google “junub”; a more common transliteration is “janoub”.)

Roberts picks some desperate nits about jelly babies and rice surviving into the far future. If he’d taken a stand and declared his unshakeable conviction that not one of our descendants would indulge in such arbitrary and meaningless pleasures as eating chilli and rice after the year X , I wouldn’t agree with him, but at least he would have stated a basis on which the events in the book were supposed to be so improbable and anachronistic. As it is, he’s just tossing peanuts, padding out the review with gripes in the hope that it will seem more substantial than it is.

But the pinnacle of desperation comes close to the end, when Roberts quotes some unexceptionable passages from the book describing Roi’s mating with a few male Splinterites. His problem is that most readers of the review would find nothing wrong with these scenes, so he goes on – surreally – to invent a parodic excerpt from Henry James’s The Golden Bowl , in which human sex is described in comically clinical detail.

Yes, these are the heights to which possessing a PhD in English will elevate your critical powers: if passage A doesn’t actually ring false just invent something that does , and pretend that the two are equivalent. Any high school student or undergraduate who tried this in an essay would be failed.

Roi’s species does not attach the same emotional and cultural values to mating as humans do. As Roberts understands perfectly well, most of what makes his invented passage so ridiculous actually turns on those values. Without the misdirection of his faux-James, the suggestion that Roi wouldn’t ponder the mechanics of the mating process loses all force; once she emerges from the buzz of cooperation, she is alert, inquisitive and reflective about everything around her, and there is nothing to compel her to treat this any differently.

That it is the raw world around her that passes constantly through Roi’s mind is what Roberts really can’t bear; to him, such an engagement with reality is unspeakably vulgar and trivial. It’s his right to feel that way, and to share his feelings with anyone who’s interested, but it’s a shame he can’t summon up the courage of his convictions and present this response without the adornment of contrived arguments, special pleading, and rhetorical strategies as laughably dishonest and incompetent as those on display here.

[1] Alan Turing: the Enigma by Andrew Hodges, Vintage, 1992.

The New York Times

Opinionator | whither the hatchet job.

Whither the Hatchet Job?

Draft is a series about the art and craft of writing.

Watching “High Noon” again the other day, I wondered how postwar British culture ever found the strength to continue breathing. America’s global economic clout can be belittled only if you believe that no American cultural product is any good. Since it is undeniable that the occasional American cultural product is marvelous, I was left looking for cultural things that the Americans couldn’t do. The only one I can think of is hostile literary criticism.

America does polite literary criticism well enough. And how: there is a new Lionel Trilling on every campus. But America can’t do the bitchery of British book reviewing and literary commentary.

In Britain, the realm of book reviewing is still known as Grub Street though the actual Grub Street vanished long ago. But its occasionally vicious spirit lives on; one of the marks of Grub Street is that the spleen gets a voice. Ripping somebody’s reputation is recognized blood sport. Shredding a new book is a kind of fox hunting that is still legal today.

Such critical violence is far less frequent in America. Any even remotely derogatory article in an American journal is called “negative,” and hardly any American publication wants to be negative.

In America, consensus is considered normal and controversy is confusing. Zoë Heller’s recent attempt , in The New York Review of Books, to prove that Salman Rushdie’s book “Joseph Anton: A Memoir” was less than magnificent is a very rare example of a critical review in an American publication.

Immediately, as if a switch had been thrown, the review became more famous than the book. Onlookers hailed the review as a sure candidate for Hatchet Job of the Year , a prize that actually exists, out there in the boiling blogosphere.

In my reading of Ms. Heller’s review, she didn’t seem to question Mr. Rushdie’s importance but rather seemed merely to find piquancy in the fact that he never questioned it either. She carefully conceded that if hundreds of thousands of people are offered a reward for your head, then you can be excused for regarding yourself as the natural subject of current historical conversation. She might have added that you can also be excused for collecting lifetime female partners the way Jay Leno collects sports cars. But on the whole Ms. Heller said nothing that might not have shown up, in Britain, in a feature on the same subject carried by almost any serious literary publication.

In The New York Review of Books, however, the piece was remarkable, generating many an argument at highbrow dinner parties. Its alien quality was underlined, perhaps, by the fact that Ms. Heller is actually a British import: like the late Christopher Hitchens, she voiced her British acerbity in a polite context, and found, as he did, that the locals were wonderfully easy to stir up. (The British expression is “wind up”: rather more cruel, when you think about it, because it treats people as tin toys.)

At one stage in my life, I was asked to review a prominent book that I thought needed putting down, and found myself in a position similar to Ms. Heller’s. It was in the late ’70s when John le Carré was in the full power of his later phase of production and The New York Review of Books asked me to write a review of his latest book. I was scarcely a chapter into it before I felt the glue closing over my head.

I wrote that Mr. le Carré’s style had become verbose and implausible by his own standard, which had been set by his early books, especially by “The Spy Who Came in From the Cold,” which I called a masterpiece. But no writer wants to hear that he has lapsed from greatness. He wants to hear, at the very least, that his greatness has acquired an extra layer of subtlety, even if it looks like incompetence.

IN my role as Mr. le Carré’s nemesis, I had already experienced what it felt like to be stomped on in print. Years before, John Carey, one of the cleverest of the Oxbridge dons moonlighting in Grub Street, brought all his wit and knowledge to the task of shriveling my first collection of essays, “The Metropolitan Critic.” I slept badly for months.

Then, several years later, he extolled my book “Unreliable Memoirs,” and I felt all the better for having once felt miserable. It was part of the give and take of the British literary world.

Mr. le Carré, however, had never had a really bad review in his life until I ambushed him in America. He just wasn’t used to it. My review was undoubtedly a hatchet job and Mr. le Carré was right to be annoyed. For one thing, a “negative” review in such an influential publication could hardly be good for the book’s chances in America, although in fact it became a best seller anyway. Mr. le Carré, nonetheless, let it be known that he thought I had set out to damage him.

I hadn’t. But I can see how it might have seemed like that to him. Having far too much fun as I picked out the book’s absurdities and pomposities, I had written a British-style killer book review but I had published it in an American context. In that fact lay the insult and the injury.

British writers know that they are in a cockpit at home but when their books come out in America they expect to be safe. Usually they are; and anyone deputed to take them down usually has to be brought in from outside, like Ms. Heller or, dare I say it, myself. American culture is a polite culture and probably the better for it.

Sometimes I wonder, though. There was a time when the American literary world grew its own hatchet persons, and could rejoice in the thoroughness with which Mary McCarthy dismembered the reputation of Lillian Hellman.

But among young writers, there seems a shortage of critics unhampered by excessive good manners. Why this should be so is a bit of a mystery. It could be that the typical established publication has become too impressed with its own self-imposed status as a journal of record, which must confine itself to the facts; and that a complex, nuanced statement sounds not enough like a fact, and hence must be confined to the blogs, where nobody has any manners anyway.

When I read the brilliant young Alice Gregory, in Slate, struggling to express how she simultaneously approves and disapproves of the journalism of Janet Malcolm, I want to lean through her study window (Alice Gregory’s, not Janet Malcolm’s) and explain that the whole secret of literary journalism is to express both sides of a question at once, and that only in America could that imperative seem abnormal. Alice, you can’t eliminate the negative. It accentuates the positive.

Clive James is an Australian poet and critic whose most recent book is a verse translation of Dante’s “Divine Comedy.”

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The theme of never giving up in gary paulsen's "hatchet".

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Hatchet job: when bad reviewers go good, arts & culture.

The art and life of Mark di Suvero

Geoff Dyer, another English writer, much better known since 2008’s Death in Venice, Jeff in Varanisi brought most of his strange work back into print, was nominated for his attack on Julian Barnes’s The Sense of an Ending :

Later, after Tony has broken up with his girlfriend, Adrian commits suicide. This would be my first objection. Obviously people commit suicide, for a variety of reasons, but in fiction they tend to do so primarily in the service of authorial convenience. And convenience invariably becomes a near-anagram of contrivance.

The impulse behind good bad reviews is not much understood, and whether understood or not, is usually disliked or dismissed. It’s considered ungenerous, as though generosity could never be misplaced. In their careers, Dyer and Mars-Jones have risked this dislike regularly, but it’s worth reading them at their other best, when they’re admiring works that they love, works that have continued in their minds, works they’ve continued to live alongside.

For that other best is rooted in a love that you can find in their best negative reviews. I’d argue that Mars-Jones wrote a better, even a beautiful, negative review last year, his brilliant dismissal of Orhan Pamuk’s Norton Lectures (published as The Naïve and Sentimental Novelist ).

After unpacking the relentless clichés in this very bad little book and finding nothing underneath, Mars-Jones offers something else instead (another mark of a good bad review), which, in the final paragraphs of the review, is a better and more beautiful ars poetica than anything offered by Pamuk:

It’s common sense to assume that artists know what they’re doing, but art is not the domain of common sense. T. S. Eliot has been mocked for disclaiming any authority as an interpreter of his own work, but the opposite assumption is at least as suspect. One novelist who offers a useful version of the writing process in its abstract mechanics is Michel Tournier in his 1977 essay Le vent paraclet . His idea is that novels are cleverer than their writers. Don’t compliment me on my imaginative brilliance, he says, just give me credit for using a device that stores impulses over time. A battery. The novel. The writer spends months if not years generating a charge that the reader experiences in a matter of hours. It’s the same with the suicide who throws himself off the Eiffel tower after climbing to the top. He’s pulped by the same potential energy he built up step by step, because it’s discharged so rapidly.

Each of these two men also have short, newish books on a single film: Noriko Smiling , by Mars-Jones, a longish essay on Ozu’s Late Spring , and Zona , Geoff Dyer’s convoluted, slightly longer book about Tarkovsky’s Stalker . As criticism, both works are curious. They rely heavily on conversational plot summary, tangents; there is nothing formal to be seen. They take for granted that the most important thing in discussing art is not to be bored while discussing art. And so they defy the practice of criticism as we know it. And in fact, both books are less critical works than devotional texts. Not holier than thou, but humble in their intentions. I can approach God or Ozu or Tarkovsky without special dispensation and so can you. Some sort of admirably amateurish engagement is what they both ask.

They are also devotional because they come after a long critical tradition that assumed (or at least assumed that we assumed) the cultural utility of narrative, of film, and of criticism, and that the reality of characters and their problems could be dismissed practically before the discussion ever began. Both of these books—and those like them—take us down as close to the object as they can, in order to teach us again how to watch Noriko and her father struggle with the question of her arranged marriage, or how to watch Stalker and Writer and Professor try to reach a room (the Room) where their deepest desires will be granted. By the lights of Mars-Jones and Dyer, we’re having to relearn what’s worthwhile about identifying with the wish-fantasy of the Room or the marriage predicament of Noriko. Readers and viewers are always doing this, relearning the basic empathy that goes with fiction, but as the intervals become longer and the incentives diminish, the process becomes less certain. A need arises for criticism that doesn’t assume (as authors and filmmakers, usually true believers, do) that we know how to care for characters that aren’t real. Both books, Mars-Jones’s in particular, spend time stripping the previous layers of criticism away. But this isn’t Ozu without tears. We just ought to be crying for Noriko rather than Ozu. We shouldn’t insult the director by supposing that the story on the screen is nothing to him and less to us.

The last few years have seen several books in or near this vein: the art historian T. J. Clark put himself in a room with two Poussins day after day until he had produced a journal of thinking and looking, The Sight of Death , one of the best books about painting I’ve read; its subtitle, An Experiment in Art Writing , indicates that it is clearly meant to be criticism with a difference. Elif Batuman’s personal essays about Russian literature, The Possessed , are closer to some autobiographical line, but they still are most interested in questions of how and why these forms can become complicated and structured enough to think in and live in until we forget there is an outside, that the world is not Poussin or Tolstoy.

For Mars-Jones to deal with Ozu, he has to pry away the glister that Paul Schrader and a whole host of other critics have applied to Late Spring and to the master’s (apparently always a Zen master) meditative camera work. Noriko Smiling has Noriko in the title—and for good reason—the book treats the young woman who wants to take care of her father rather than submit to an arranged marriage as a real narrative problem, not merely as an excuse for formal greatness. It’s one thing that both books have in common. To be truly reverential, you can’t have reverence only for past reverence. There’s something underneath, in this case a story, and both books lean heavily on remarkable and engaging plot summaries to reach it. And yet it’s worth mentioning that both these films are meditative; they spool out their stories at a rate we can take in and have many minutes left over for ourselves. How to spend them? Mars-Jones puzzles over the beautiful vagaries of plot, trying to see how and why it all fits together. He considers the post–World War II American occupation of Japan and the particular nature of the film censorship that went along with it, using these to move deeper and deeper into the imponderables of Noriko’s motivation.

But in Stalker , Dyer has a higher minutes-to-narrative ratio to fill, and he fills it with an extended and marvelous history of his engagement with the movie and all the dark hypotheticals that the movie’s wish-fulfillment plotline has sent him down. But the book isn’t about what Geoff Dyer wants as much as it is about how a movie can make you turn these thing over in your mind, a reminder to take art personally. For this, both men insist, is one of the thrills of narrative—offering pieces of your life, letting them be evoked and then invoked by an author, and then having them returned: altered or turned against you (by something that befalls the characters). The most financially rewarding sectors of narrative make their money by evoking your particular life and then rewarding you for having it: of this many bestsellers are made. Stalker and Late Spring don’t reward us in that way, and they will not let us alone. And these two short books are faithful to that.

Dyer moves so close to the story that he considers what he would do if he were faced with the Room, a room that grants your deepest wish. In a move that would embarrass most critics, he allows the plot of the movie to question and require answers from the life of Geoff Dyer. What would he do? What would you do?

So that this movie and his book are not only an aesthetic sequence of images and their closed commentary, he’s unfolding a knotty human thing in the middle of his knotty human life. In one hell-for-leather passage, he proceeds from discussing the idea of the Room’s offer of a deepest desire to a discussion of his parent’s wish for a better cut of steak from the supermarket. Something which, rather than being easily nostalgic over, he vivisects into a convoluted but gorgeous discussion of the absurdity of denial and fulfillment. Then, in case we still found this too sepia-toned, he mentions that his deepest desire would probably be to have managed a threesome. He conversationally recounts his near-misses. But, lest we think him too bold, he admits that his deepest desire could actually be something embarrassing, really embarrassing, not magazine-writer embarrassing: real estate. To have bought a flat for a thousand that would now cost three hundred thousand. To have sold out when the selling out was good.

But although Mars-Jones and Geoff Dyer both behave as though they are agents of the Secret Service—throwing themselves bodily between their films and normal criticis—the swelling orchestral nonsense of contemporary autobiography is nowhere to be seen. Dyer doesn’t tell us to care about Stalker because his parents didn’t buy the cuts of meat they wished they had or because he never had a threesome. This isn’t the kind of audience-hostage-taking autobiography that David Mamet once compared to bringing a gun to a knife fight. There is this movie, Stalker , you see, and it reminds him of things. That’s all.

Another way both authors signal that these viewing accounts are meant to be provisional is their willingness to say they don’t know. Adam Mars-Jones goes on about Noriko’s father, an old professor, and his habit of rubbing his wooden cigarette holder against the sides of his nose, then throws up his authorial hands and says, Who knows why? You tell me, he says. Dyer does the same, mentioning the many animals of some zoo, including the Przewalski’s horse, then adds, “whatever that is,” conspicuously mentioning not only what he does not know, but did not look up.

Why this gesture from both men? More like an actor’s pose than a rhetorical trick, isn’t it? Why include it at all? Because it creates the sense that this is conversational and locked out of anything like perfect knowledge. He’s just said these things so we can, for a moment, not know, not go down that tangent, and put our phones away. They avoid a static reverence by steering clear of full authority, but also by maintaining their bad reviewers’ willingness to be irritated. Neither Dyer nor Mars-Jones came to the attention of the Hatchet Judges because they were easygoing, but even as they discuss the films they love, the make it clear not only that they do not know everything, they don’t revere everything. Dyer kicks L’Avventura to the curb, mostly to show us that he can be bored by a slow, apparently aimless film, so that we will trust him while he provides running commentary to Stalker , one of the greatest boring films of all time. He does the same to Jim Jarmusch’s The Limits of Control , as well as to late Henry James, admitting that the moment has passed. He’ll never try for the pleasures of those works.

Mars-Jones echoes this at the outset of Noriko Smiling , saying he hasn’t seen much Japanese cinema, going so far as to mention that, as he writes, a Criterion Silent Naruse is sitting unopened on his DVD player. These are not the Church fathers endorsing the hierarchies. Instead they are admitting that the hierarchies only serve to push us away, putting many removes and understandings between us and the ability to be engaged by a novel or a film. And in this way, they’re even at odds with that other up-to-the-minute genre: I took a year off to become the absolute best at cooking/reading Dante/Proust/Joyce/Carol Oates/memorizing/Paris, and so on.

But despite this different DIY approach, neither book is falsely egalitarian and they don’t dumb anything down. The books demand your reaction and intelligence, and not your education or understanding of this or that. It remains to be seen if these traditions—the novel and the narrative film—can be saved from the kind of curation that has befallen poetry or ballet, or that this year’s Oscar nominees celebrate. Their Hatchet-nominated reviews are not dead-end asides, but preludes to appreciation. Clearing the way, so that Noriko Smiling and Zona and Late Spring and Stalker can be ours fully and pointedly—and not just as part of an interminable and very bland general appreciation.

Drew Johnson is a writer living in Massachusetts. His fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Harper’s , Five Chapters , The Cupboard , VQR , and elsewhere .

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hatchet job

Definition of hatchet job

Examples of hatchet job in a sentence.

These examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'hatchet job.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

Word History

1940, in the meaning defined above

Dictionary Entries Near hatchet job

hatchetfish

hatchet man

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“Hatchet job.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary , Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/hatchet%20job. Accessed 7 Apr. 2024.

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hatchet job noun

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What does the noun hatchet job mean?

There are two meanings listed in OED's entry for the noun hatchet job . See ‘Meaning & use’ for definitions, usage, and quotation evidence.

How common is the noun hatchet job ?

How is the noun hatchet job pronounced, british english, u.s. english, where does the noun hatchet job come from.

Earliest known use

The earliest known use of the noun hatchet job is in the 1920s.

OED's earliest evidence for hatchet job is from 1925, in Escanaba (Michigan) Daily Press .

hatchet job is formed within English, by compounding.

Etymons: hatchet n. , job n. 2

Nearby entries

• hatchery, n. 1857–
• hatchet, n. a1350–
• hatchet, v. 1603–
• hatchet face, n. 1707–
• hatchet-faced, adj. 1648–
• hatchet fashion, adv. & n. 1829–
• hatchet fish, n. 1848–
• hatchet fist, n. 1798–
• hatchet-headed, adj. 1712–
• hatchet jaw, n. 1857–
• hatchet job, n. 1925–
• hatchet man, n. 1668–
• hatchet moulding, n. 1790–1902
• hatchet stake, n. 1843–
• hatchettine, n. 1821–
• hatchettite, n. 1868–
• hatchettolite, n. 1877–
• hatchet vetch, n. 1548–
• hatchet work, n. 1697–
• hatchety, adj. 1821–
• hatch gate, n. late Old English–

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Meaning & use

Pronunciation, entry history for hatchet job, n..

Originally published as part of the entry for hatchet, n.

hatchet job, n. was revised in March 2017.

hatchet job, n. was last modified in July 2023.

oed.com is a living text, updated every three months. Modifications may include:

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Revisions and additions of this kind were last incorporated into hatchet job, n. in July 2023.

Earlier versions of this entry were published in:

OED First Edition (1898)

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OED Second Edition (1989)

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Citation details

Factsheet for hatchet job, n., browse entry.

Hatchet Job in Esquire Dodges Springsteen’s Artistry of Imagination

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Bruce Springsteen fans who don’t mind getting their hackles up should check out the current issue of Esquire, wherein cover boy Bruce gets utterly trashed in one of the most mean-spirited assaults this side of Albert Goldman.

Writer John Lombardi’s core argument is that Springsteen is a phony for singing about hard-pressed people living on society’s fringes when he never has been there himself. Lombardi attributes Springsteen’s mass appeal to shrewd marketing, rather than compelling self-expression.

Lombardi’s argument conveniently refuses to grant rock songwriters the power of imagination--the ability to conceive of something outside of one’s own immediate experience, and to relate it in a way that rings true emotionally. Springsteen has imagined a world for himself and his audience. Lombardi calls that manipulation. I’d call it artistry.

H.B. BLUES: The blues recently swarmed all over Walter Trout, the local guitarist who plays in John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers. That’s blues as in Hill Street Blues--armed with handcuffs and heavy firepower.

It happened 2 weeks ago, when Trout was playing a gig with his own group at Perq’s, not far from his house in Huntington Beach. Trout said he went home before the show to fetch a microphone he’d forgotten--and found himself surrounded by a police SWAT team.

Before he knew what was happening, Trout said, “they had me on the ground handcuffed, with shotguns at my head.”

The special weapons and tactics team had mistaken Trout for a fugitive from Florida who was believed to be toting a submachine gun--and who had been staying in an apartment adjoining Trout’s house. The real suspect, George F. Butz, who was wanted on attempted murder and burglary warrants from out of state, was at Perq’s, where police made the arrest without incident, and without a submachine gun being found.

“That was the closest I’ve ever come to death,” said Trout, who had no trouble mustering adrenaline for his show that night. Afterward, Trout said, he wrote a song about the episode, called “Yosemite Sam.” His wife, he said, thought that Butz looked like Yosemite Sam, the cartoon character.

Trout should be in more hospitable hands Dec. 11 when he and Mayall will play acoustic blues from 10 p.m. to midnight as live-in-the-studio guests of disc jockey Jim Ladd on KMPC (101.9-FM). The Walter Trout Band will play at Perq’s Dec. 22-24, and John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers will be at the Coach House on Dec. 28.

REOPENING SOON: Michael’s Supper Club, the new Dana Point club that shut down concert operations in September after fire officials refused to approve a capacity of more than about 160, may reopen in February, according to owner Michael Zanetis. Zanetis, who has finished renovations that he said should allow for a capacity of 210, is awaiting inspections by county building and fire officials. Plans call for a less ambitious booking policy than the club had when it opened in August, Zanetis said this week. He plans to feature well-known touring pop, rock and oldies acts one weekend a month and fill in other weekends with a house band that will put on a “rock ‘n’ roll revue.” Zanetis said he hopes the still-unnamed band, to be made up of touring sidemen, will build a following.

BANDYING ABOUT: Friday is Round 2 in the Rock City Rumble, the ongoing battle of the bands at Bogart’s for groups from Orange County and Long Beach. Don’t Mean Maybe, Cactus Jack, Wood and Smoke, the Nerv and the Modifiers will square off in 30-minute sets starting at 8 p.m. Admission is $5; proceeds will be split among the three top finishers, as determined by fan voting and a panel of judges.

ON THE MEND: “The Best of Bill Medley,” recently released on MCA Records, collects the Corona del Mar resident’s recent sound track work--including the ubiquitous “Dirty Dancing” theme, “(I’ve Had) the Time of My Life”--along with new versions of such favorite oldies as “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin,’ ” “Little Latin Lupe Lu” and “Georgia on My Mind.” Medley’s partner in the Righteous Brothers, Bobby Hatfield, does not appear on the album. The broken jaw Hatfield sustained in September in a tussle and fall at the Hop in Fountain Valley is mending, according to a group spokeswoman. He is expected to resume his singing career.

FOR THE KIDS: Upcoming rock benefit concerts will provide Christmas gifts for children at two county homes for abused and neglected children. Reggae band StrangeJah Cole will play Dec. 18 at Club Postnuclear, 775 Laguna Canyon Road in Laguna Beach, with half the proceeds going to the Orangewood Children’s Foundation in Orange. The show starts at 8:30 p.m.; admission will be $8.50. Information: (714) 497-6532. On Dec. 17, the Loose Moose Saloon, 8901 Katella Ave. in Anaheim, will present a benefit for the Canyon Acres Residential Center in Anaheim. Appearing are Nevada Time, Cheeseboy and the Decadent Debutantes, an ad hoc band of local studio pros and rock band members that gets together each year for a Christmas benefit. The show starts at 8 p.m. Admission is $5 or an unwrapped gift. Information: (714) 826-2040.

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State champions anonymous.

Tell us an accomplishment, talent, or quality about yourself. What about this accomplishment or quality relates to who you are today?

“State Champions.”

Those are two words any competitor would like to hear, and I had the privilege and honor of hearing them in my sophomore year in the regiment, or band and colorguard. People typically react with surprise when they learn that bands compete. “But band is not a sport!” they say, bewildered. It might not be typical, but it takes the same determination to be a champion regiment as any traditional athletic team. The experience of being in the regiment is extraordinary, and I will try my best to explain the unbelievable feeling of marching on a field under the Saturday night lights.

Simply imagine practicing for countless hours during the summer and the school year. Think about the heat and sweat you would have to endure. For the band, it is about having perfect marching technique and hitting specific spots to create artful formations with each individual, all the while playing your instrument, keeping your notes and tune perfect, and staying in tempo! With the colorguard, it is also about hitting your spots and creating formations, in addition to maneuvering equipment, having perfect...

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Sensible Ways to Fight Terrorism

More from our inbox:, the quake, as felt in manhattan, r.f.k. jr.’s claim of ‘censorship’, obstacles to liberalism, prioritizing and valuing care jobs.

To the Editor:

Re “ The West Still Hasn’t Figured Out How to Beat ISIS ,” by Christopher P. Costa and Colin P. Clarke (Opinion guest essay, April 1):

Two clear lessons have emerged in the decade since ISIS exploded on the world scene. First, as the authors note, pulling all U.S. troops and intelligence assets from fragile conflict zones is a boon to globalized terror movements. Despite political promises, the full U.S. withdrawal from Iraq in 2011 and Afghanistan in 2021 did not “end” those wars; it transformed them into more complex and potentially more deadly challenges.

Second, we must reckon with the underlying grievances that make violent anti-Western ideologies, including militant jihadism, attractive to so many in the first place. These include the ill effects of globalization, and a “rules-based” world order increasingly insensitive to the needs of developing countries and regions.

Simply maintaining a military or intelligence presence in terror hot spots does nothing to reduce the sticky recruiting power of militant movements. Unless the United States and its allies and partners begin offering tangible policies that counter jihadi ideology and propaganda, we will just continue attacking the symptoms, not the causes.

Stuart Gottlieb New York The writer teaches American foreign policy and international security at Columbia University.

The Islamic State’s territorial caliphate in Iraq and Syria may have been eliminated years ago, but as Christopher P. Costa and Colin P. Clarke write, the terrorist group itself is very much in business. ISIS-K, its branch in Afghanistan, has conducted two large-scale external attacks over the last two months — one in Iran that killed more than 80 people and another near Moscow that took the lives of more than 130.

If the United States and its allies haven’t found a way to defeat ISIS-K in its entirety, it’s because terrorism itself is an enemy that can’t be defeated in the traditional sense of the term. This is why the war on terror framework, initiated under the George W. Bush administration immediately after the 9/11 attacks, was such poor terminology. Terrorism is going to be with us for as long as humanity exists.

Viewed this way, terrorism is a conflict management problem, not one that can be solved. While this may sound defeatist to many, it’s also the coldhearted truth. Assuming otherwise risks enacting policies, like invading whole countries (Iraq and Afghanistan), that are likely to create even more anti-U.S. terrorism than we started with.

Of course, all countries should remain vigilant. Terrorism will continue to be a part of the threat environment. The U.S. intelligence community must ensure that its counterterrorism infrastructure is well resourced and continues to focus on areas, like Afghanistan, where the U.S. no longer has a troop presence. But for the U.S., a big part of the solution is keeping our ambitions realistic and prioritizing among terrorist threats lest the system gets overloaded or pulled in too many directions at once.

While all terrorism is tragic, not all terrorist groups are created equal. Local and even regional groups with local objectives aren’t as important to the U.S. as groups that have transnational aims and the capabilities to strike U.S. targets. This, combined with keeping a cool head instead of trafficking in threat inflation, is key to a successful response.

Daniel R. DePetris New Rochelle, N.Y. The writer is a fellow at Defense Priorities, a foreign policy think tank in Washington.

Re “ Earthquake Rattles Northeast, but Little Damage Is Reported ” (live updates, nytimes.com, April 5):

I’m lying in bed Friday morning, on 14th Street in Manhattan. Suddenly I feel and see the bed start to shake!

My first thought — OMG, I’m in “The Exorcist.” Then an alert on my phone tells me that it’s an earthquake in New York City.

Frankly, I’m not sure which one scared me more.

Steven Doloff New York

Re “ Kennedy Calls Biden Bigger Threat to Democracy Than Trump ” (news article, April 3):

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s concern about the Biden administration’s “censorship” of misinformation might be viewed as legitimate if the American public demonstrated more responsibility about fact-checking what they see and hear on social media and other information platforms masquerading as legitimate sources of news.

Sadly, many in this country, and indeed the world, have abdicated responsibility for being factually informed about current events. As long as bad actors have unfettered access to social media platforms, it will be necessary to “censor” the misinformation they claim as fact. The world has become the proverbial crowded theater where one cannot yell “fire.”

Helen Ogden Pacific Grove, Calif.

Re “ The Great Struggle for Liberalism ,” by David Brooks (column, March 29):

In face of growing populism at home and abroad, Mr. Brooks issues a cri de coeur on behalf of liberal democracy and democratic capitalism, which provide the means to a “richer, fuller and more dynamic life.”

His impassioned plea for “we the people” of these United States to experience a sense of common purpose, to build a society in which culture is celebrated and families thrive, is made despite existential challenges to American liberalism:

1) We do not share an overarching belief in who we are as a people, as a nation.

2) Trust in our three branches of government, in checks and balances, is broken amid warring partisanship.

3) There is, for many, as Mr. Brooks notes, an “absence of meaning, belonging and recognition” that drives a tilt to authoritarianism in search of the restoration of “cultural, moral and civic stability” by any means necessary.

The ballot box in a free and open society allows for choice, and there are those who, in exercising their right to vote, would choose to cancel the aspirational hopes of the preamble to our Constitution.

David Brooks sees the full measure of the choices facing America and the world in 2024. Do we?

Michael Katz Washington

Re “ New Ways to Bring Wealth to Nations ,” by Patricia Cohen (news analysis, Business, April 4):

Ms. Cohen is right to argue that the service sector will be the key to economic growth in the future. However, it’s essential to consider what service jobs are — and who will be doing them.

Of course, the service industry includes office workers in tech hubs like Bengaluru, as highlighted by Ms. Cohen. Currently, these jobs are held predominantly by men, so to spur inclusive growth, employers and governments must make sure women have equal access.

But the service sector also includes hundreds of millions of people — mostly women — who are teachers and who care for children, older people and those with disabilities and illnesses. To seize the opportunity ahead, governments must position care jobs as careers of the future for women and men, alongside tech jobs. This requires making sure these positions provide good pay and working conditions.

If the goal is sustainable growth, the best approach leverages the critical care sector to generate income in the short run and prepare healthy, well-educated young people, which maintains progress in the long run.

Anita Zaidi Seattle The writer is president of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s Gender Equality Division.

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