Laura Miller

Or maybe something a little more than endangered, judging from the title that’s just come across our desks: “The Death of the Critic.” Ronan McDonald, the author, is a lecturer in English and American studies at Britain’s University of Reading, and he’s particularly exercised by what he sees as the loss of the “public critic,” someone with “the authority to shape public taste.” It’s only in the final chapter that the mystery behind the critic’s disappearance is solved. The culprit is none other than … cultural studies! (With a healthy assist from poststructuralism.) By treating literature as an impersonal text from which any manner of political meaning can be wrung, cultural studies professors have robbed criticism of its proper evaluative function — the right to say this is good, this isn’t, and here’s why.

So, Laura, it seems that, if we aren’t quite dead, we critics are on something like life support.

Laura Miller: I suppose it’s only natural that McDonald, being an academic himself, would blame the academy. He believes that substantive scholarly criticism acts as a foundation for serious non-scholarly criticism — such as reviews and essays in newspapers and magazines — lending credibility to the idea that criticism (specifically, literary criticism) is a job for trained experts. When academia falls down on the job of, as you put it, saying what’s good and what’s not, then all criticism starts to look arbitrary and dispensable. We don’t have celebrated “public critics” now because critics don’t care about the public, not because the public doesn’t care about critics. What do you think: Is criticism responsible for its own demise?

Bayard: I think critics are just the canary in this particular coal mine. It’s no accident that McDonald locates the “Golden Age” of criticism at the midpoint of the 20th century, which was also the apogee of the modern novel, particularly the American novel. Novels — and novelists — mattered then in a way they simply don’t today. (William Styron’s posthumous essay collection is a potent reminder. The man got invited to the Kennedy White House on the strength of one novel!) Even if you think critics are parasites, you have to acknowledge they can only survive when their host organisms thrive. In this regard, I think McDonald is right: If we want to bring the critic back to life, we first have to resuscitate the novelist.

Miller: I agree that it’s hard to argue for the centrality of literary criticism when literature itself has become marginal. Most people in publishing chalk this up to the availability of too many other entertainment options. What brings people back to books tends to be the belief that they offer something especially meaningful, and it’s true that academic criticism has busied itself with undermining that belief for the past 50 years. However, even the criticism that McDonald admires for its reach — the New Criticism of the 1950s — may have contributed to the public’s lack of interest. Thanks to McDonald’s really excellent historical overview, I was reminded of how crucial critics were to modernism — all those difficult, even gnomic poems and novels needed to be explained to readers who were used to conventional narrative, meter and rhyme. The idea that to be worthy of serious attention, a literary work has to tear down or revolutionize the forms of the past — well, that makes literature exciting and criticism galvanizing and oh so Important for a while, but at a certain point there’s nothing left to dismantle. And meanwhile, the readers wandered off to read Stephen King or watch TV. Having gotten the “fuck you” message loud and clear they just stop listening to intellectuals.

Bayard: I think McDonald argues convincingly that the complete trashing of the traditional canon — of the very idea of a canon — has created a kind of inverse reaction: People are now hungering to be told what’s good. So maybe there’s hope for criticism after all? And as for the “fuck you” aspect of modernism, I agree with you as far as poetry goes. But when you think back to the great novelists of the mid-to-late 20th century, they were working largely in the naturalist vein. Even Philip Roth, for all his postmodern games, grounds much of his work in the closely observed realm of Jewish Newark. And James Wood, who most nearly approximates McDonald’s ideal of “the public critic,” is a standard-bearer for classical realism, as conservative in his way as Matthew Arnold.

Miller: Despite what the critics who championed modernism claimed about the obsolescence of the traditional novel, that’s more or less still what people want to write and read; fiction didn’t, for the most part, follow the example of “Ulysses.” And poststructuralism doesn’t have much to say about this one way or the other; the radicalism it promoted is political rather than artistic, a matter of whose voice gets heard and whose story gets told. In cultural studies, whether or not a work by a member of a previously silenced group is “good” or not is the wrong question: “Good” is understood to be a suspect term based on the self-interested values of those in power.

So the only critics left to evaluate most contemporary fiction are journalists, ranging in seriousness from someone like Wood to your average newspaper freelancer who mostly delivers plot summary. There are no critical movements evident today. James Wood has a well-formed, if rather austere aesthetic but he seems to be the only one who actually adheres in it. Of all the people I’ve met who admire Wood’s criticism I’ve yet to encounter anyone who actually subscribes to his fairly restrictive standards or taste. They like his writing and seem to feel braced by his rigor, but at the end of the day, they go home with Jonathan Franzen or Zadie Smith instead.

Bayard: I like that phrase “go home with” because, when I think about the critics I love the most, they’re not necessarily the ones I agree with, they’re the ones I’d like to date. I argue with them, but when they’re gone, their music is still bopping around in my brain. Many years ago, Susan Sontag, in “Against Interpretation,” argued for “an erotics of art.” Is it time now for an erotics of criticism? Instead of bemoaning the decline of literature, should we be doing a better job of showing people what they’re missing: the excitement of unexpected insights, the thrill of new voices, the sex of ideas? That sounds like a lot more fun than figuring out which fiefdom we’re going to defend in the Theory Wars. (I’ve a hunch Ronan McDonald would be on our side.)

Miller: You’re right! Why pillory theory, when even the people who used to espouse it are saying it’s dead? Let’s talk about what makes for a good critic. I often think that there are two kinds: the ones whose taste I find simpatico — the ones I come to for recommendations on what to read — and the ones who are themselves terrific writers, irrespective of what they recommend. Sometimes there’s an overlap, but not often.

There are critics, like Wood, that I go out of my way to read, although I have no intention of ever opening the books they tout. That’s indicative of an additional aspect to criticism besides evaluation (which McDonald wants to bring back to academic criticism) and interpretation (that is, elucidating the work and its many meanings, which we could use more of in journalistic criticism). It’s the literary worth of the criticism in and of itself, and the chance to see a sophisticated reader at work. McDonald was enthusiastic enough about William Hazlitt to make me pull an old collection of Hazlitt’s essays from my shelf and put it on my bedside table and get reacquainted with that beautiful mind. What’s your notion of a great critic, Louis?

Bayard: I find I’m drawn to critics for the same reason I’m drawn to any writer: the quality of their prose. They can misinterpret and misevaluate to their heart’s delight as long as they make the words dance. Helen Vendler and Harold Bloom may be preeminent in their respective fields, but I read their prose only under duress. Whereas, no matter how wrongheaded she is, I’ll read anything by Pauline Kael. Or Anthony Lane or Clive James or, yes, James Wood.

And thanks to McDonald’s book, I now want to read more of Northrop Frye, who fired this sterling round of grapeshot at T.S. Eliot for fiddling with the canon of great writers: “…all the literary chit-chat which makes the reputations of poets boom and crash in an imaginary stock-exchange. The wealthy investor, Mr. Eliot, after dumping Milton on the market, is now buying him again; Donne has probably reached his peak and will begin to taper off; Tennyson may be in for a slight flutter but the Shelley stocks are still bearish. This sort of thing cannot be part of any systematic study, for a systematic study can only progress: whatever dithers or vacillates or reacts is merely leisure-class gossip.” Of course, I take Frye’s thematic point — the vagaries of taste are a fickle criterion for evaluation — but I’m more impressed by the dazzling execution of that stock-market metaphor and that ever-so-subtle colon in the last sentence. Anyone who wants to write about writing should be able to write.

Miller: Oddly enough, I read Frye’s “Anatomy of Criticism” just last year. Not all of it, alas, is quite so witty as the line you quote (underlined in my copy!), but I still found it illuminating, however unfashionable Frye may be these days. That man was well-read; one of the more lamentable casualties of the theory boom was that it produced thousands of English majors who can speak Lacan but who’ve never read, say, Philip Sidney.

Which brings to mind McDonald’s complaints about the “democratizing” of criticism, the idea that anyone can and should do it and that no one opinion has more weight than any other. The blogosphere, as he sees it, is only the most visible manifestation of this broader, anti-authoritarian trend. Because academic critics have abandoned evaluation, the popular critics charged with saying whether a book is good or not have gotten “slack,” in McDonald’s eyes — deficient in rigor and scholarship. If anyone can do it, then surely it’s a skill that requires no expertise or cultivation. It’s true that anyone can dispense quickie, depthless, thumb’s-up/down judgments, but that doesn’t really enrich your experience and understanding of literature as a whole. And of course, that might be contributing to the impression that literature doesn’t offer anything special.

Bayard: Yeah, the blogosphere is the elephant in the room that McDonald never really gets round to discussing, but to my mind, it’s a far more pressing issue for criticism than theory is. Why pay a professional critic to evaluate something when you have a gazillion volunteer evaluators ready to fire off at any given moment? As McDonald says, criticism “is the only mode of literary writing that you can be confident most people will have tried in their lives.” We’ve all written critical essays at school. We’re all critics, or at least we fancy ourselves to be.

The problem with arguing for cultural gatekeepers is that, if you’re a professional critic, you inevitably look self-serving — “Hey, that’s my job!” — and yes, elitist — “Don’t try this at home, guys.” I myself don’t have any particular training or qualifications to be a reviewer, other than my own experience as a reader and writer, so I feel silly arguing that someone else isn’t qualified to deliver an opinion. And believe it or not, I’ve learned things from Amazon reviews, from letters pages, from literary blogs, from all sorts of non-traditional outlets. The quality of writing is certainly variable, but then so is the quality of traditional journalism.

Miller: I don’t think there’s a real causal connection between the blogosphere and the withering away of newspaper criticism, actually. It has more to do with the economics of newspaper publishing and management and editors feeling that criticism is disposable because it’s not reporting, which they see as a newspaper’s core product.

I think of blogs not as alternatives to reviews or essays, but as a forum for short items, news and remarks, as well as links and responses to longer pieces posted on the sites that commission them. I could be wrong, though, as I’m not really a reader of blogs. I have a hard enough time keeping up with the book review sections of the New York and Los Angeles Times, the New Yorker, the New York Review of Books, Bookforum, the Atlantic, Harper’s, TLS, the New Republic, etc., as well as the British newspapers like the Guardian and Independent, which I read online. Yet even in those publications I often find that the pieces I’m excited to be reading are the exception rather than the rule. I’m all for cultural gatekeepers because there’s way more out there than I have time to read and it’s not always easy to find the best of it.

As for qualifications, what qualifies Doris Lessing to be a celebrated novelist? Only the novels she’s written. If you and I agree that it’s good writing that makes a good critic, rather than simply the delivery of information and an opinion, then really good critics are as common as really good novelists — that is, not very. Talent is neither equitably nor widely distributed.

Bayard: For sure, talent is inequitably distributed in all art forms. I actually believe great critics are even rarer than great novelists or poets, and I wonder if that’s because criticism itself is held in such low esteem. (Brendan Behan once compared critics to harem eunuchs, which is relatively nice as the analogies go.) McDonald mentions that one of academia’s last havens for evaluative criticism has been the creative-writing class, and he suggests that universities should offer more in the way of “creative criticism” classes, teaching the craft of interpreting other people’s works. All the same, I’m skeptical this would reverse the current state of affairs. People will only value literary criticism to the extent they value literature. Unless we can arrest the decline of reading — and even Harry Potter hasn’t managed that wizard’s trick — then criticism will be swept away in the same mud slide.

Maybe McDonald’s next book should be “The Death of the Reader”?

Miller: It may indeed be a vicious circle: The less critics are valued, the fewer talented and original people apply themselves to the profession and the more it starts to seem like a job that anyone can do. During this conversation, I’ve come around to McDonald’s point about the need for academia to lend what’s left of its credibility to criticism as a whole: “Creative criticism” is, after all, exactly what English professors were once chiefly known for.

One thing academics don’t seem to grasp, however, is the overall decline in reading that you’ve cited. It hardly matters whether or not an English professor actually likes to read novels and poetry, does it? Books are the salt mine, and the academics are the miners. If anything, literary enthusiasm can be a detriment if your job is to prosecute books for their ideological crimes. When even English professors won’t stand up for literature, is it any wonder it’s failing? I hate to end on the same note we began on — blaming cultural studies — but unfortunately, McDonald is a bit stronger on diagnosis than cure, isn’t he?

As far as the death of the reader goes, I hope that the critic (who is, after all, just as much a reader as a writer) really isn’t the canary in the coal mine on this one, but I fear that you may be right about that.

Bayard: Well, it’s been a while since I was in college, but I do remember professors who loved English literature every bit as much as I do, so I don’t want to tar the whole profession out of hand. And I don’t want to end on too sour a note. There are still — there will always be — people who love to read. Maybe we begin simply by celebrating and rewarding that wherever we find it, and then we do the same with good books. Life’s too short to dwell on the dross.

This week’s focus is thrillers: a suburban family is menaced by shady secrets and unexpected dangers; an art forger gets sucked into a bizarre conspiracy; a Stalin-era communist apparatchik seeks to redeem himself by uncovering a crime; an enigmatic college professor asks his class to unravel a hypothetical (or is it?) murder; and a divorcee becomes a mother-avenger as she searches for her missing teenage daughter.

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“Hold Tight”
By Harlan Coben

Like the hit men he portrays with such relish, Harlan Coben collects his contract and goes about his business with a minimum of fuss — and he gets the job done every time. Not that he earns much love from the critical intelligentsia, but for his millions of acolytes, the effect of reading a Coben book is to resent anything that stops you from completing it. Had a rough day, honey? Tough shit. You want me to eat dinner? I’m on a diet. Kids killing each other? Call me when someone’s bleeding.

And indeed, someone is always bleeding in Harlan Coben land, a white upper-middle-class suburban enclave menaced by the World Without. Coben’s particular suspense turf is the imperiled family, and the clan that lies at the center of “Hold Tight” has more than its share of trouble — though the full extent of it doesn’t become clear until Mike and Tia Baye install spy software on their son’s computer. Adam is a 16-year-old goth with the expected attitude and some unexpected secrets, as his parents learn when they find an instant message advising him to “just stay quiet and all safe.”

“What would Adam need to stay quiet about in order to be safe?” his mother wonders, but Adam doesn’t stick around long enough to answer, and in the course of tracking him down, his parents learn that he’s mixed up in the suicide of his best friend, Spencer, and in the shady doings of a teen-oriented club in the Bronx that may be offering a bit more than alcohol-free entertainment. And the Bayes aren’t the only ones having a bad week. Their next-door neighbor has just learned that her dying son was fathered by someone other than her husband, and a psychopathic killer named Nash is, for mysterious reasons, dragging suburban moms into his van and pulverizing them.

Kidnapping, rape, Internet cabals, kids with drugs, kids with guns: Coben’s work might be accused of playing too ardently on the fears of the soccer-mom demographic, but he gives his families enough gumption to fight through their various terrors and enough layers to make you care about whether or not they end up in someone’s nasty white van with tinted windows. And if “Hold Tight” is forced to fall back on coincidence to tie up its loose threads, it nevertheless gives readers all the assets we’ve come to expect from Coben: killer pace, stripped-down prose that never overreaches itself, and a conservative and abiding belief in the family structure, even — make that especially — at its most fragile. Formula this may be, but nobody cooks up the ingredients better. — Louis Bayard

“The Forgery of Venus”
By Michael Gruber”

Absorbing suspense, well garnished with history and a dollop of high culture — so many “literary thrillers” promise just that, setting their contemporary characters hot on the trail of an antique mystery, name-checking the geniuses of the past as they go. Most of these books, however, seem to be written by people who know as much about, say, Leonardo da Vinci as can be skimmed from a dog-eared copy of “Fodor’s Guide to Italy.” Then there’s Michael Gruber, the master of the game, a pop Nabokov whose sterling prose, unreliable narrators and Möbius Strip plot devices bump the genre into previously unexplored territory. His 2007 bestseller, “The Book of Air and Shadows,” followed a lubricious attorney’s search for a long-lost Shakespeare play. His latest novel, “The Forgery of Venus,” is narrated by a conflicted painter who fabricates (or perhaps re-creates) one of several now-lost nudes that the Spanish painter Velásquez is believed to have produced in Rome in 1650.

Gruber’s choice is astute; though not as familiar to the masses as Rembrandt or Michelangelo, Velásquez is generally considered by other painters to be the greatest of the old masters. Gruber has a real understanding of painting, that witchery of chemistry and technique that conjures the luster of flesh, fur and satin out of calcite and iron oxide; at moments, the novel is almost fragrant with turpentine and linseed oil.

His narrator, Chaz Wilmot, the embittered son of a successful but hopelessly compromised Norman Rockwell type, dithers away his own talent until he comes to the attention of some rich, powerful and shadowy individuals. They have noted his uncanny ability to imitate the great painters of the past with a keen and mercenary interest. Chaz’s knack for artistic mimicry is further honed when he participates in a bizarre study on the effects of a drug called salvinorin A on creativity. The drug, known for stimulating hyper-vivid memories in those who take it, causes Chaz to relive not only his own past, but someone else’s, too. And that someone else appears to be Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velásquez.

Chaz is a mess, a cynical wisecracker and a screw-up who has allowed his disillusionment with the contemporary art world to corrode his soul. “Our icons are blank,” he complains to a friend, “and the only religion we see in the galleries is irony. I can do irony fine, but it makes me sick.” He’s not likable in any conventional sense, certainly not idealized in the usual fashion of pop-fictional heroes, but he’s completely believable. His struggle to find an honorable use for his own gifts becomes as gripping as the bizarre, possibly delusional conspiracy he gets caught up in.

Pervading the novel, as luminous, complex and elusive as Velásquez’s rendering of the pope’s white lace robes (“white is never white, only fools paint it so with actual white paint”), is the dream of art itself. It is, as one of the characters assures Chaz (paraphrasing Marcel Duchamp), “that which cannot be explained,” a mystery it takes a lifetime to solve. — Laura Miller

“Child 44″
By Tom Rob Smith

The heroes of most thrillers are damaged men with tragic pasts; they tend to feel guilty about a dead wife or estranged child, or they chew themselves up inside over some doomed innocent they failed to protect. These aren’t bad guys, however — quite the opposite. They are knights in slightly tarnished armor, over-committed to the job and way too hard on themselves, but ultimately on the side of right and good — yadda, yadda, yadda.

Leo Demidov, the protagonist of Tom Rob Smith’s flinty, Stalin-era detective thriller, “Child 44,” starts out guilty, really guilty. A war hero and loyal Communist Party apparatchik, he is an officer of the MGB (precursor to the KGB), and in the first few chapters of the novel, we learn that he has been complicit in more crimes against humanity than the best detectives ever get the chance to solve. All the machinery of the paranoid, dehumanizing totalitarian state — arrests, interrogations, denunciations, executions — is in full gear at the beginning of “Child 44″ (although things stutter a bit when Stalin dies midway through the novel) and Leo’s job is to provide people to be ground up by it. His victims are “ideological criminals”; as for actual crime, that’s supposed to be extinct in the perfected communist state. Anyone who suggests otherwise qualifies as an ideological criminal.

Thanks to his role in the persecution of a man who even he comes to see must be innocent, Leo has an inkling of his own culpability before the system inevitably turns on him and his wife, Raisa. The couple survives, barely, and Leo gets reassigned to an obscure rural police force where one of his past misdeeds catches up with him. The gruesome murder of a local girl reminds him of rumors about the death of a child back in Moscow — rumors that Leo was ordered to shut down, since a child-targeting serial killer is the sort of monster who can only be produced by the decadent West.

Although the conclusion of “Child 44″ is a bit outlandish, Smith otherwise handles this story (based on a notorious real-life case) with a grounded, muscular realism and some truly riveting action scenes. Unlike Martin Cruz Smith’s Arkady Renko, who solves crime in a Soviet Union that is already beginning to crumble from within, Leo must pursue his investigation near the peak of “1984″-style oppression and double-think. Unsympathetic superiors are a convention of the genre, but Leo has it exponentially worse than Dirty Harry, et al.: His bosses will destroy him for even suggesting that this crime is possible. His illusions pulverized, his wife finally free to announce that she married him out of fear instead of love, Leo sees catching the murderer as his last shot at redemption — literally. He knows he won’t survive the solving of it, and that the authorities can’t be trusted to dispense justice. Bleak as it is, the help Leo receives from an unexpected quarter provides a morsel of balm in what’s otherwise an almost unbearably relentless thriller. — L.M.

“Obedience”
By Will Lavender

Two signs that Winchester University is bit stranger than the average Midwestern college: At least one student is perpetually reading “City of Glass,” Paul Auster’s exercise in metaphysical noir, and the campus sports a statue of Stanley Milgram, who conducted that famous experiment demonstrating the average individual’s willingness to subject others to painful electric shocks if ordered to do so by an authority figure. Like every college, Winchester has its share of creepily intense student-professor dynamics, whether played out as illicit affairs, harassment complaints or the formation of fanatical cliques of intellectual followers. But at this school, the fervor is ratcheted up a few more notches.

In “Obedience,” Will Lavender’s suspense novel set at the fictional Winchester University, the professor in question is charismatic, mysterious and rather scary. His name is Leonard Williams (or is it?) and he teaches a course called Logic and Reasoning 204, in which the sole assignment is to solve a mystery. “There’s been a murder,” he announces on the first day of class, or rather “a murder that may happen in the future.” A teenage girl is missing. Who took her, and why? He gives his class a few shreds of evidence. That night, the students receive cryptic e-mails containing possibly staged photographs. Attempts to track down more information about the pictures result in reprimands from shadowy campus officials. Three of the students — a big man on campus, the studious girlfriend he dumped the year before and an emotionally fragile boy mourning his brother’s suicide — begin to wonder just how “hypothetical” professor Williams’ little thought experiment really is.

It must be said that “Obedience” is not one of those intricate, Swiss-clock thrillers in which every piece of the plot clicks smoothly into place and it all adds up perfectly in the end. While it may not be as enigmatic as Auster’s novels or David Lynch’s films, it shares their preference for atmospheric menace over strict logic. Halfway through, you may find yourself wondering how Lavender can possibly account for every twist in this metastasizing collection of ominous developments; he can’t … or at least, not entirely. But all of the elements are so striking — especially the recurring figure of a disturbing girl who keeps turning her head away, hiding her face — that you’re tempted to just go with it, and you should succumb to that temptation.

This is the sort of story in which a character, while retrieving her sweater from a cloakroom, is slipped a note reading, “None of this is real. I AM NOT HIS WIFE.” A library’s copy of a true crime book is revealed to contain nothing but blank pages. A roadside lounge, replete with weather-beaten poker players and a chatty bartender on one afternoon, is, when visited the next day, completely emptied of people and furniture. Plausible? Perhaps not. But “Obedience” is nevertheless a full course-load of sinister fun. — LM

“Losing You”
By Nicci French

I admit it. The whole time I was reading “Losing You,” the thriller by husband-and-wife writing team Nicci Gerrard and Sean French, I was busy casting the movie version. I have no idea if the film rights have even been sold, but if they have, the producers had better choose an actress ballsy enough to play the book’s heroine. If they don’t, they’ll have to answer to me and a goodly number of Gerrard fans, and I’m here to say it won’t be pretty.

Not that there’s anything exceptional about Nina Landry at first glance. She’s a divorcee, just turned 40, still struggling to stay civil with her ex and living for the time being on a remote island 60 miles east of London. (It was her ex’s idea to move there.) Christmas is less than a week away, and she’s about to take her two kids on a vacation to Florida with her new boyfriend. The tension is high, the packing isn’t finished, the car won’t work and Nina’s 15-year-old daughter, Charlie, has had the bad timing to throw her mother a surprise birthday party — a party Charlie hasn’t even bothered to attend. Now there’s only a few hours before the flight, and Charlie still hasn’t shown up and wait till I get my hands on that girl! Only it seems someone else may have had the same idea, because Charlie never comes home. And as disquiet gives way to blazing panic, Nina becomes a mother-avenger, chasing down every clue, shaking every tree, disdaining and finally ignoring the dim-bulb local constables who’ve been assigned to the case. There’s nobody she won’t piss off and nothing, finally, she won’t do to find out what’s happened.

“Losing You” plays out over what feels like real time — from roughly 10 in the morning to 6 in the evening — and although it builds slowly, it never once slackens. At the same time, it never forsakes the need for texture. The complex particulars of Nina’s and Charlie’s relationship are convincingly evoked, and the authors make shrewd use of their locale: the fictional Sandling Island, a place like “the edge of the world” — all foghorns and moaning winds and shrieking gulls — where Nina can “scarcely bear the sense of solitude that engulfed me” and where people can live and die without a trace.

What gives “Losing You” its chief distinction, though, is its unusually emotive color and its flinty protagonist, who, like any mother, understands that no one can possibly care as much about her child as she does. Nina is the parent we’d all like to be under duress, and I find I’ve become nearly as protective of her as she is of her daughter. A friendly warning, then, to any producer thinking of committing her story to film: Kate Winslet or nobody. — L.B.

What are your reading recommendations for this summer? Discuss them here!