![]() ![]() Although there is some consensus at the extremes – axiomatic masterpieces and unequivocal flops – the flexibility of interpretation and the fact of personal taste mean that reliable pleasure-giving may be more to the point in criticism than the iffier matter of pleasure-guiding. ![]() The reviewer is not paid to be right because he cannot really be right (or wrong). It is itself supposed to be a source of it. “A reviewer isn’t paid to be right, just to make a case for or against, and to give pleasure either way” – including, presumably, by means of thrillingly vicious insults and titillating displays of merciless candour. But criticism, in Mars-Jones’s view, is there not only to shepherd toward pleasure. Reviews are addressed to the “potential reader”, who is “being guided to pleasure or warned against disappointment”. Mars-Jones does his best to pretend the book he is reviewing “arrived not by my letter-box but through a portal from an alternative universe”. Displays of tact or generosity – any “second-guessing” arising from extraneous social concerns, whether sympathy or self-interest – are compromising. Delightedly collecting the inaugural Hatchet Job of the Year award (for a demolition of Michael Cunningham’s novel By Nightfall) in 2012, the writer Adam Mars-Jones declared flintily in the Guardian: “A book review is a conversation that excludes the author of the book.” It is precisely because Mars-Jones knows exactly how criticism can smart and scar that he believes it is part of the discipline of the principled critic to discount the author’s feelings. Rogen is both right and wrong about reviewers – at least according to the outlook of ruthless practitioners of the malign craft. ![]() In an interview last week the actor Seth Rogen, reflecting on his brushes with bad reviews, said: “I think if most critics knew how much it hurts the people that made the things that they are writing about, they would second guess the way they write these things.” The Guardian’s film critic Peter Bradshaw came to the defence of “bad notices”: “Of what value are the good reviews… without the bedrock assumption that the reviewers were free to say the opposite?” The exchange dredges up an old question: who is criticism for? ![]()
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