What is the point of a bad review?
In mid-October, the writer and podcaster Dolly Alderton, published her first fictional novel, Ghosts. Her debut quickly became hot property for her middle-class millennial fandom and soon after, a Sunday Times bestseller. Then, unexpectedly, her work was upstaged by a particularly scathing review.
Headlined “Haunting, but not in a good way” Barry Pierce, a journalist for the Irish Times, said the novel bought him “nothing but pain and disappointment”. Twitter users ripped apart the piece, amplifying particularly harsh phrases across the platform. Some seemed to love seeing a regularly lauded author criticised, others were protective of the much-loved writer.
It is unlikely this debut novel would have attracted such criticism or praise had it not been written by an already renowned writer, but the arguments that ensued raised an interesting question: what is the point of a review? Is it a means of exercising free speech and opinion? Or, if you have nothing nice to say, should you say nothing at all?
The preliminary definition of criticism is “an expression of disapproval and perceived faults,” while the secondary definition is “analysis and judgement of merits and fault.” The definition itself exemplifies the two streams of thought around review and critique. Chris Dercon, ex-director of the Tate Modern, speaks of the secondary definition: “‘I like it’ and ‘I don’t like it’ isn’t criticism,” he says, “criticism is what happens in between.”
In an interview for Harper’s magazine, the author Zadie Smith describes her favourite criticism as resembling “people thinking aloud”. Her reviews focus on how the work makes her feel and her relationship to the literature. She avoids snap judgements, appealing to the complexity of each creation and avoids reviewing anything she does not like: “I don’t have enough energy to write about things I hate,” she says.
Martin Amis, in The War Against Cliché, labels reviewing a democratic past-time: “Interacting with literature is easy,” he writes, “anyone can join in… we all have competence.” Websites such as Goodreads, and social media in general, facilitate it, allowing anyone and everyone an online space to share their opinions and reviews. Amis argues that negative critique by journalists or academics often acts as an attempt to distinguish the amateur from the professional.
What the professional reviewer can achieve, though, through their often-large audience, is a trusting relationship with readers. Over time, a reader will choose favoured, renown critics, assuming similar tastes or respected judgements. This, as Zadie Smith explains, is why it is essential to review or critique within the context of your personal tastes. She says a review should never label something objectively “bad”, in the same way no review is “right” or “wrong”.
“Enjoying being insulting is a youthful corruption,” says Amis. “You lose your taste for it when you realise how hard people try.”
It is hard to consider Pierce’s review without factoring in Alderton’s success (Alderton has 122.7k Twitter followers, Pierce has 6.4k). Due to her fame and popularity, writing a negative review of her work is a sure-fire way to get your name on the map. And really, one bad review will do little to dent Alderton’s career, but it could be the making of Pierce’s. So, was his review serving the writer over the reader? Or perhaps, the saying “no press is bad press” rings true, and the review was incendiary enough to spike Alderton’s sales, benefitting her too.
Having read Alderton’s novel, (and as a self-confessed fan of her previous work), I understood some of Pierce’s hesitations about the plot. The problem lies in his review consisting of more inflammatory superlatives than justification for his thoughts. His distaste consumes the review, leaving no room for debate or consideration. It fails its primary duty to the reader. As the critic Jonathan Jones puts it: “Criticism today is not about delivering truths from on high, but about striking a spark that lights a debate.”