Dissatisfaction with cultural critics has always been with us, particularly among angry young men. Since I began working on this project, several articles on the subject of book reviewing, written from an increasing number of different angles, have appeared in Australia and elsewhere. Reading these confirms that, when it comes to the art of the book review, uncertainty is the only certainty and anxiety is everywhere. Newspapers shrink, books pages disappear, brave little journals fold. Overworked literary scholars are forced to concentrate only on projects that will attract funding, at the expense of attention to the practice of literary criticism at its most intellectual, intensive, and extended. Reviews and advertisements become less and less distinguishable from each other, amateur book bloggers proliferate, and such big online sites as Amazon and Goodreads offer at a glance an instant book review, where this subtle and seductive art has been reduced to a number of stars out of five.

Is the heartfelt, under-informed commentary of pseudonymous punters, with their scores and their scorn, their judgements of ‘It rocked!’ ‘No, it sucked!’, and their sentences beginning ‘I really liked the bit where …’, balanced out by the advent of high-quality, well-patronised literary sites like The Millions? When American critic Morris Dickstein says ‘The democratisation of reviewing is synonymous with the decay of reviewing’, is he right? Or should the online opportunities for anyone with a computer and an education be regarded as growth rather than decay?

In an attempt to find some answers to these and other questions, and to find out what kinds of assumptions people are making when they talk about reviewing, I have sounded out a cross-section of people who work in various corners of the Australian literary world. Sixteen of them have generously responded to a survey including questions on many of the topics already mentioned, including the shift to online discussion of matters literary, as of so much else, as the digital age progresses. The responses come from readers, authors, reviewers, literary editors, booksellers, and bloggers, and most of the respondents wear two or more of these hats. Obviously, with such an exercise the answers will be partly determined by each respondent’s professional point of view, but several matters nonetheless emerged across this spectrum as common sources of particular interest or concern. 

Views on reviewing

Literary commentary is a broad-spectrum activity. If one were to set, as a fairly high-level assignment in a writing course, the task of writing different reviews of the same book for a number of different sites or purposes – say Amazon, the Women’s Weekly, a social reading group, a personal book blog with links and graphics, the weekend papers’ books pages, ABR, and a specialist academic journal – a good student would both know and be able to give a practical demonstration of the desirable differences in content and style.

There are likewise different skills involved in reviewing novels, poetry, and the various different kinds of non-fiction, but these, too, tend to be elided in general discussions of reviewing, as do the different expectations brought to reviews by their readers. Some readers regard book reviewing as a consumer guide, others as a form of entertainment, others as an intellectual contribution to the cultural conversation, and still others as a minor art form in itself.

Even across the small sample of sixteen respondents to the survey, a broad range of views emerged on what a book review ought ideally to be and do. Most of the many articles that have appeared over the decades on the state of book reviewing have assumed a common set of expectations and assumptions, but when these discussions posit a more or less homogeneous audience of the like-minded, a hypothetical ‘we’ who all want pretty much the same thing from book reviews, they are masking a range of differences.

Asked, for example, what their expectations were of a good book review, most of the respondents mentioned the importance of putting a book in context, but had different views on what sort of context they wanted. Novelist, academic, and reviewer Delia Falconer says, ‘The thing I want most from a reviewer is to put a book in context: map out its literary genealogy, its place in a family of other work, in the author’s wider oeuvre.’ Fiona Stager, co-owner of Avid Reader Bookshop in Brisbane, wants to know ‘Where does it sit in the literary landscape?’ Aviva Tuffield, associate publisher at Scribe Publications and chair of the Stella Prize board, stresses the importance of clearly identifying genre: ‘if it’s a novel, is it a mystery, a crime novel, a realist novel, a comedy of manners?’ – to which the author, scholar, and reviewer Lucy Sussex adds, ‘but you need to know whether the reviewer has any knowledge/taste in the area or not … a film reviewer who likes Philip K. Dick movies could be a complete ignoramus when reviewing science fiction’. The literary editor of The Australian, Stephen Romei, says ‘I expect them to tell me something about the author’s background (including their nationality, something very few reviewers do).’

Almost all of these answers presume an exceptional breadth of reading and depth of knowledge on the part of the ideal reviewer; it’s a far cry from the honest but often naïve enthusiasm of book bloggers or the ‘reviewers’ on such sites as Amazon and Goodreads. Yet for those who see a general dumbing down of literary commentary and blame the digital age for it, it might come as a surprise to see some of Australia’s most respected reviewers and critics maintaining their own blogs, such as James Bradley’s City of Tongues or James Ley’s The Medusa vs. The Odalisque – sites at which, given unlimited space and no editorial restrictions, they often exercise the freedom to write at a more erudite and intellectually sophisticated level, usually for a more specialist audience and usually at more length, than the books pages will readily accommodate. The possibilities of online publication broaden the spectrum of literary commentary at both ends.

‘Dissatisfaction with cultural critics has always been with us, particularly among angry young men’

Even up near the specialist and sophisticated end, however, ‘academic’ is apparently still a dirty word. Lisa Hill, who writes the well-established and widely read book blog, ANZ LitLovers, says that for a review of non-fiction in ‘something like ABR and its competitors’, she expects ‘a critique by someone who’s an expert in the field, but academic nit-picking is irritating’. The Australian’s chief literary critic, Geordie Williamson, sketches both of what are, for him, the unacceptable ends of the spectrum: ‘I don’t want a simple restatement of the plot, with the final para offering the equivalent of x stars out of five. Nor do I want the kind of academic dissection that leaves the book dead on arrival.’ James Ley, editor of the new Sydney Review of Books, avoids the word ‘academic’ but pinpoints some of the features common enough to give academics a bad name that many of them don’t deserve:

A reviewer should not be condescending towards either the writer or the reader. No cheap shots, no dumbing down, no gratuitous name-dropping designed to impress or intimidate, no pretentious flourishes or grandstanding. It should be a conversation between equals. 

Another common theme running through many answers to this question was the desire for a clear and unequivocal evaluation of the book. Aviva Tuffield puts this the most strongly, and puts it first: ‘I always want a book review to make a judgement call … for reviewers to tell me if they enjoyed and admired the book, or if they didn’t.’ Jason Steger, the literary editor of The Age, agrees that he expects ‘some judgement, which I hope will be convincingly argued’, as does Stephen Romei: ‘I expect the reviewer to tell me if they think it’s a good book, an average book, or a bad book, and why they think this.’ Bethanie Blanchard, who reviews for the books pages and also runs Crikey’s book blog Liticism, likes the five-star system: ‘I’ve also found the star rating – something I hated initially – essential to these shorter reviews. The star is a quick shorthand to say where the book sits in terms of merit, and then your comments can be read against that.’ 

Blanchard goes on to make an observation that, to me, rings true but sits oddly with the common desire for a judgement call. Responding to a question about the difference in reader expectations of professional reviewers and amateurs, she says ‘Quality professional reviewers … have usually studied literature for years and have the skills to critique a work responsibly. Amateur critics are more likely to frame a review around whether they “liked” a book or not.’

In my own reviews, I try to avoid direct expressions of evaluation – except in extreme cases, I don’t think the worth of a book can be confidently quantified – and, as a result, can sometimes find that I haven’t made my judgement as clearly as readers might have liked; I prefer to make more indirect comment on the book’s value by using descriptive terms with positive or negative connotations. When A.D. Hope wrote in his famous hatchet job on Patrick White’s The Tree of Man that it was ‘pretentious, illiterate verbal sludge’, there was no need for him to add, ‘This is not a good book’ – much less, after the fashion of David and Margaret, ‘One and a half stars.’ A reader who loves White’s work will recognise immediately the qualities to which Hope is referring, but would rephrase the description of them as, say, ‘sophisticated, adventurous verbal cognac’, with likewise no need to add, ‘This book is wonderful: five stars.’ 

Which is not to say that connotative language in place of a more direct assessment is always desirable either. Some readers may be familiar with the Book Review Bingo card featuring twenty-five of the most commonly used terms in reviewing, including two of which I am often guilty of using – ‘haunting’ and ‘lyrical’ – and two of which, ‘unputdownable’ and ‘tour de force’, I would rather clean up a dead rat than use. (Tour de force is a particular bête noire. Ah well, c’est la vie.) To say that a book is ‘readable’, perhaps the most weaselly word on the Bingo card, is a form of damning with the faintest possible praise: either you mean that a child of five could follow it with ease, or you mean that it is not – quite – unreadable. Other Bingo squares include ‘pitch perfect’, ‘rollicking’, ‘sweeping’, ‘gritty’, ‘nuanced’, ‘compelling’, and ‘timely’; regular reviews readers will, with a little sigh, recognise them all.

In his essay ‘The Sound and the Fury: Uneasy Times for Hacks and Critics’ (ABR, December 2004–January 2005), ABR editor Peter Rose considered the question of a book reviewer’s greatest responsibility, a matter that is, again, often either taken for granted or glossed over in general discussions of the state of reviewing. Rose considers the possibilities one by one: 

Is it to the reader, the author, posterity, one’s literary editor, ‘the market’, one’s nationality, the broader culture? Are we entertainers or sceptics or doomsters or commercial spruikers …? Are we there to help sell books or to analyse them? 

All of these points were touched on by at least one of the survey’s respondents. Most thought that the reviewer’s greatest responsibility was to readers, both to provide them with an entertaining read and to save them wasting their money. Lucy Sussex puts it most succinctly: ‘A reviewer’s responsibility is to the reader – if the book is crap then they need to know.’ I have been told stories by other reviewers of being bailed up by pugnacious strangers claiming that they are owed $32.95 for a book they bought on the reviewer’s recommendation and didn’t like. (I am relieved to say that this has not yet happened to me.) Lisa Hill is likewise stern on this one:

I reject the often heard argument that … it’s okay to send [a book] back un-reviewed rather than write a negative review – because that leaves the reader who’s paying for the book none the wiser. It’s an abrogation of responsibility. Books are expensive in Australia and for the entire life of my mortgage the purchase of a book was a treat for me. I needed reviewers to give me good advice.

Most of the respondents also see other obligations. Susan Wyndham, literary editor of the Sydney Morning Herald, adds, ‘we also have a secondary responsibility to authors and publishers … Our ultimate responsibility is to the wider culture … to help create an intelligent conversation about books and a belief in their importance and value’, a point also made by several others. Fiona Stager mentions a responsibility to the author, as does the blogger and founder of the Australian Women Writers Challenge, Elizabeth Lhuede. Delia Falconer, who has published several books and knows what it’s like to be on the receiving end, argues that the reviewer’s main responsibility is to the reader, ‘to help them make a choice’, but adds: ‘I also think the reviewer owes the writer a basic respect: to have some sensitivity to the fact that books take time, often painful time, to write – not to soft-pedal, but certainly to try not to be flip or dismissive.’

Peter Rose writes: ‘I believe that our ultimate responsibility is to the work itself – the novel, the slim volume, the memoir, the play, the film – not to its hopeful maker, intended audience, or national honour.’ Geordie Williamson says it’s a ‘50/50 split: to the book under discussion, which deserves your attention and respect, as well as a default optimism regarding its worth; and to readers, those who are trusting you to arbitrate honestly’. Rebecca Starford, reviewer and editor of Kill Your Darlings, begins by saying ‘The reviewer has a responsibility to the work,’ but then adds ‘and to producing their best writing, so in a sense they have a responsibility to themselves.’ James Ley agrees, almost in the same words: ‘The reviewer has a responsibility to the work and to him- or herself.’ Literary critic, journalist, and editor Peter Craven further explores this notion of a responsibility to self: 

A critic meets her responsibilities to her readership by meeting her responsibility to herself. Hence the wisdom of Walter Benjamin’s ‘Never review on behalf of the audience’ – this is likely to involve second-guessing of the ‘I don’t like it but you might’ kind, which is both factitiously obvious … and patronises the reader.’

The most radical response to the question about responsibility comes from writer Sam Twyford-Moore, host of The Rereaders podcast and director of the Emerging Writers’ Festival, who sets aside all traditional notions and questions of reviewing and posits a completely different and unknowable future:

I’m honestly of the opinion that we are in a late age of reading in the traditional sense, and so I don’t think reviewing should be held to the same standards or responsibilities it once had. That’s clear enough from the downgrading of the role [of the] critic in the cultural conversation.

That the role of the critic has been downgraded in the cultural conversation is something I doubt – if that were true, surely criticism would be discussed less widely and less often, rather than more of both – but it’s certainly true of the pay scale. As James Ley points out, more and more professional reviewers are having to find something else to do for a living:

The point at which it is not worth anyone’s while is fast approaching. In the fifteen years I have been reviewing professionally the basic rate of remuneration has not changed, while the opportunities for paid work have steadily dried up.

This point is echoed by Stephen Romei: ‘It’s absolutely clear that we are in a period where getting paid to write, full stop, is under threat.’ Twyford-Moore found the same problem with his digital experiments: 

In 2011 I started a critical review podcast, The Rereaders, with two friends and writers, Rebecca Giggs and Fiona Wright. This was the first of its kind at the time, and despite a devoted audience there was just no way to monetise it apparent to us and the hours spent on it were too demanding at the time, so we had to retire it.

There can be fewer callings more calculated to disprove the neo-liberal shibboleth about paying peanuts and getting monkeys, for anyone who takes up book reviewing for the money is clearly not smart enough to be a good reviewer in the first place. 

The ‘decline polemic’ and the hatchet job

As is clear from the ‘Tomahawk Man’ quotation with which I began, complaints about book reviews and reviewers were appearing regularly long before the Internet was invented, and most such complaints were to do with the fact that reviewers, in the complainers’ eyes, were not swinging their tomahawks ferociously enough, or indeed not swinging them at all. The astringent Rebecca West’s essay on the subject, ‘The Duty of Harsh Criticism’ (1914), sounds a disconcertingly contemporary note as she calls for ‘a new and abusive school of criticism’. There is, she says,

no criticism in England. There is merely a chorus of weak cheers, a piping note of appreciation that is not stilled unless a book is suppressed by the police, a mild kindliness that neither heats to enthusiasm nor reverses to anger. We reviewers combine the gentleness of early Christians with a promiscuous polytheism; we reject not even the most barbarous or most fatuous gods.

West was responding to the outbreak of war and making a passionate claim for the value of the life of the mind, and for the importance of moral and intellectual courage in what were dangerous times for civilisation. Elizabeth Hardwick, writing in the same vein fifty-five years later, went on the same kind of energetic attack: ‘Sweet, bland commendations fall everywhere upon the scene; a universal, if somewhat lobotomized, accommodation reigns. A book is born into a puddle of treacle; the brine of hostile criticism is only a memory.’ Her choice of metaphor here is interesting: of the four basic taste sensations, she posits only the two most palatable – salty and sweet – as opposites, with no consideration that ‘hostile criticism’ is often sour or bitter, or both. Hardwick was sufficiently energised by her perceptions of excess sugar to found the New York Review of Books four years later, along with her husband Robert Lowell and a handful of like-minded friends. 

‘When it comes to the art of the book review, uncertainty is the only certainty and anxiety is everywhere’

When the Sydney Review of Books went live on 29 January this year, it included a column called ‘Critic Watch’, planned as a regular feature. First to fill this space was Ben Etherington with a piece called ‘Brain Feign’, in which he discusses what he sees as the shortcomings of reviewers in Australia, with specific reference to the almost universally positive critical reception of Anna Funder’s novel, All That I Am (2012). Etherington’s piece begins with a brief history of what he calls the ‘decline polemic’: essays and articles complaining that book reviewing has gone to the dogs. He points in particular to an article by Jane Hu titled ‘A Short History of Book Reviewing’s Long Decline’, published online last year at The Awl, in which Hu’s wit and scholarship combine to create an upbeat, lively, and extremely informative piece sketching the history of complaint about literary critics and criticism. 

Hu locates the beginning of this history in Paris in 1665, though the term ‘book review’ was not, she claims, used until the 1860s, and goes on to demonstrate that, as Etherington puts it, ‘the polemic against insipid reviewing [is] something of a genre in its own right’. Hu and Etherington both cite a number of recent broadsides, spats, and manifestos on the subject. Etherington’s argument is by way of a prelude to what follows: a detailed practical demonstration of the ways in which – and some assertions about the reasons why – he thinks that reviewing in twenty-first-century Australia has declined. 

Back in 2004, Peter Rose’s essay ‘The Sound and the Fury’ probably didn’t qualify as ‘decline polemic’ and was for obvious reasons more sympathetic than usual to the lot of the professional reviewer, but nonetheless he observes in it that 

criticism – such an influential genre – is one of the least self-critical and transparent literary forms. No other genre, I’m tempted to say, gets away with such liberties, smugness, or sloppiness. No other genre is so complacent, so conservative, so resistant to change. And this unreflective condition cannot be good for critics or readers alike.

Two years later, Angela Bennie published an edited collection of reviewers’ hatchet jobs startlingly entitled Crème de la Phlegm, in which she provides a long and serious introduction in praise of critical rigour and ruthlessness; like most ‘decline polemic’ it expounded the view that bad and indifferent books must be cleared away in order to make room for the good stuff, and that cultural values can only be degraded if all books are, as Hardwick had said, ‘born into a puddle of treacle’. 

That may justify certain sorts of negative or even just searching criticism, but it still doesn’t provide an acceptable rationale for the sort of hatchet job that seems to have been written mainly for the self-entertainment of the reviewer, if not for more base motives. There’s some irony in the fact that Bennie’s collection of unpleasantnesses should have elicited at least two detailed, nuanced, thoughtful, sophisticated, intellectually respectable, and not at all hatchet-like reviews ruminating on the phenomenon of critical nastiness. Reviewers James Bradley in The Age and Simon Cooper on the ABC’s The Book Show both came to the same general conclusion: that if this book was intended to demonstrate the importance of a serious and reflective criticism to Australia’s cultural life, it fails not only because most of what it contains is just as trivial as the bland, all-encompassing acceptance it derides, but also because, as Cooper puts it, ‘it has been removed from the cultural spheres that sustained it. Criticism, good and bad, is a parasitical activity, and when you remove the host the result is inevitably lifeless.’

Nevertheless, the hatchet job as a minor art form is now held in sufficient esteem to have its own prize. Established by British site The Omnivore and first awarded last year, the Hatchet Job of the Year Award is ‘for the writer of the angriest, funniest, most trenchant book review of the past twelve months’. Its aim, says the website, is ‘to raise the profile of professional critics and to promote integrity and wit in literary journalism’. The prize is a year’s supply of that very English delicacy, potted shrimp.

I can see why such an award might promote wit, for it is almost disgracefully easy to be witty at the expense of a book you don’t like. The temptation to show off in that situation is often overwhelming, as I once found myself when confronted with a début novel by the daughter of crime writer Kathy Reichs of Bones fame, for it was clearly on that account alone that the book had made it as far as publication. Her genre of choice was chick lit, which I have nothing against as such, but this one had a narrator-heroine who referred to her own vagina as her ‘hoo-hah’ and she talked about her hoo-hah quite a bit. What with the quadruple provocation – the practice of nepotism, the bad taste in euphemism, the intermittent affronts to feminism, and the fairly awful writing – I felt that in this case a hatchet job was the only possible choice. 

The 2013 winner of the Omnivore award was Camilla Long’s review of Rachel Cusk’s The Aftermath; it was clearly even more fun to write than it was to read, as Long took Cusk’s mannered verbal expressionism apart word by word: ‘Can a tray of vol-au-vents really be “steeped in rejection”? In Cusk’s world, even the canapés are victims.’

But making an argument that might allow a vicious or vengeful critic to defend her or his practice on the grounds of honesty strikes me as naïve. When the writer-heroine Harriet Vane says in Dorothy L. Sayers’s Gaudy Night (1935) that one thing she resists is ‘saying that somebody’s beastly book is good when it isn’t. I can’t do that. It makes me a lot of enemies, but I can’t do it’, she is merely claiming integrity in the face of possible repercussions, not recommending that the beastly book should be shredded into snowflakes and fed to the dog. Most of the respondents to my survey were uneasy or dismissive about wielding the hatchet, largely on the grounds – as sketched by Cooper and Bradley in their reviews of Crème de la Phlegm – that the hatchet job really doesn’t have much cultural value. Geordie Williamson writes:

Hatchet-jobs are momentarily entertaining yet they’re rarely helpful in understanding why a book works or doesn’t. The kind of criticism these figures want is the kind that attacks the writer, not the book. They are the Big Macs of literary culture: a sugar and fat hit initially, after which you feel faintly nauseous. 

Stephen Romei adds a point that’s usually at the back of most reviewers’ minds: ‘at the end of every book is the human being who devoted years of their life to writing it. It’s easy to be cruel if you fail to remember that.’ But Peter Craven, who has done a few memorable hatchet jobs in his time, is unrepentant; of negative reviews, he says ‘there should be no objection to their being savage’.

‘Anyone who takes up book reviewing for the money is clearly not smart enough to be a good reviewer in the first place’

The title of Gideon Haigh’s widely discussed broadside for Kill Your Darlings in 2010 declares not just decline but demise, focusing specifically on Australia and attacking its writers, its reviewers, its publishers, and everything else about its literary scene, without naming any specific examples of who and what he was talking about. ‘Feeding the Hand That Bites: The Demise of Australian Literary Reviewing’ was obviously intended as a provocation, but the scattergun nature of Haigh’s attack means that nobody emerges fatally wounded, and the reader is left with a memory of one of the most memorable hatchet-job sentences of all, from American drama critic Percy Hammond: ‘I have knocked everything but the knees of the chorus girls, and Nature had anticipated me there.’

Most decline polemic boils down to an attack on all forms of literary commentary that differ from the polemicist’s notion of what a book review ideally ought to be, and this notion is usually a narrow one. It takes various forms: the angry attack the placid for being nice, ideologues attack formalists for being apolitical, old-style ‘men of letters’ attack populists and pluralists for appreciating genre fiction, outsiders attack insiders for being inside, cosmopolitan types attack cultural nationalists for being insular, and academics attack non-academics for not knowing enough about literary theory. Some commentators seem never to have got past the prescriptive and proscriptive instructions from high-school English classes: ‘A book review must do X, but it must not do Y.’ 

In ‘Brain Feign’ Etherington recounts the panel discussion on literary criticism held at the Wheeler Centre late in 2010, not long after the publication of the Haigh piece:

The participants were Haigh, Peter Craven, Kill Your Darlings editor Rebecca Starford, and Hilary McPhee. The conversation spilled into print and came to focus on the relative merits of traditional print and new online forums for criticism. Craven had spoken against literary blogs and Geordie Williamson, writing just before the Wheeler event, was also dismissive. Rebecca Starford and Daniel Wood pointed to new possibilities.

The Williamson piece referred to here, endearingly titled ‘Bugger the Bloggers’, is a long essay published in the Australian Literary Review in September 2010, which in fact ranged much further than just the buggery of the bloggers and indeed made only mild, brief, and thoughtful protest about the praise of online criticism:

Much has been written about the revolutionary potential of the Internet for criticism. It is ridiculously cheap, blisteringly fast and the online community it engenders is one that thrives on argument and constant to-and-fro. Most significantly, the web breaks the monopoly on criticism once held by analog-era organs and allows everyone to have their say. Just because the medium allows argument to thrive, however, does not mean that it is ideal for criticism. 

Part of the perceived decline lamented in these debates is the move to online literary and cultural commentary, where nobody ‘keeps the gates’ – a metaphor that is, I feel, well past its use-by date – and anyone who feels like saying something about books, theatre, movies, music, painting, television, video games, or the best way to make a Disney Princess birthday cake can choose from a number of existing sites at which to do so, or indeed can set up his or her own blog. The thinking seems to be that good criticism will somehow get ‘lost’ in this wilderness, just as the argument for the more robust forms of critique is that room must be made for the good art by sand-blasting away the bad. 

‘It is almost disgracefully easy to be witty at the expense of a book you don’t like’

But my experience has been that if you are someone who cares about the quality of the cultural conversation, then good criticism will come streaking up out of the ruck, online or off, and command your attention. When I first started reading blogs in 2004, one of the first I came across was the now justly famous The Rest Is Noise by the New Yorker’s music critic Alex Ross, a blog that he subsequently turned into a book, but which he has, post-book, continued to maintain. Another blog I discovered early on was the Australian poet, novelist, and theatre critic Alison Croggon’s Theatre Notes, recently and regrettably retired, but still online and for years one of the places where people from all over Australia and beyond came to take part in an inclusive yet often very high-level conversation about all manner of theatre-related things. I found these blogs because people were talking about them, and people were talking about them for a reason.

In general the decline polemicists agree, if only by implication, on two things. The very word ‘decline’ has built into it the assumption that there was once some golden age of reviewing, now passed into legend; much decline polemic is essentially of the same order as Elizabeth Jolley’s lament in Central Mischief (1992): ‘Custard tarts are not what they used to be.’ And the assertion that book reviews no longer skilfully identify either literary merit or the lack of it assumes that ‘literary merit’ is a quality on whose characteristics we all agree, one that is timeless, universal, and immutable. The decline polemic, in fact, takes as its starting point the assumption that there is such an entity as ‘we’, and that ‘we’ all know who ‘we’ are.

Indeed, in Australia at least, the variations on the ‘decline’ theme have almost always included the complaint that Australian reviewing in particular is riddled with matey-ness, mutual congratulation, back-scratching, metaphorical incest, and other alleged crimes, usually attributed to the smallness of the literary community. Two of the most recent, Etherington’s piece and a similar essay by Emmett Stinson, also recently published in the Sydney Review of Books, called ‘In the Same Boat’, have focused specifically on the Australian literary critical scene and have found it lacking for some of the usual reasons, though both also make other, better, and more important arguments.

But allegations of cronyism and insularity have in turn been questioned, disputed, and discounted on a number of fronts, most commonly the idea that this sort of thing is peculiar to Australia. Those who think that it is might have been very surprised to see an article published earlier this year in the Irish Times by its arts editor, Shane Hegarty, who writes:

Here [in Ireland], there has long been the sense that smallness dulls criticism. Smallness of country. Smallness of artistic scene. Smallness of the genre within that scene. Smallness of size of the pool of reviewers. It can be difficult to identify a suitable reviewer, because of the fear of breaking a certain collegiality among artists, or because of the rule that you should never review a friend – or even an enemy … In a country in which arts criticism has all but disappeared from much of the Irish media, in many genres a critic’s opinion can hold exceptional weight.

How often have you heard that said about Australia? It was heartening to see that most of the respondents to the survey, when asked whether they found Australian reviewing ‘mealy-mouthed, lukewarm, timid, bland, characterised by matey back-slapping, and/or incestuous’, and if so to what degree they thought it was peculiar to this country, replied robustly in the negative and often at length – although, given that many of the respondents could be said to be well within the so-called ‘gates’ of the imagined Australian literary citadel, one possible retort would be the Christine Keeler classic: ‘Well, they would say that, wouldn’t they.’ 

Peter Craven certainly did: ‘There is a lot of loose talk about book reviewing in Australia … I don’t believe any of the nonsense about Australian literary insider trading.’ Bethanie Blanchard is likewise dismissive: ‘I think this oft-expressed opinion is now an easy, boring, and unoriginal generalisation made so many times as to be without meaning.’ Geordie Williamson says: ‘It is perhaps true on occasion. But not as often as such critics suggest.’ Rebecca Starford says: ‘I do agree that there is a lot of this kind of reviewing in Australia ... The problem is that when there are so few quality outlets for reviewing/criticism in Australia, these things become apparent.’ Lisa Hill sees it as a matter of trust gained through trial and error: ‘As a reader I have been surprised by some glowing reviews of rather ordinary books – and have learned not to trust the reviewer again.’ Delia Falconer has strong feelings – ‘it really gets my back up’ – about accusations of national literary insularity: ‘so often the self-appointed “experts” who keep flogging this dead horse, usually print and radio journalists, don’t bother to inform themselves about the global context, all they’re interested in is Australian exceptionalism.’

James Ley sees the effects, but is cautious about the cause:

I do think [Australian reviewing] is often mealy-mouthed, lukewarm, timid and bland, though I don’t think the matey back-slapping and incestuousness is as bad as people might assume (it happens, of course). I think the problem of chronic soft-pedalling is rather more complicated, intangible and insidious than simple cronyism, and it is almost certainly not limited to Australia.

Like Ley, Susan Wyndham is well placed as an editor to observe such goings-on if they do exist, and gives an illuminating overview: 

I am aware of many instances of reviewers in various publications pulling their punches in order not to wound an author, and also of savage reviews that might or might not have been deserved and have been motivated by revenge, reputation-building (the reviewer’s not the author’s) or a genuine desire to be courageous and frank. Certainly Australian literary circles are small … But I think the inner literary circles of London and New York are quite similar.

Stephen Romei has clearly also noticed, from his editorial chair, the reverse side of the ‘cronyism’ knitting: ‘Indeed what an editor often has to guard against is the overly negative review, because he or she doesn’t realise that X hates Y.’ It was a relief to see Lucy Sussex offering her ‘rules of thumb’ as a reviewer, and to remember that most of us as reviewers have similar rules: ‘no friends, enemies, people to whom I have an existing editorial relationship, or sensitive little plants.’

But novelist, reviewer, and current Australian Critic of the Year James Bradley doesn’t think that the current flare-up of discussion about reviewing is really about reviewing at all. Bradley recasts the entire debate from a point of view that I don’t think would have been possible even just a few years ago, and in doing so takes the argument in a whole different direction that one hopes he will say more about in future:

the ‘debate’ about reviewing is really just a stalking horse for a much bigger set of anxieties about what Australian writing is for, and about the democratisation of culture more generally … Those anxieties seem to frame so much of the handwringing about reviewing and standards.

Changes

One of the things that emerged most clearly from the survey was concern about, and resistance to, the blurring of the boundaries between reviewing a book and promoting it: the indefinable point at which a cultural activity somehow morphs into a business transaction. While the increase in online activity has exacerbated and complicated this, it’s by no means new. A bemused-sounding Peter Rose tells the story in ‘The Sound and the Fury’ of the woman at a literary cocktail party who instructed him sternly in what she saw as the ‘promotional’ role of ABR, of which he had already been the editor for several years. ‘Never had it been put so baldly or so confidently,’ writes Rose. His story reminded me of a likewise bossy publisher who once admonished me, also at a party, because my reviews so rarely contained any ‘quotable quotes’ for use in publicity for the book or author in question. As part of a question on this blurring of reviewing and promotion, I relayed this story in the survey where it got several startled responses, including Lisa Hill’s ‘It sounds as if they want you to do their work for them!’ But the pithiest response comes from James Ley: ‘I sincerely hope you told them to fuck off.’ 

What was happening in both these party conversations was a fairly major missing of each other’s mental track: editors and reviewers see their work as a culturally important part of a literary conversation, and are taken aback when publicists and publishers see it as a potential source of free advertising copy. But between these groups the relationship is symbiotic and must at least be negotiated, just as the organisers of writers’ festivals must accommodate, if they are to survive, the perception of them from some parts of the bookselling and publishing industries as a sort of trade fair. Ley continues: ‘Whenever I write a sentence that sounds like the kind of thing that gets plastered across a book cover, I cross it out.’ Geordie Williamson agrees: ‘I’m proud of the fact that my reviews contain little in the way of grist for the publicity mill. It means I haven’t gushed.’ Bookseller Mark Rubbo, managing director of Readings in Melbourne, is philosophical: ‘I suppose publishers naturally want “objective” endorsements that they can use for publicity and will try and pressure reviewers to provide, [but] they have no right to expect them or complain – as the Rolling Stones said, you can’t always get what you want.’

In a post on his blog Known Unknowns a few years ago, Emmett Stinson addressed this question by directly considering the book as commodity and the implications of that for a cultural conversation:

Book reviews straddle [the] divide between economic and ‘literary’ value, which is made more difficult by the fact that most literary types tend to ignore the fact that works of literature are also commodities. Given the fact that reviews, by their very nature, have their feet planted in these two irreconcilable notions of value, it’s not surprising that book reviews have always been (and always will be) a deeply problematic genre.

If I understand correctly what Stinson is saying in this and more recent articles on the subject, then he is suggesting, among other things, that neo-liberal values have become normative to the point where many people genuinely can’t see the conflict he is describing, in much the same way as certain politicians and businesspeople seem sincerely unable to get their heads around the meaning of the expression ‘conflict of interest’. 

But there’s no question that the knotty issue of the cash nexus is made more knotty by the way that books, writing, and writers are discussed and dealt with online. James Ley connects this matter of promotion directly with the clubbiness discussed above, citing the amount of ‘backslapping’ and self-promotion that social media, in particular, seem to generate, as do writers’ festivals and public events. Writers post links on Facebook and Twitter to articles praising their own work, often egged on by their publishers or publicists; writers who are friends will cheerlead for each other. ‘It seems to me,’ says Ley,

that in the current climate there is a very large grey area, exacerbated by social media, between behaviour that is collegiate, mutually supportive and professionally respectful in an appropriate way, and the gigantic conga line of suckholes that is constantly on display at writers’ festivals, on Twitter, etcetera. 

Any writer, reviewer, or publisher on Twitter in particular knows this large grey area well. Delia Falconer’s view is that ‘while consensus and positivity prevail on Twitter, it’s not a space that fosters criticality. For all that we read about trolling, so much of the Twittersphere seems to be about cheerleading, and about building communities of assent (sometimes ones that seem to actively mitigate against dissent).’

I don’t think Ley is talking about the natural extroverts who have fun at writers’ festivals, because they are the sorts of people who would enjoy themselves no matter where they were; nor do I think he is talking about those writers who are acquaintances or friends and who console each other, congratulate each other, and cheer each other up on Twitter, depending on how their literary fortunes are going. But he takes issue with the effect that this atmosphere can have on reviewing:

And when everything seems to be entangled with the machinery of promotion, and everything seems to be about boosterism and clubbishness … (and I do stress the word ‘seems’), reviewers can start thinking about the way that their views might be received in such a clubbish context and so start second-guessing themselves, which is always fatal because criticism cannot do what it should be doing if it is worried about anything other than the intellectual task at hand.

In response to the questions about whether they thought the online environment was likely to change the way we write and think about reviews, most of the respondents say no. They foresee further shrinkage, though not quite disappearance, of hardcopy literary commentary, and in general see the advantages of the online environment as being to do with unlimited space and speed of response, its disadvantages as being lack of paid work and, framed as a corollary (which it probably is), a drop in professional standards. Booksellers Fiona Stager and Mark Rubbo add problems with something they call ‘discoverability’, a concept Stager explains: 

With so much content going online it can be hard for a consumer to navigate through the morass … it is hard for an author or publisher who isn’t a brand name to find an audience. This audience needs to be not just readers but buyers as well. It’s why there is still a role for a bookseller who can curate a collection to reflect their customers’ or community’s needs.

The clear exception to this lack of expectation about any significant future change in the practice of reviewing comes from Sam Twyford-Moore, of all the respondents the most experienced and skilful in the creation and use of various digital platforms. In his view, the progression of the digital age will bring about a major paradigm shift in the role of the cultural critic, if it has not done so already:

Criticism should now be seen as a form of cultural activism – and the critic as activist – but not a self serious activist, spending zero amount of time lamenting the lost art of the form, but responding immediately to the emergent digital spaces and … engaging fully with new ways of reading, and the dissemination of work.

The most specific example he gives is a site called Zócalo Public Square: ‘what Zócalo does is combine magazine writing, panel events, and podcasting to create a dynamic public program exploring all areas of civic life … Their coverage on literature and the arts … is what sold me on them completely.’ Going to the site to investigate, I found myself sold on it completely, too, simply on the basis of the way it describes itself:

a not-for-profit daily Ideas Exchange that blends live events and humanities journalism … We explore connection, place, big ideas, and what it means to be a citizen, be it locally, regionally, nationally, or globally. 

My own experience has been that the online environment actually does change the writing itself, and that this is as true of critical writing as of any other. I found that posting at my blog, something I did at least once a week for more than five years and usually about books and writing (or, less often, film or television or music), freed up the mind in new and unanticipated ways. There was no need to fit my thinking to any of the critical models and paradigms in which I had been trained; neither the scholarly nor the journalistic rules applied, nor was I writing for either an academic audience or a books-pages readership. I was writing, rather, for myself and for anyone who happened to feel like reading the blog and maybe making a comment, with no obligations, expectations, or money changing hands. Practising traditional forms of critical writing was to cultural-critique blogging as being awake was to dreaming: the online experience was more vivid, more visceral, more directly connected with whatever aspects of the book or performance in question had touched me most deeply. When James Bradley wrote a post at his blog City of Tongues in 2010 about how differently he found himself writing when writing online, I knew exactly what he meant:

There’s a rush and a rawness to the process of blogging that’s genuinely exciting. Partly that’s about knowing you don’t have to get it right, that there’s no-one you’re letting down if the piece doesn’t come together. But it’s also about being able to chase ideas where they lead … This allusiveness is partly a function of the form, its capacity to blend words and images, to link to other sites and other articles, all of which push online writing towards an openness and gregariousness that is difficult to sustain in print media.

All of these things seem to be leading towards a new and quite different form of cultural conversation; some things may be lost, but there may be a greater number of things to be gained. For me at least, it’s enough to justify the optimistic note that Susan Wyndham strikes at the end of her answer about perceptions of the future: ‘Or we might see the rise of forms we can’t imagine yet. Let’s hope so.’

 ABR Fellowships, funded by private patrons and philanthropic foundations, are intended to generate fine, incisive writing and to broaden the magazine’s content. This is the first of three ABR Ian Potter Foundation Fellowships we will be offering this year. Each Fellowship is worth $5000.