Which critics have most impressed you?

Judith Brett, Vincent Buckley, Stephen Carroll, Peter Craven, Kerryn Goldsworthy, Clive James, Hilary McPhee, Peter Pierce, Louise Swinn, and Chris Wallace-Crabbe.

Do reviewers receive enough feedback from editors and/or readers?

Most editors I have worked for have been helpful and communicative, although often overworked and unable therefore to devote generous time to individual reviewers. There isn’t much feedback from readers, as far as I’ve seen, presumably because the main conduit is letters to the editor, which many readers are disinclined to use.

What do you think of negative reviews?

If ‘negative review’ means genuinely finding a work inadequate, unsatisfactory, or even incompetent, then the reviewer has to say so clearly and unequivocally, and with appropriate available evidence. But the review is centrally about the work and its author; it’s not about the reviewer. While a certain amount of wit, sternness, cutting edge, and so on can be among the reviewer’s armoury in a negative review, I strongly object to reviewers who demonstrate their own wit, ingenuity, knowledge, and general sharpness at the expense of an author whose flawed and naked work becomes suddenly not something to be properly evaluated and described, no matter how strenuously, but the vulnerable occasion for a predatory critic’s performance.

How do you feel about reviewing people you know?

Ideally it’s better not to, because two kinds of obvious distortion immediately become possible. If it’s someone you know and like, there is the temptation to overpraise or, if the work is in some way flawed, to ‘featherbed’ its faults. And if it’s someone you know and for some reason dislike or don’t respect, there is the obvious danger of bias the other way.

The Australian literary culture, however, is so relatively small that it’s almost impossible not to be offered for review the work of people you know, in some cases people you know very well and who are your friends. Friendships have famously foundered on such reviews. My own routine has been to take all offers as they come and to refuse the commission if I think my connection to the author – of whatever kind it might be – would distort the character of the review in ways I simply would not be able, or perhaps not inclined, to control.

What’s the primary responsibility of a reviewer?

It is to present the work and its author to potential readers informatively, respectfully, but rigorously, so that if they are wanting to come to some sort of preliminary view of the work, they will have a reliable, intelligent, critical, and entertaining consideration on the basis of which to begin making a judgement or coming to a decision – to read or not to read, to buy or not to buy.

I think it’s important for a reviewer to have a broad, confident range of literary reference so that the possibilities contained in the penumbra of meaning and influences that enshroud any serious work of the literary imagination can be identified or at least signalled. As T.S. Eliot put it about the business of writing, ‘One wants to get something off one’s chest. One doesn’t know quite what it is that one wants to get off the chest until one’s got it off.’ A reviewer gets a sense or a glimpse of how this process is taking place by recognising the sometimes muted, sometimes deliberate, sometimes barely conscious nods the writer is making to his or her own literary resources, heritage, and preferences. A reviewer can make the reader aware of this wider imaginative network, taking the experience of reading the work beyond its basic structures of plot, character, and action.