What makes a fine critic?

Taste and style. These distinguish the best critics. By taste, I mean that a critic should be expert in – have a cultivated taste for – the constituent ideas of the book, play, or exhibition under review. Are they sustainable? Artfully presented? Incoherent? Glittering with novelty or broken and discredited? Such a critic – a sensitive expert, the one with soft eyes – moves on the same plain as the artist, among artists, in the guise of a collaborator, and should ideally give and hazard with the artist an equal share of themselves.

As for style, I think the best critics also retain a certain amateurism, an apparent passion for enquiry and commentary. Amateurism is really a kind of vital energy. It is the part that is irrepressible. The amateur critic has a joyful style. He or she knows when to use a cruel or unusual word, how to signal rapture or boredom or urgency, when to rant, and when to measure and compare.

Do you accept most books on offer, or are you selective?

I have never declined anything offered me by an editor. In my experience, editors are pretty good at matching the right reviewers to the right book.

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

No, but how much is enough? I would always want more.

What do you think of negative reviews?

Negative reviews are the most thrilling kind of literature, if written in a spirit of rivalrous friendship. In a serious, honest, imaginative denunciation, you realise that art does make a difference, that it is worth arguing about, and that criticism is more than just light entertainment.

On the other hand, negative reviews crammed only with sarcasm, snideness, and ego, with no real sense of competition among equal partners, or of the artist and the critic being invested in the same grand endeavour, are something quite different.

Such reviews are very sad. Something has gone awry. The critic is debased, and the review is reduced toits most trivial and pompous function: consumer protection.

But, of course, some books, and many plays, are not outright wrong, only bungled. How can you argue with empty badness? In such cases, even the best critic is brought to his or her knees. What then but an angry cry for competence?

How do you feel about reviewing people you know?

A short-form review of a book by someone I know, commissioned by a magazine or newspaper, is loathsome work. An involved and intimate survey of the artistic ambitions and achievements of a friend – or an enemy – is one of the most rewarding things a critic can do.

What’s a critic’s primary responsibility?

Give a sense of what reading the book or watching the play was actually like. Offer some useful background information on the author and their subject. Get the facts right, the names, and dates. Describe the bigger cultural picture ... all that mundane but necessary stuff is important.

But are these responsibilities? To whom are they owed? The author? The reader? The industry? I’m not sure I feel any strong obligation toward one more than the rest.

The only obligation I properly understand is this: ‘Critic, to thyself be true!’ It sounds conceited, but what is our alternative? Answers the Mountain King: ‘Troll, to thyself be enough!’ Every critic is always on the edge of trolldom. The struggle to resist, to be more than enough, is, I think, our primary responsibility.