Critics are getting less cruel. Alas
Winnie the Pooh" she found it so full of innocent, childish whimsy that she—in her own moment of whimsical spelling—“fwowed up". For the reader, life offers few purer pleasures than a very good, very bad review. For the writer, life offers few purer pains.
After Parker, A.A. Milne never wrote another “Whimsy" the Pooh again; the mere word “whimsical" became “loathsome" to him. After the “drivelling idiocy" comment, Keats obligingly dropped dead.
“Snuffed out", Lord Byron wrote, “by an article". Literary life rarely offers such splendid spectacles today. Open book-review pages, and you are more likely to see writers describing each other and their work with such words as “lyrical", “brilliant" and “insightful" rather than, as they once did, “tiresome“, “an idiot" and a “dunghill".
On literary pages there is now what one writer called “endemic" grade inflation. An editor for BuzzFeed, a news site, even announced that its books section would not do negative book reviews at all. This was wonderful news for writers (and their mums) everywhere.
It was much less good news for readers. The literary world may no longer need to mourn spurned poets; it does need to mourn the death of the hatchet job. Few will lament it loudly.
Criticism is not a noble calling: as the old saying has it, no city has ever erected a statue to a critic. But then few cities have erected statues to sewage engineers or prostate surgeons either. But they are useful, just as critics are.
A well-read person might read 20 or so books a year. By contrast, 153,000 books were published last year in Britain alone, according to Nielsen BookData. That is an average of 420-odd books a day.
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