'At Once Principled and Opinionated'

Could it be age? Intellectual entropy? Perhaps a long-delayed consequence of over-indulgence in youth? A reader has sent me a link to a review of a novel I wrote almost eighteen years ago for the Houston Chronicle and I remember neither reading the book nor writing the review. Vita and its author, Melania G. Mazzucco, are blanks in my memory, though I’m grateful to my younger self for warning me to keep away: 

“Those of us with experienced palates, fluent in literary cant, recognize that potent scent as coming from a sloppy, steaming bowl of tripe. Vita is a melodramatic stew of personal, Italian and American history, an awkward but fashionable mélange of Zolaesque naturalism and first-person confessionals, spiced with the occasional dollop of ‘magical realism’ — the silliest, most baleful literary fad of the last half-century.”

 

Much about the review bothers me. I have no doubt it’s accurate and I would never consider reading the novel again (or, in a sense, for the first time), but the tone is glib and the prose is sometimes overripe. The writer needs to calm down a little bit. I’m not second-guessing myself, exactly, and I feel no guilt over what I wrote, but the person I short-changed is not the writer of the novel but its reader. I should have quoted more extensively. I should have toned down the alliteration and paid more attention to bolstering my argument. I took the more seductive route. I believe it was Evelyn Waugh who noted that it’s easier to be funny when writing a negative review than when praising a book. Eric Ormsby writes in his essay “Fine Incisions: Reflections on Reviewing”:

 

“The critic must stimulate curiosity but he or she must also appeal to our innate sense of justice. Like it or not the critic is a judge, and sometimes unavoidably, a hanging judge; that is the etymology of the word (from Greek kritēs, ‘a judge’). We may flinch from the ‘judgmental’ but at the same time, I think, we’re strangely elated, as well as reassured, when we see justice done, even in so small a matter as a review; it sets the world momentarily aright.”

 

I don’t think I’ve ever flinched from the “judgmental,” which is, after all, a means of survival and an act we perpetually perform, whether explicitly or otherwise. When I write of Vita -- “[W]hile the novel addresses many themes modishly popular among academics — identity politics, the oppression of women and girls, ‘transgressive’ sex (incest, pedophilia) — and spawns more subplots than Richard Nixon, it signifies nothing” – I’m not sure how useful I’m being to the reader. Bad books ought to be identified as such (that can be a fulltime occupation), and we all learn to trust the tastes of some critics and ignore others. As Ormsby writes:

 

“A critic should be just, just to his or her own convictions and to the book under review. This isn’t the same as being ‘impartial,’ a specious ideal. The best critics, the critics we tend to trust, are at once principled and opinionated.”

 

[Ormsby’s essay is collected in Fine Incisions: Essays on Poetry and Place (The Porcupine’s Quill, 2011).]