Everyone's a Critic: on Reviews
I do not now recall what the first review I wrote for the internet was, though if we set aside brief notes on Amazon, it was probably for one of a string of abandoned Blogspot blogs I have run in my time. I’m pretty sure the first one I wrote for someone else was for Rambles.net (and you can still read what I wrote for them) when I was 16. It’s never been my bread and butter, and usually the payment I’ve received for it is in the form of review materials — exciting, but not bill-paying.
Reading reviews goes even further back, to the pages of the subscription to the TLS my father maintained for much of his life — copies of which invariably ended up in the bathroom, in those pre-smartphone days, and which I inevitably read. Of course, that particular outlet covers almost solely books, and I read plenty of reviews of music both in print and online, from brief notices in Pop Culture Press to longer write-ups in magazines like Uncut or websites like Pitchfork.
After the last time Goodreads shat the bed, I switched over, and if you want to creep on my reading habits, you can do it here.
Yet somehow, despite the proliferation of requests that people review their purchases, or rate and review stuff on apps like Goodreads or Storygraph — realizing the promise of the saw — I have been slacking on actually reading good reviews of stuff — which is a pity, because I love them. (It’s also an ask, so if you’re writing reviews or have a preferred source for them, please drop a comment, and also thank you Sean T. Collins for watching all that prestige TV and writing about it so beautifully.) But this dearth, which is mostly a personal problem based on my laziness in the face of digital enclosure and relative lack of time to seek them out, also prompts me to a question: what is a review? What are they doing, and what makes a good one? Obviously, my above-cited not-so-much-bona-as-middling fides don’t necessarily qualify me to say one way or another — but really, who is qualified to review stuff?
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As usual, let’s take a minute to define terms. When I talk about “reviews” in this piece, I’m not talking about peer review, the academic publishing practice; I’m also not talking about “product arrived in promised condition and arrived fast! hated the book though”-type stuff, which is really more about the purveyor of the material than the material itself. I’m also not talking about the episode recap — a genre that, I would argue, also extends to certain types of book and music reviews. Although that particular genre has experienced a great deal of growth and transformation, especially in the hands of skilled practitioners, and it can definitely overlap into what I’m talking about here, its concerns are different and lie largely with contextualizing and summarizing on-screen/page/whatever actions.
I’m talking here about what gets starred in Publisher’s Weekly, for example. I’m talking about a short-form, hybrid genre — it’s unusual for a review in a conventional publication to pass 1000 words, and by “unusual” here I mean “it happens a lot, but makes up a small minority of published reviews.” Blended into that genre are concerns and techniques of literary criticism in the academic sense, along with half-hidden memoir or autobiography, both crammed into a box made out of service writing. The reviewer uses their analytical senses, honed by their personal background which is often elided from the finished text, to explain how a work of art felt to them — all in the service of answering the reader’s fundamental question: will I like this thing? (Obviously, this is to specific values of “like”: I’m a sucker for stuff described in highly negative terms when it comes to art and literature.)
As such, the review rests at the intersection of “art” and “content.” Sure, in old-timey publishing, reviews, like news articles, were measured in inches on a page, but that doesn’t mean they are not capable of artistry. Much like the works that rest between “art” and “craft” (have I mentioned today that I have been knitting since I was 8?), there’s room to argue on both sides — but even if reviews were purely “content,” there are still formal concerns to them. To illustrate what I mean, let’s look at some reviews that I consider very good, and see what we can make of them.
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Let us turn first to that most satisfying of reviews, the hatchet job — satisfying, that is, for everyone but the subject. The hatchet job is distinct from the hate read, about which Cameron has written elsewhere, largely in that someone else required the writer to encounter the artwork in question. While Dorothy Parker’s apocryphal remark about Atlas Shrugged is a classic of the genre, here I’d like to have a look at Jonathan Jones’ review of Dismaland for the Guardian, which went up almost ten years ago and has lived in the back of my mind ever since.
An image from inside Dismaland, from Wikipedia and licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.
Admittedly, making fun of Banksy is very easy, but that’s not what Jones does here. In his review, Jones enters into the spectacle more or less in good faith, though noting that before going through the fake security that makes up part of the “commentary” of the thing, you have to go through real security, who are checking for knives and spray paint. Jones highlights this fact because it points to what he identifies as the central problem of the show: “This is somewhere to come to say you went,” he writes. Essentially, Dismaland falls flat because it is the rotted waste of Benjaminian aura, repackaged into something to be sought out to say it was experienced, but not something capable of transcendence.
Except! Notice that last paragraph, in which Jones remarks that, “It has been a long time since [he] was thrilled to see a Damien Hirst.” In touching on Hearst’s unicorn vitrine, glimmering with the bizarrerie Jones finds so lacking elsewhere in Dismaland, replaced by sneering and winking in art-installation form, Jones brings home the final blow in the best of the hatchet jobs: the awareness that this didn’t have to suck. Somewhere, under all of the problems of the work or works in question, there was the promise, or at least the ability, to be better, to be transformative or transporting. This works in part because of how present Jones is to the review: we are visiting Dismaland and Winston-super-Mare with him (for better or worse), and so we are inclined to see the items under discussion as he sees them. Here, the memoir aspect of the review is foregrounded — a memorable choice, and one well-suited to the thing (and the phenomenon of which it is an emanation) being reviewed.
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Here’s all the stuff in the Invisible Sun box, as shown on the publisher’s website.
So much for memoir: let’s look at the literary-critical mode. I offer as an example David M. Higgins’ 2018 review of Invisible Sun, a pricey and beautifully-designed tabletop roleplaying game, which appeared in LARB. Strange, yet gratifying to nerds like the ones here at Broken Hands HQ, to see a TTRPG reviewed in a more or less “normal” review outlet — but Higgins uses the space examine Invisible Sun using the toolbox of literature. This is fitting: the game wears its capital-S Surrealism proudly, yet, as Higgins notes, may be seen to wear it rather than live it. Higgins especially makes note of the game’s suggestion that grinding, unpleasant tasks — the kind many people, the world over, have to do to survive — are handled in the game’s default setting by “thoughtforms.”
Higgins vehemently rejects this concept — “when I run Invisible Sun,” he writes, “I’ll likely jettison or modify the idea of thoughtforms (everyone in the setting counts as people) or include them as authentic entities fighting for recognition of their personhood” — but also allows that the game might be doing something different. They go on to suggest that the game posits, “In the real world, the kinds of jobs that thoughtforms occupy often crush the soul; in a superior reality, no one would have to live like that.” Higgins aligns this with Invisible Sun’s avowed commitment to escape, generously granting that its Surrealism offers something useful and revelatory beyond mere set-dressing and system-level interventions.
Throughout the review, they make clear the links between Invisible Sun and Surrealism, linking it too to poststructural approaches to hermeticism, noting briefly Monte Cook’s connection to Gene Wolfe. Higgins accepts Invisible Sun as a literary creation, in addition to a luxuruiously-designed game, and essentially offers to play ball.
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So where does the “service writing” part come in? Admittedly, I’m stretching the definition a little: “service writing” typically refers to either a specific job in the automotive industry, or can be used to cover the “how-to” genre. The “service” it provides is telling the reader how to do something, or how to make a decision — it offers a service, and is written in order to provide that service. Here’s a nice piece outlining how to write one; you’ve almost certainly read one. In the case of reviews, the service offered to the reader is assistance in determining whether or not the reader will like the thing under review. (It also offers the service to the publisher, label, or whatever of drawing attention to the reviewed item, but that’s a different problem.) This undertaking is less clear-cut than in other types of service writing, but follows similar parameters.
Publisher’s Weekly runs a lot these; Library Journal does, too. Here’s an example from the former, and here’s one from the latter, both from the SFF section of each outlet. Notice the length and the formal similarities between the two: each one runs about 170 words; each offers 4-5 sentences of description of the book in question, followed by 2-3 sentences of analysis; each closes with a note about what makes the book well-suited to a particular type of reader. There’s no room for memoir here, and it would scarcely matter if it featured — LJ only links to the reviewer’s other reviews on their site, while Publisher’s Weekly doesn’t even feature a byline. Both also use their time well: I feel like I know what I’m getting in to with each of these books, even if I weren’t already broadly familiar with the authors.
Reviews of this kind are, at their finest, a tantalizing peak at what a new book offers. They aren’t ad copy — there’s too much specificity and too much care for literary style for that — but nor are they in-depth criticism. They describe the item, offer a brief analysis of quality or character, and offer an even-briefer final opinion. As with any compressed format, it’s easy for reviews of this kind of fall into cliches — remember when every post-punk band had “angular” guitars? I sure do! — but even those cliches serve a purpose, a kind of FFO (“for fans of”) that signals that quality without breaking it awkwardly out of the text. In their crystalline intensity, service-type reviews border on poetry.
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As mentioned previously, I’m kind of talking out of my ass on all this: my credential is basically that I’ve read a lot of reviews. But as calls to review proliferate (I, personally, like leaving glowingly positive reviews via the email receipts I get from small businesses), the genre runs the risk of devaluation. If everyone’s a critic, why bother paying them?
You can probably guess where I’m going to go with this: you should pay them because they’re artists, and if we’ve got to have an economy, you’ve got to pay your artists. Like any art form, reviewing abilities can be honed, and it’s worth the time to do so. As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, becoming a reviewer made me a better reader. Thinking about what feelings a work of art elicits, and how, will help you enjoy that work the more. It might even help you convince your friends to listen to that album you really liked (no promises, though).
Besides all that, to engage critically with a work of art — or a piece of media, but come on, we’re talking metacriticism here, let’s get out the highfalutin’ china — is to accept and appreciate the work of it. When we think about things in the sense of meaningful review, especially when doing so under some kind of formal constraint, we make an argument for its worth as an art work. This is not content; this is something worthy of consideration — and if it’s not, it purports to be, and as such is subject to the kind of consideration we would extend to a work of art. When we review books, movies, TV shows, albums, whatever, we engage with them to a meaningful degree, and then articulate the results of that engagement. Alas, no one has time to read or watch or listen to or perceive every work of art on offer — but through the medium of review, we can decide how we wish to pass our precious time, or live vicariously through others’ experiences, or at least figure out what’s next on the TBR. You can even get god at writing them the way you get good at writing anything: through lots of practice. Reviews are incredibly valuable, and to read a good one is have an entirely new artistic experience.