why i read criticism
Lately I've been reading a lot of BookForum.
Hello, all of you discerning, kind, and empirically beautiful souls who have volunteered to receive my emails. Welcome to a new era.
In case you've forgotten, I'm Andrea. I write fiction, and in this newsletter I write about other things, and keep you updated on any publications or events I'm involved in.
an event
In a little over a week, I will be at Porter Square Books in Boston, joining a symposium on the writer Renee Gladman. I wrote a small piece in response to her Ravicka quartet, and now have the honor of presenting that piece at the event on September 5.
The shortest statement I can make on Gladman's work is that I never feel smart enough to grasp it but I always want to try. After my piece is up on PSB's site, I'll send another email with a link to it. In the meantime, here is a link to the event page, which I believe will be livestreamed.
reading criticism
Lately I've been reading a lot of BookForum. I subscribed when they rose from the grave last year, and the quarterly issues have been piling up, but last month I had the revelation that they’re very easy to commute with. So sometimes, at 7 in the morning, I read criticism on the train.
If you don't know, BookForum is one of the few venues that exist purely as a vehicle for literary criticism. (Others include the Los Angeles Review of Books, the New York Review of Books, and the London Review of Books. They are blessedly straightforward in their names. And a shout-out to Strange Horizons, which has fantastic criticism along with the podcast Critical Friends, which I deeply enjoy.)
In BookForum I've read pieces on: contemporary literary fiction (a lot of this tbh), musician biographies, nonfiction about the politics of the '90s, a graphic novel sequel, an art critic's last collection, a history of reality TV, and a philosopher's latest depressing/optimistic work. It's been a blast, which you won't be able to tell in text. Imagine I'm waving my hands around, gesticulating wildly for emphasis about how great all of these have been to read, regardless of whether I have or plan to read the work in question.
I love reading criticism. I love another mind pulling apart, in brief, a work I may not have otherwise heard of. Not to tell me whether it's Good or Bad, but to inspect what it's doing, and possibly why, and possibly how it relates to the critic's view of what the world is like right now, and possibly in context of the larger literary sphere. It is more likely to make me want to read a book than someone repeating a log line at me and saying FIVE STARS! Stars are meaningless. Ratings are for things you can measure against a stable and universal yardstick. No writing falls into that category. But I've gone off about ratings in the TinyLetter era of this newsletter, so I'll stop there.
A review is not the same thing as criticism, or at least they feel very distinct to me. Criticism may well give you an impression of whether the critic liked the work or not, but largely, in my experience, it is subsumed under the larger project of connecting dots, picking up themes, setting the work in context. A critic will rarely say "I liked" or "I didn't like" but instead takes the thing and turns it over in their hands, ideally until they've said something else entirely. Reviews have their place, but I read criticism to enjoy the piece itself, not primarily to help me decide whether to read the work in question.
some criticism I have enjoyed of late
Of Monsters and Men by Rhian Sasseen in The Baffler, on Monsters by Claire Dederer. Maybe an edge case toward a review: I sought this out after feeling let down by the book. I hoped for cultural criticism and got something like an article diluted by personal essay and repetitive examples and hand-wringing until it was book-length. What solace did this criticism give me? This:
"Dederer’s search for nuance has, paradoxically, created a work muddled by inexactitudes. Reading it is not unlike the act of exhuming old Twitter threads. By the book’s end, Dederer having backed herself into a corner, throws up her hands and turns to that familiar canard: there’s no ethical consumption under capitalism, and so 'our consumption, or lack thereof, of the work is essentially meaningless as an ethical gesture.'
"This may be true, but it’s an unsatisfying conclusion, one that feels irresponsible in a book that raises what it views as provocative questions."
Time to Face Reality by A.S. Hamrah in BookForum, on Emily Nussbaum's Cue the Sun!, which is about the reality TV era. A book I'll likely never read, but I enjoyed this look at it.
The Bad Enough Mother by Janique Vigier in BookForum, on The Stepdaughter by Caroline Blackwood, a re-release. This also looks at Blackwood as a whole, to some extent, and introduced me to a writer I had no familiarity with, and now I want to read her work and maybe think about Shirley Jackson whilst I do.
Thank you for reading.
critically,
andrea
currently
listening: OUI, LSF by Les Savy Fav
watching: Orphan Black (!!)
eating: nectarine golden cake