ABC of Reading

I should like to suggest that commitment in a novel may be measured by its power to absorb us, by the energy it contains. A book which is lacking in power cannot be moral. Dullness is worse than obscenity. A dull book is wicked. It may intend to be as good as gold, as nice as pie, as sweet as can be, but if it is banal and boring, it is evil ...

The dignity and pleasure of being professional is to work and work in solitude--until it looks like you didn't have to work at all.

An artist can be so perfectly attuned to the moment that he or she makes machines precision engineered to flatter contemporary taste. An artist can also be so perfectly attuned to the moment that he or she sees what’s unsaid and so says something new. The first category is disposable; the second is not. The work of a critic — alert to ideals, alert to ambition — is to tell the difference.

My own theory—as the parent of three young children—is that horror returns us to the thrilling precinct of childhood by temporarily erasing the line between the imagined and real. We get to experience the rising tension of predation, the adrenaline spike of sudden violence, and the perverse pleasures of liberated gore. Our hearts start hammering, as they did when we were kids. We flinch and sweat and shriek. Then the lights go up and we march back into the respectable prison of our adult lives.

Small children are naturally confident, curious, and creative, because for a brief window of time they get to experience life undivided, as an extension of themselves, as if they were the first human being in existence.

An appeal for the revival of the negative book review, then, is a remonstration against forced and foppish praise, where everything is good and so nothing at all is good. It is an appeal for a greater investment in the context and content of a book, a task far different from the casting about for bits to extol. Authors know that a book begins to live only when it goes out into a world of readers, and they know enough to embrace the negative review as the challenge, an essential provocation that may happily birth more books.