Great Bad Reviews
The array of scathing criticism earned by Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones reminded me just how fun it is to read a negative review. When a talented critic gets ahold of a work upon which heaps of eloquent scorn can be piled, the results can be as darkly satisfying as a hearty, villainous laugh.
One of my favorite literary assassins is the eternally unimpressed Joe Queenan, who has vivisected any number of pop culture figures, politicians, and entire nations in his books and essays. In a New York Times piece called “Why Not the Worst?” Queenan explains “one of life’s unalloyed pleasures”: finding ”an uncompromisingly stupid novel in a world filled with stupid novels that do make compromises.”
In the essay Queenan explains his resistance to “the tyranny of the good” and confesses, “One of the reasons I became a book reviewer is because it gives me the opportunity to read a steady stream of hopelessly awful books under the pretense of work.” While the essay revels in Queenan’s effortless eviscerations of bad writing, he also points out the sheer entertainment value and priceless critical thinking practice gained by wallowing in the gutters of horrible literature.
A slightly different twist on the joys of nasty criticism is offered by Bill Henderson’s Rotten Reviews collections. The thin but priceless volumes catalog hundreds of witty dismissals of both long-forgotten works and canonized classics. Assorted victims of these poisonous pens are labeled, among other things, ”an explosion in a cesspool,” “a copy editors despair,” and “a third-rate work of art but a first-rate outrage to our sensibilities.”
Equally evilly enjoyable is Fifty Works of English Literature We Could Do Without, a legendary 1968 collection of essays trashing everything from Beowulf to Hamlet to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. This compilation of hatchet jobs by a triumverate of British writers tears down a series of classics that for centuries have “choked (readers) . . . with the implied obligation to like dull books.” A particularly tasty example comes from their battering of The Bride of Lammermore:
“What can be made of a writer who at the most poignant and harrowing climax of his novel describes events only with the desperate phrase that they ’surpass description’? It is immediately obvious that we are dealing not with an artist but with Sir Walter Scott.”
All of this reveling in negative reviews also reminded me of a quote usually (but not definitively) attributed to Winston Churchill, in a note responding to a bit of acid criticism directed toward him:
“I am sitting in the smallest room in my house. Your criticism is in front of me. Soon it will be behind me.”
