I’m at the kind of cocktail party where no one looks at you when they’re talking. Even your friends cast a restless gaze over your shoulder, trying to see who else is there, figuring out if a pass to get another glass of wine will position them in the path of someone else, someone better, to talk to.
It’s the kind of cocktail party where people don’t have conversations; they take turns delivering monologues. Accounts—of recent trips to Europe, sailing adventures from years ago, research done in archives, site visits in distant lands, the last book tour or television appearance—are offered with the ease and practice of oft-delivered lectures. The most well-mannered will eventually ask, in polite soft tones: “And you?” But they will soon scurry off for another cube of cheese.
I’m at the kind of cocktail party where different types of nametags reflect social stratifications. At a glance you can tell who will be the most sought-after conversational partners. At these kinds of events, identification badges will be accessorized with ribbons that may leave the most famous or distinguished feeling like prize pigs at the state fair.
A second glass of wine can’t dull the sting of the phrase I hear too frequently at this kind of cocktail party. It’s uttered by people making pronouncements about the work of other people in the room: “It’s really good, but. …"
I tend to forget, until I’m at this kind of cocktail party, how irritated I become with the grudging praise that academics and writers often allot to their peers (or to those whom they would like to think of as peers).
As a writer, I am reminded every day how hard it is to wake up and try to have something to say. I spit out stubborn words and then struggle to arrange them on the page. The more I write—and struggle—the more generous I am as a reader. While I can, at times, feel bitchy impatience, boredom, or simply (if I’m to be honest) jealousy, and want to list all the problems in a particular work and then bask in my superiority over the author, I try to deny myself that pleasure. Instead I try to think about how hard it is to wake up and try to have something to say. What can I find to admire in this book? What can I use?
“A brilliant but flawed analysis” is something we see all too often in published reviews, along with “One wishes the author had” or “The book would have benefited from.” Then the reviewer goes on to say, well, what the reviewer would have done if he had written the book. “But it’s not your book,” I rant to myself.
The arrogance that wafts from so many book reviews can make me stop reading. I don’t miss the old days when The New York Times Book Review made a practice of assigning a review to an author’s known enemy. Mean exchanges can be fun to witness—blood sport has a prurient appeal—but what real good do they do?
At the kind of cocktail party I’m complaining about—one that will happen with some frequency as the season of annual meetings gets under way—I will expect to hear that a lauded novel’s narrative arc sags, or a fine collection of essays contains a few clunkers. Yes, and I’ve gossiped about friends’ bad haircuts and silently judged those who say they’re trying to lose weight as they wolf down a second piece of cake. I try to keep an eye on my own critical tendencies, and at least be aware that I have them.
But I worry when those who are involved in cultural production and academic analysis become so accustomed to reflexive critical posturing that we forget how that stance hurts us when we’re trying to make a case for why studying the humanities and supporting the arts is important. Because we have somehow—in the academy and outside of it—come to equate being supercritical with being analytical, it can look to outsiders like all we do is shake our heads and say that no one is doing valuable and lasting work.
When the arts are as underfed as feral cats, academic departments are being exterminated, and the STEMers, bless their hearts, seem to be getting the lion’s share of fresh meat, we need to focus on what is good and important about what we in the humanities do. We need to teach our students the value of studying literature, and history, and philosophy, and art—including the stuff written by our friends and colleagues.
The editor of BuzzFeed made a splash a year ago when he announced that it would not publish negative book reviews. “Why waste breath talking smack about something?,” he asked. “You see it in so many old media-type places, the scathing takedown rip.” He went on to claim that people in the online books community “understand that about books, that it is something that people have worked incredibly hard on, and they respect that. The overwhelming online books community is a positive place.”
I don’t really believe that last part to be true. Maybe I’m just hanging out in the dark alleys of the online book community, where you’re as likely to get mugged or beaten as you are to find a positive comment. Maybe I read too many “old media-type” publications.
It’s easy to ignore the criticism of people who have never written anything more public than an interoffice memo, yet carp about a Man Booker prize-winning novel being “slow” or about Joyce Carol Oates’s use of what they consider overlong sentences with too many semicolons. But in academe—where we are all expected to do the same heavy lifting and where we are peers who review each other’s work—I wish for more generosity. What’s wrong with going all fangirl over someone else’s work? What do we lose if we focus our talk on what’s excellent about a book rather than what’s not? What would we lose if we didn’t view good as the enemy of perfect?
Alas. This kind of cocktail party reminds me why I would rather stay home with my dog and binge on old episodes of The West Wing than be at this kind of cocktail party. It makes me want to never write anything ever again. Because if you’ll say something so nasty about someone whose work I respect and admire, what—and please don’t tell me—would you say about mine?
Rachel Toor is an associate professor of creative writing at Eastern Washington University’s writing program in Spokane. Her website is http://www.racheltoor.com. She welcomes comments and questions directed to careers@chronicle.com. Her first novel, On the Road to Find Out, was published in 2014 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
