(image by Claudio Schwartz, via Unsplash)
It’s been thirty-five years since I took one of my most important college courses, an elective to round out my general-education requirements. It just looked like fun—I didn’t know it would set the course of the rest of my life.
It was an upper-division Journalism course called “The Critical Review,” taught by the irreplaceable David Littlejohn. The very first class session brought a good-natured challenge. Professor Littlejohn asked, “What are reviews for?” We immediately went to the consumer-advice response: you should (or should not) go to this restaurant—see this movie—buy this book. “So why would someone write a review of a concert?” he said. “Paul Simon played the Oakland Coliseum last week, one night. No one can decide to go see him now based on your recommendation. Nobody cares about your recommendation.” We stumbled around for a bit, developing no motivations that were convincing even to ourselves as we tried them out. Finally, he gave his own judgment. “People read reviews for the same reason they read anything else,” he said. “They want to engage with an interesting voice.”
That was the first time I’d really come to terms with the craft of a review (just as, two semesters earlier, Paul Groth had asked me to come to terms with the craft of an academic paper). What did it mean to be not merely competent but engaging? That question has motivated my teaching, my public speaking, and my writing regardless of genre. (Littlejohn himself, in accepting his Berkeley Distinguished Teaching Award in 1985, said that his role as a teacher was to generate a period of time more shapely and pleasing than that of everyday life.)
The magazines I subscribe to are review-heavy. The New Yorker is filled with reviews of movies I’ll never see, concerts I’ll never attend, galleries I’ll never visit. It’s a rare day when the New York Review of Books reviews a book I know much about. Political journalism is now mostly reviews, after-the-fact assessments of “what it all means,” and how our political climate is like the McCarthy Era/the American Revolution/the fall of the Roman Empire.
It seems like a review of any sort is akin to a map, in which a landscape is abstracted into its most salient features. And that decision of salience, the choice of which features matter, is the unspoken core of the critical enterprise. We’re going to focus our reader’s attention onto some element or pattern of the thing and eliminate others from our consideration. We’re going to decide which other things are like this one, and thus generate a specific conversation among objects or periods or genres.
A bad review is vague—two stars, thumbs-up. A bad review is leveled, every aspect being mentioned at equal weight in a misguided attempt at thoroughness. A bad review is objective, claiming allegiance to some imaginary but unarguable standard of quality. The opposite conditions—detailed, specific, and distinctive—provide criticism worth reading.
We think of criticism as being inherently negative. We criticize things we don’t like. But writing strong and positive criticism is really important, and really difficult.
The old saying is that “heaven is generic and hell is specific.” This is often true of our criticism as well. When we tell a friend about a restaurant we liked, we often stop more or less at “it was great.” (Sometimes we talk about which dish we ordered, and then say “it was great.”) But when we tell a friend about a restaurant that was disappointing, those disappointments are much more sharply rendered. We speak with authority about what was over- or under-cooked, a sauce that was too sweet, service that was slow or over-attentive, the noise, the decor, the prices… an endless array of specifics that nettled us.
I get this as a writer quite a lot. Readers say “I loved it, it was great!” and then talk about a typo on page 118 or one character who didn’t strike them as fully real. And that makes the praise less impactful. With my own writing students, instead of marking up a paper front to back, I’d highlight one thing that they were doing really well, and ask them to consider how to do that elsewhere; then I’d highlight one practice or habit needing attention. It felt both more respectful and more helpful.
We see this in our relationships, too. When things are going along fine, we don’t mention it. But any gravel in the path is immediately commented upon. We’re petty critics, missing the forest of the good in favor of whining about that one weed over there.
So here’s your writing challenge for the day. Write a review of something you really appreciate. Be detailed—help us experience the phenomenon ourselves. Be specific—tell us exactly what’s working, exactly how it’s satisfying. And be distinctive—tell us how it satisfies YOU, how you relate this to other experiences you’ve had and the values you carry. You’ll get to relive that experience in an even more focused way, and you’ll be the engaging voice that your readers will want to read more of.
Herb Childress 