The Bad Staggers On

A handful of parody responses occur to me, such as a Euclidean proof of why one of my own books is bad. But to play it straight, we should ask, why isn't "bad" in the eye of the beholder? Why should a reader go with anything other than his or her gut? What's the use of a critic? The challenge is everywhere these days: on reader-centric websites such as Goodreads (which I quite enjoy), and on too many blogs to count. To see into the truly bad takes training; one needs to discern what a book's assumptions are and how it betrays them—usually by falling back on ghost-gestures, some mimicry of the passions long since leached of value. But the crisis of so much contemporary criticism, especially in the mainstream review forums, is that the old gestures are the only ones most of the mighty Brahmins understand. Most reviews these days seem written by a software program, with inserts selected off an all-too-familiar menu: click, "vivid settings," click, "tormented characters." Thus, bad staggers on, propped up by dunderheads. Small wonder readers doubt the worth of a review such as this (which I couldn't live without).