In Defense of the Negative Book Review: Can Hatchet Jobs Build Strong Literary Culture?

THE PVRITAN FRONTIERS of NEW ENGLISH - by Julienne Isaacs

As American critic Lee Siegel put it, negative reviewers are supposedly all about “the dark art of the takedown.” The negative reviewer increasingly figures in the popular imagination as someone who sharpens her hatchet only to shred others’ creativity. Is the hatchet job a relic of a bygone era of literary criticism, or is it as crucial as ever? More importantly, should negative reviews always be seen as “hatchet jobs,” or is there room for kindly constructed criticism in Canadian literary culture?

Before we consider arguments for and against negative reviewing, it’s helpful to define the primary task of a literary review. As I see it, the aim of a review is to argue whether or not a given book is worth reading by using plenty of evidence to back the claim. A secondary purpose of the literary review is to situate the book under consideration within or outside the canon by comparing it to related titles.

In Jan Zwicky’s essay “The Ethics of the Negative Review,” reprinted in 2012 by Canadian Women in the Literary Arts, the award-winning poet asks readers to reimagine the literary reviewer as:

a kind of literary naturalist, someone with sharp ears and a good memory, who’s willing to tarry alongside both us and the literary world, for whom any item is of potential interest (some less, some more, to be sure), and who, instead of seeing an award culture’s hierarchy of achievement, hears a living chorus of voices, talking, murmuring, singing to themselves and to others.

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