Last week the UK publishing industry was agog after Susan Hill published a missive from a name-withheld literary editor who promised never to review any books written or published by her. Now the Observer’s Rachel Cooke has hit back, decrying the trend of so-called “amateur criticism” amidst the blogosphere and bemoaning the decline and fall of “real” criticism. Even though that argument’s been done, and done, and done some more, there’s always a new way to go about it, right? Not exactly, as Cooke bases her judgment that the ‘sphere is “untrustworthy, banal and, worst of all, badly written” after giving literary blogs a single day to prove their worth to her, hardly enough time to offer a reasonable opinion about a single blog, let alone a group of them.
What also escapes Cooke is that the divide between amateur and professional critics is, if not dead, pretty well close. Need we say more in who edits this particular site? Or the fact that former Dallas Morning News book critic Jerome Weeks is now blogging daily, to give a couple out of many possible examples? The problem with print criticism as it stands now is that individual voices are too often discouraged instead of encouraged (how many working critics will stand the test of time, or even have their work collected in essays? Exactly.) This is a debate that will continue to rage, hopefully with reason, but Cooke’s piece did little to promote real debate instead of needless polarization.