Seeing stars: writers should not fear online reviews

The writer Caleb Crain is unhappy about “the intrusion of counting into the life of literature”. He believes that big data and predictive-taste algorithms are cutting humans “out of the loop”, and that social media are undermining our faith in “the mental states of other people” when those inner states aren’t acknowledged in tweets and likes.

It seems we are mired in “a new kind of disenchantment”, he says, which is devolving our sense of literary merit. As big data blurs personal opinion into preference aggregates, and as Twitter-propelled article-surfing destroys reviewing communities and the authority of critics alike, Crain contends, we have no choice but to “declare war on counting”. So that, you know, “literature will survive”.

As readers, but perhaps more so as independent publishers working at the shamelessly literary end of the scale, we are wary of any argument that assumes the new digital age will sweep away everything that matters to intelligent readers. Readers are not, as Crain might believe, more likely to equate long-term value with popularity now that Goodreads uses star ratings, and Amazon rankings have come along; nor are they likely to permit the literary canon to be shaped by sales data.

However much Crain might rhapsodise about the old days, in which a “freemasonry” of critics, academics, booksellers, librarians, and publishers transcended time and space to distil, as if from the ether, their ages’ gold standards of literary excellence – however Crain might, by contrast, bewail the “illusion of certainty” through which consumer behaviour or social-media stats purport to concretise our likes and dislikes – does anyone really believe that the same type of value is being assessed in both cases? Or that Amazon is anything more than a shopping site? No.

We’ve met many a writer who has expressed frustration because a bad review on Amazon was kinking their online sales, but not one who was convinced that posterity had damned them as a result. Readers of literary fiction still defer by and large to the judgment of themselves, their trusted friends, their favourite critics, to prize judges, and, in the long-term, to academics.

And for every publisher or media outlet that makes choices based primarily on numbers, there’s another making decisions primarily on aesthetics, and twice as many making decisions based on some combination of the two, as well as a host of intelligent critics ready to scrutinise their choices. To say otherwise is to parade a straw dog.

Crain justifies his gloomy prognostications about the future of reading by means of the even gloomier aspersions he levels against contemporary criticism. “Reviews today,” he argues, “cut off from the communities that once fostered and disciplined them, have no authority.” He asserts that in an internet age of shrinking print coverage, “readers arrive at online reviews by way of Twitter and Facebook” instead of by subscribing to print periodicals, and as a result, there is little loyalty to particular literary sites, journals or newspapers.

Because of this, Crain contends that reviews forums have lost both their identities and their standards. Bad times for books coverage! In his view, the times are worse for the poor critic, however, who – formerly policed by editors to ensure her work did not “drift so far” from the taste of the periodical’s readership “that her reviews no longer helped” – is left, on her own, to backfill cyberspace with reams of undisciplined rubbish.

And times are worse yet for the reader, who in the old days voted with her feet, Crain suggests, buying the periodicals whose standards she shared and cancelling subscriptions when those standards diverged. Nowadays, that same reader doesn’t cancel her internet services when she finds a review unhelpful; Crain argues that online readers have no way of registering their dissatisfaction with a critic’s point of view.

Which part of this is most naive? Most critics wrote, in print, for multiple publications, and were noted for their own personal slant and standards before they set pen to paper; to say that the prestige of their print outlets constituted the better part of their authority is to deny critics their individual opinions and skills. To say that readers have no influence online is to forget that digital reviews editors work to please their communities, too (readership size equals ad revenue, at least at most major sites.) And to say that, nowadays, it’s rare to find an “online literary review [with] a coherent sensibility” is nonsensical. Every site is struggling fiercely to define itself. Neither the proliferation of online literary reviews, nor the use of social media to discover and discuss them, is destroying the “coherence of [the] system”.

No more, at any rate, than the rise of cheap newspapers in the 18th century and the emergence of even cheaper Grub Street hacks – the anonymous critics whom Alexander Pope so famously decried as “fools” who “rush in where angels fear to tread” – spelled the end of poetry. In Pope’s time, the hacks outnumbered the so-called “real writers” to a substantial degree, much as Amazon avatars now vastly outnumber trained critics. But while he was annoyed, and encouraged critics to improve themselves, Pope wasn’t afraid; nor should we be. Bad criticism in public places is certainly a nuisance. It can be more influential than we in the business of literary publishing might like. But does it spell the end of days? Hardly.

There is perhaps a larger point, however. Crain wishes to protect the individual’s experience of reading: an act at once “sensuous, invisible, soulful”, in which the reader is alone, yet in imagined communion with her fellow book-lovers.

Is that so different from the communion that people are seeking online? Whether on Twitter or deep in the recesses of one’s imagination, it’s still extraordinary that a book can show us – each and every one of us, unique, secretive, solitary – how connected we are. As Claire Messud puts it in The Woman Upstairs:

[S]uddenly the cosmos seems like one vast plan after all, patterned in such a way that the novel you’re reading at bedtime connects to your astronomy lecture, connects to what you heard on NPR, connects to what your friend discusses in the cafeteria at lunch – and then briefly it’s as if the lid has come off the world, as if the world were a dollhouse, and you can glimpse what it would be like to see it whole, from above – a vertiginous magnificence.