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" The consensus seems to be emerging that everybody&amp;#039;s too nice, or at least professional critics of culture. Last week, over on Slate, Jacob Silverman published a much-discussed diatribe &amp;quot;Against Enthusiasm,&amp;quot; in which he took shots against everybody on Twitter playing nice with one other. The impossible social position of the responsible critic \u2014 pissing in the face of people you will meet at parties for the rest of your life \u2014 is made infinitely more problematic by social media: Whereas critics once performed one role in print and another in life \u2014 Rebecca West could savage someone&amp;#039;s book in the morning and dine with him in the evening\u2014social media has collapsed these barriers. Moreover, social media&amp;#039;s centrifugal forces of approbation \u2014 retweets, likes, favorites, and the self-consciousness that accompanies each public utterance \u2014 make any critique stick out sorely. Not to share in the lit world&amp;#039;s online slumber party can seem strange and mark a person as unlikable or (a worse offense in this age) unfollowable. This kind of rationalization might mostly take place in our lizard brains, but I&amp;#039;d argue that it&amp;#039;s the reason why the literary world \u2014 a famously insular community to begin with \u2014 has become mired in clubbiness and glad-handing. Dwight Garner, in a New York Times Magazine Riff, published this morning, expands the theme into a restrained manifesto in favor of fury: The sad truth about the book world is that it doesn&amp;#039;t need more yes-saying novelists and certainly no more yes-saying critics. We are drowning in them. What we need more of, now that newspaper book sections are shrinking and vanishing like glaciers, are excellent and authoritative and punishing critics \u2014 perceptive enough to single out the voices that matter for legitimate praise, abusive enough to remind us that not everyone gets, or deserves, a gold star. I almost one-hundred-percent agree with both assessments. I come from Canada, so I am painfully aware of how nicey-nicey leads to samey-samey leads to borey-borey. The ability to take it and the ability to dish it out are key signs of literary maturity, both for individual artists and for culture as a whole. Writers who are too weak to take a nasty review are just too weak generally. But I would go further. I would say that shaking off a bad review is one of the key lessons in becoming a real writer. It teaches you that it&amp;#039;s all in the game, as Omar fromThe Wire put it. But since we&amp;#039;re all in favor of criticism, let me offer two of my own to the Silverman/Garner defense of the nasty. First of all, there are some pretty terrifically harsh reviews out there. The late career of Martin Amis alone is offering up whole new realms of development for the slam. Take this review of Yellow Dog from the Telegraph, which contains the immortal line &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s like your favourite uncle being caught in the school playground, masturbating.&amp;quot; That&amp;#039;s a takedown for the ages. For a more recent example, there&amp;#039;sthis extreme bit of butchery by Evgeny Morozov against the Khannas that has to be read to be believed. I love it. The real problem though, of which Silverberg and Garner are both no doubt aware, is that, if you starting writing negative reviews, it&amp;#039;s hard to know when to stop. The eternal problem of book-reviewing is that 99.999 percent of books published are shit, and everybody knows it. In 2009, in the U.S. alone, 1,052,803 books were published, or one for every three-hundred people. I&amp;#039;ll be generous and say that only about a million of those books were utterly worthless, which means that 52,803 of them were worth something. The excellent books occasionally float to the surface of this fetid river but mostly they drown. Kicking the shit down is unnecessary 99.999 percent of the time. For the critical critics, books are like the zombies in 28 Days Later: there&amp;#039;s just too many of them to kill. Like zombies, you just have to let them starve. Follow The Culture Blog on RSS and on Twitter at @ESQCulture. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/entertainment/a15345/problem-with-nice-11711512/>