“Everyone’s a critic”: As column inches narrow, it's time for editors to raise standards

One of the puzzling editorial decisions, in these straitened times, is the Irish Times commissioning book reviewers who have eked out careers in literary writing as opposed to journalism. 

In a comically written review where she described Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises as overrated, Dorothy Parker confided grimly in her reader: “You see this silver scar left by a bullet? I got that the night I said that any well-told story was worth the telling. An eighth of an inch nearer the temple, and I wouldn’t be sitting here doing this sort of tripe”.

Parker’s depictions of a ludicrous profession, embroiling its workers in violent feuds that leave them scratched and bruised, is actually an accurate portrayal of the job. Any well-writing critic will tell you that making art worth fighting about is good for art.

These days those writers fight a more personal battle - how to survive. When I started out years ago, one generous journalist shared how their journey started at the turn of the millennium: “The industry had just thrown open its doors to new writers and was beginning to close them again. These days they are showing them the door”. 

Just as the theatre industry was scalped by austerity cuts in the 2010s, Irish Theatre Magazine, a publication that commissioned in-depth criticism, lost its Arts Council funding and closed its doors. Its predecessor Theatre Ireland ceased in the early 1990s due to similar circumstances. Theatre publications, like the economy, seem to go through cycles of boom and bust, except there hasn’t been a recovery this time around. 

That has left newspapers as a final stronghold, one that a job-seeking critic can find nearly impossible to penetrate. Only through the miracle of selfless recommendations by other journalists did I get a footing there, but the ground immediately started crumbling. A 450-word review once in a while might get you €45, or a 900-word feature will run for €200. New full-time positions, with the salary to match, don’t seem to exist anymore.  

The forecast is bleaker when you see the column inches narrow further. In 2017 the Irish Independent absorbed its weekly 400-word theatre review into its 900-word feature space, shaving 500 words from its weekly coverage and effectively laying off one of its critics. The Irish Times removed its national theatre listings completely. 

In these straitened times, it’s astonishing to see the decisions some editors do make. One of the most puzzling is the chosen genealogy of the Irish Times’ book reviews page. A majority of its contributors have eked out a career in literary writing as opposed to journalism. I sounded off on Twitter and kept an eye out for bullets scraping my temple. 

Sure enough, that publication’s book editor took umbrage and suggested to “scratch a critic, and you’ll usually find an aspiring author, so it’s a false dichotomy”. 

I’ve no doubt that a literary author can work hard at being a good critic. What’s disappointing is that an editor doesn’t consider a critic’s writing as a long-crafted skill. 

Forget about showing your informed knowledge about the artist and “telling” what the art is about. There are writers who spend years chiselling out absorbing ledes and filing before deadline. They keep an eye out for wordplay and wit, and learn how to spot wisecracking when they see it. They know that courage is a more powerful than awe. They constantly talk themselves off the fence, knowing they’ll make enemies if they do. 

Some critics work a long time before they get job security. The widely influential American film critic Pauline Kael didn’t start at the New Yorker until she was 48 years old. 

In this age it may be hard to imagine anyone matching Parker’s metaphor for a production of The Power of Darkness, describing a visit where she arrived a “comparatively young woman and staggering out, three hours later, twenty years older.” Nor will anyone sound as sincere pleading: “But won’t you please see it, even if you have to mortgage the Dodge”. That doesn’t mean those critics aren’t out there. 

If we apply the English theatre critic Kenneth Tynan’s maxim - “a good critic is one who perceives what is happening … a great critic perceives what is not happening,” how well-placed are the contributors to the Irish Times books page to write about that industry? Who can objectively write about patterns in book sales, the relationships between publishers and booksellers, the gender breakdown of releases? 

But what's most important is that the paper employs writers with some resounding judgement. This past weekend 10 book reviews were published on the newspaper's website. Nine of them contained superlatives running the gamut of “stunning,” “masterful” and “dazzling”. One written by Tony Clayton-Lea - a critic imported from the paper’s music pages - dared to deem one book “a mass of contradictions”. 

Without picking many battles, such coverage risks turning bland. When Parker recalled working at the turn of the 1920s, she said: “Vanity Fair was a magazine of no opinions, but I had opinions”. It's an important differentiation to remember.

The deterioration in quality at on the Irish Times' book page is what happens when an editor takes “everybody’s a critic” as instruction. It’s really time we retired that useless phrase. Having a theory about a stomach ache doesn’t make you a doctor.