How to write a take-down

Leo Robson in the ideas letter

So yes, local context matters. When I started writing reviews of novels, there were a number of relics from the postwar decades who were no longer writing their best stuff. So I have written harshly about books by Kundera, Mario Vargas Llosa, McEwan, others. I was runner-up for the no-longer-existent Hatchet Job of the Year prize for a review of a biography of Martin Amis. But I wasn’t trying to be a young gunslinger—I wasn’t especially young when I wrote some of the pieces, and would say the same thing now. I don’t think anyone could claim I was slating masterpieces. I find it silly when people say “I wouldn’t write that now.” It’s often untrue. Martin Amis regretted some of his antics from the early ’70s, when he went for Angus Wilson and Ballard and Philip Roth, but he was harsher on Michael Crichton and Thomas Harris two decades later. Finding a book or film or play or exhibition deficient and saying so when you are being paid for your opinion should not be dismissed as a young person’s game.

I think ridicule is OK, and maybe inevitable. I wrote a takedown of a history of the novel by the poet and publisher Michael Schmidt and he wrote me to say he should probably be jumping out of the window but was too busy laughing. You need to be direct. John Lanchester made this interesting point about what he called John Updike’s “very powerful negative review” of a Kingsley Amis novel, Jake’s Thing. He said it was “much less patronising, and more overtly hostile” than was usual for Updike. Actually that review isn’t negative, but I find that a useful distinction. You want to be actively aggressive, not passively so, closer to rude than snide.

From a long and interesting discussion with Leo Robson about the nature of criticim.