Why is unmerited praise so annoying? The opposite sin, unmerited censure, we consider unjust and meet with indignation. But the misplaced compliment, the excess approval, the outsized reward given to what we know doesn’t deserve it—that we find distasteful. Even in matters of culture, where the stakes are less immediate, undue favor gives offense. A bad novel is just a bad novel. We read twenty pages and toss it aside. But a good review of the novel sticks in our head, as if a trust has been violated. While the novelist speaks for himself, the critic speaks for a standard, and since the survival of culture depends upon a wary discrimination of virtue and vulgarity, his overly generous review plots a course of diminishing expectations. If others follow and we discern no ulterior motive, we can’t even make a moral rejoinder. Something errant and unreasoning, it seems, is happening.
While the novelist speaks for himself, the critic speaks for a standard.
This is the animus behind B. R. Myers’s Reader’s Manifesto, an idiosyncratic tirade on the “Serious Writers” of our time and the reviewers and award-givers who sustain them. The project began when Myers came across one of the more critically admired sentences in recent years.
In the long unfurling of his life, from tight-wound kid hustler in a wool suit riding the train out of Cheyenne to geriatric limper in this spooled-out year, Mero had kicked down thoughts of the strange place where he
