Critiquing the book review

This piece by Ben Yagoda is seven years old but still worth a read. Yagoda asks why, in many cases, reviewers, that is, critics, and the general public can dramatically differ on books, as well as movies and such. He lists four types of critics, per traditional breakdowns.

His focus, though, is on what he calls "soft touches" and "logrollers," along with related puffers.

"Soft touches" are also "review sluts," in the pockets of public publishers and movie studios. "Logrollers," to extend from him, would be those who puff in hopes of good reviews back. I suspect this is primarily a fiction problem.

Rather, the big problem, he thinks, is more than that. It's that familiarity breeds just the opposite of contempt. To that end, and more, he quotes Orwell:

It is almost impossible to mention books in bulk without grossly overpraising the great majority of them. Until one has some kind of professional relationship with books one does not discover how bad the majority of them are. In much more than nine cases out of ten the only objectively truthful criticism would be “This book is worthless”, while the truth about the reviewer’s own reaction would probably be “This book does not interest me in any way, and I would not write about it unless I were paid to.” But the public will not pay to read that kind of thing. Why should they? They want some kind of guide to the books they are asked to read, and they want some kind of evaluation. But as soon as values are mentioned, standards collapse.

Well put. Or is it?

Yagoda actually thinks Orwell and Ellen Hardwick are wrong on WHY this happens:

Orwell and Hardwick present the “gross” overpraise as calculated; I think it usually is not. As a friend of mine suggests, critics fall prey to a sort of hermeneutic Stockholm syndrome. They experience so much bad work that they get inured to it. They are so thankful for originality, or for a creator’s having good or arguably interesting intentions, or for technical proficiency, or for a something that’s crap but not crap in quite the usual way, that they give these things undue credit.

Even better put, perhaps. I think it's probably 65-35 non-calculated, rather than almost always more or less semi-conscious.

In either case? It's part of why I have a "touted by reviewers unduly" bookshelf at Goodreads, for books that get a particular downvoting when they're not what they are. "The Eastern Front" lost at least one extra full star, if not 1.5 or so, because of this. Here, at least, I think it is semi-conscious, not semi-unconscious. I personally rated Lloyd's "Passchendaele" at 5 stars. I suspect many critics, whether more conscious or less, bank-shotted off that to overrate this. Happens elsewhere, such as Major League Baseball players winning undeserved Gold Gloves.

It's worth noting that Yagoda's book-world focus is on fiction, where a focus on creativeness of craft — even if not good, just creative — is part of what drives this. That's also why I suspect this is more conscious in the non-fiction world.

I know in fields like history, or biblical criticism, "hot young bucks" come to notice, and if nothing else, critics don't want to look like they're missing the boat if they do a truly critical review. So, they may pull punches.