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I haven’t read a bad novel this year. This isn’t a good thing. The reason I have avoided picking up a story I hate this year is because I have read precious little fiction. Outside of a handful of trusted authors with new books out — Zadie Smith, Linda Grant, Salman Rushdie, Ann Patchett — I have confined myself to reading old loves and factual accounts.
My year of reading narrowly has been inspired by one thing above all: I no longer trust most reviewers. The hatchet job is now a dying art. This is a problem, because a critical shoeing isn’t just a form of hygiene, a way to separate Ridley Scott’s Gladiator from Ridley Scott’s Napoleon. It’s true, of course, that one reason why giving something a good panning is worthwhile is that it has similar benefits to culture as a whole as brushing your teeth.
But it’s not the only reason, and in many ways it is merely a secondary benefit. The more important value of the hatchet job is that a critic who hasn’t discovered something they hate over the past year either hasn’t spread their net widely enough or has become accustomed to mediocrity.
Ask me what novels this year were good or bad and I’ll stutter awkwardly; ask me to pick a terrible film and I’ll talk your head off. The reason is simple: I have read a little more than a dozen novels in 2023, while Letterboxd, a delightful website that lets you log what you’ve watched, tells me that I have watched a century of movies. As a result, I have been enchanted by things I would never have taken the time to watch, admire Quentin Dupieux’s Smoking Causes Coughing, and repulsed by films I thought I’d love, admire Bradley Cooper’s Maestro.
Unfortunately, Letterboxd itself is part of the war on the hatchet job: when you log the latest movie you’ve seen, whether at home or at the pictures, you are handed the opportunity to give it five stars, with a scale that starts at a half star. The idea that there might be a film so bad it deserves to procure zero stars out of five is not permitted. Perhaps that’s because 2023’s 65, a cripplingly dull prehistoric yarn, had not yet been released in cinemas when Letterboxd launched in 2011, but I suspect it is part of a general cultural trend against the hatchet job.
I’m not saying that our private lives should be devoted to finding things to hate. When it comes to dining out, I long ago decided to outsource my judgment to the restaurant guides provided by Michelin, the Automobile Association and the newsletter-writer Jonathan Nunn. Life is simply too short to eat badly. Others may similarly pick to let the Booker Prize, or Radio 3’s record review, do a similar job of separating sheep from goats.
But I am saying that you should distrust any critic who hasn’t stumbled upon an object of loathing, because it reveals that your critic either has too-low horizons or too-generous a marking scheme.
The inflationary impulse is most keenly observed in the three-star review, a category that once meant “a film you won’t regret seeing on a first date, or during a long flight”, but increasingly means, whether on Letterboxd or its literary equivalent Goodreads, “this is irredeemably dreadful”.
And it has spread well beyond the cultural sphere: anyone who has ever used any form of online ranking knows the five-point scale is actually a three-point one. To eat at a restaurant with a three-star ranking on Google is to risk food poisoning. An aggregate five-star review, meanwhile, reveals that whatever the subject in question it simply hasn’t attracted many reviewers.
Nor can any professional critic claim that they are immune from the disease, or that it has spread from the algorithmic masses to the critical elite. If anything, quite the reverse: it is easier to find critical reviews, albeit accompanied by an overly positive star rating, on Letterboxd or Goodreads, than it is in most of the printed press. Outside of a handful of publications and writers, most reviews are soft-soap. Non-fiction is particularly egregious: books are either “necessary” (trans: bad, but I agree with the argument it is failing to land) or “urgent” (really bad, but important and I agree with the argument it is failing to land).
What is, in fact, necessary and urgent is that we use our limited amount of free time to find things we genuinely relish: that means both trying new things and having the ability to recognise when what we’ve just experienced truly stinks. Here’s hoping that next year I read at least one truly terrible novel.
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