I feel very conflicted when I read negative reviews of debut novels. Obviously, we should take people’s work seriously and actually evaluate, not just praise. It’s a sign of respect if we can be honest about a book’s flaws: it helps readers decide what to read, and it (ideally) helps writers mature. But a critical attitude can easily shade into cynicism, which Max Larsen beautifully diagnoses in this review:

I have long been vaguely aware of my skepticism toward unfamiliar writers, but now I grasped with awful clarity: I’m a cynic. I’m an insufferable crank. When I encounter flowing imagery or bold formal innovations I immediately surmise the author is a vapid, pretentious, bloviating charlatan, and then I wait to be proven wrong…Because I have been conditioned by decades of social media consumption and advanced humanities education to believe that if I’m not being critical, then I’m being stupid; that every new author I read is out to steal my attention, to build their brand™, to degrade whatever semblance of literary culture still clings to life in this country—until they convince me otherwise.

This doesn’t make me feel interesting or cool. It mostly makes me feel depressed. I’m disclosing this ugly quirk because I suspect I’m not alone. I imagine that under our increasingly alienated conditions of cultural production other readers feel they, too, must choose between austerity and vulgarity, between stoically mistrusting all life’s cultural pleasures and blissfully gulping down slop like a 12-year-old at Golden Corral.

I think Larson is onto something here—it’s easy to feel like there are only 2 modes: paranoid reading or PR-adjacent, overly positive reading. But, as Larson asks:

What if I didn’t have to choose between becoming Theodor Adorno and becoming a Disney Adult?

What this might look like is reading with more critical generosity—trying to understand the novelist’s project and evaluate the book with scrupulous balance, on its own terms. It would not mean picking a work apart looking for flaws; but it also wouldn’t mean avoiding those flaws and pretending they don’t exist.

This review is a really elegant demonstration of how to practice that generosity—and how to be self-aware of one’s own biases, too.