Hunting the Snark: on harsh reviewing

The recently published ninth edition of the excellent Chambers Dictionary, which has always prided itself on keeping up with new words, gives only one meaning for the noun "snark". It's "an imaginary animal created by Lewis Carroll." The tenth edition might well carry a second meaning: "an adverse book review written with malice aforethought". If the dictionary were compiled on historical principles, like the OED, it might mention that the word "snark" was first used in this sense by Heidi Julavits in a long and fascinating article about book-reviewing which she published in The Believer. Elsewhere in the literary forest, Dale Peck, writing in The New Republic, had attempted to bury Rick Moody's novel The Black Veil under an avalanche of abuse. Generating a small but widely reported kerfuffle, this event was one of the stimuli for Julavits's contention that the killingly personal review might be reaching such epidemic proportions that it needed its own monosyllabic name, like plague.

Plausibly claiming to have identified an industry-wide rise in the prevalence of a snide tone, she called such a review a "snark". Since the noun derives from the accepted slang adjective "snarky", one would have thought it a rather understated label for an attack whose intent is often not merely snide but outright murderous. Better acquainted with the concept of gangsterism in public life, the Germans call a killer review a rip-up and the Italians a tear-to-pieces. But this new, English word — English tempered by an American determination to believe that serious people can lapse from high standards only in a temporary fit of civic irresponsibility — is probably violent enough, and it certainly captures the essential element of personally cherished malice.

The desire to do someone down, or indeed in, is the defining feature. Adverse book reviews there have always been, and probably always should be. At their best, they are written in defence of a value, and in the tacit hope that the author, having had his transgressions pointed out, might secretly agree that his book is indeed lousy. All they attack, or seem to attack, is the book. But a snark blatantly attacks the author. It isn't just meant to retard the author's career, it is meant to advance the reviewer's, either by proving how clever he is or simply by injuring a competitor. Since a good book can certainly be injured by a bad notice, especially if the critic is in a key position, the distinction between the snark and the legitimately destructive review is well worth having.

(The rest of this article is in The Meaning of Recognition, published by Picador in 2005.)
Photograph by Gillian Mann.