Wanted: Critics who are actually critical

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/19/magazine/a-critic-makes-the-case-for-critics.html?_r=4&pagewanted=1&seid=auto&smid=tw-nytmag&pagewanted=all

A Critic’s Case for Critics Who Are Actually Critical

By DWIGHT GARNER

Published: August 15, 2012

"It hurts to be criticized, and there is exhilaration in firing back, sometimes literally. The novelist Richard Ford, after a dismissive review from Alice Hoffman in The New York Times Book Review in 1986, shot bullets through one of her novels and mailed the mutilated thing to her. “My wife shot it first,” he reportedly said. Years later he spat in public upon the novelist Colson Whitehead, who had harshly reviewed another of his books. Afterward Whitehead commented, “This wasn’t the first time some old coot had drooled on me, and it probably won’t be the last.”

Ford is old-school. Most of us, when confronted with painful words, can’t resort to firearms or loogies, as much as we’d enjoy it. Instead we stew. We struggle to be as chipper as the novelist Kingsley Amis, who commented that a bad review could ruin breakfast but should not ruin lunch. It probably helped that Amis drank at lunch."