When I was in the second grade, our teacher often gave us “musical” instruments—little tambourines, toot-horns, triangles, and such—and we’d form a kiddie-band, just making joyful noise. It was fun. God bless the teacher (Mrs. Fargo) for putting up with all that racket for the sake of the children’s fun. I was reminded of that band recently when I read a way-too-long article in a literary magazine that was once a favorite. Actually, I have to admit that I didn’t finish the article, and so my remarks may be unfair, but the tedium was just too—well, that’s where that band comes in. Even the most doting, loving parent, even the most dedicated and caring teacher, can take only so much of that kiddie-band “music.”

Although it’s sometimes more-or-less forced on them, fiction-writers are not critics. Criticism is not the first genre at hand for a poet or a fiction-writer. Yes, to be sure, they can do it, but it doesn’t “come natural” to them. I’m a writer of fiction, not a critic—and, heaven knows, certainly not a poet. I’m glad I know that. One reason is that it makes me recognize and appreciate good criticism when I see it. Unfortunately, it also makes me recognize the bad stuff as well—the kiddie-band music.

Good criticism demands not just the vision of the fiction-writer, but a unique ability to articulate that vision in comprehensible language that literally becomes the reader’s own words, helping him understand why and how he has loved the story he just read, and to love it even more for having understood how and why he loved it. The entire experience of reading becomes infinitely richer for him. Good criticism is unmistakable when one encounters it. One finds oneself saying things like, “Oh, yes. That’s so true.” It’s the same experience we have when we read the primary work itself, if it has affected us so deeply that we now want to read about it, too, and then perhaps even to re-read the primary work a second, or maybe even a third time. Good criticism is as “creative” as poetry or fiction, with marvelous left-brain reasoning thrown in for good measure .

Bad criticism is, in a word, noise. It is frustrating, annoying, but worse than that, it’s destructive. It’s what Wordsworth meant when he said, “We murder to dissect.” Academia is the primary origin of this noisy destructiveness. Although it may sound as if I’m prejudiced, I’m really not, and many academics actually agree with me. There are several obvious reasons: the required adoption of jargon, the required analytical essays, theses, and dissertations, which must always conform to professorial whimsy, etc. The trouble is, once the survivor of the graduate program goes out into the literary world (if he ever does), he takes the same penchant for obscurity with him, the same veneration for “authoritative” demur, the same elitist intellectualism, argumentative narrowness of view, and literary political correctness.

Then—heaven help us—that critic tries to write fiction. Some mischievous demonic muse whispered in the ear of his vanity: “Don’t just write about fiction—write it yourself!” It may be that this malevolent voice comes when the critic’s own work is not doing so well, and rather than labor to improve it (which inevitably means un-learning a lot of hard-learned stuff), he imagines the reason it’s not doing well is that he’s actually a “creative” writer anyway. And that’s when we get really bad fiction. Infected (consciously or not) with the relativistic reality endowed by academia, the would-be writer tries to create a plotline that reads more like a depiction of psychosis than a plot (No, that’s not Marquez-like magical realism, just your kiddie-band imitation of it), characters that are more like brittle abstractions or concepts than human characters. I could go on, but perhaps I don’t have to; perhaps the reader will recognize the rather gruesome experience.

The “destructive” part is that the innocent, open-minded and educated reader can make neither head nor tail of it, and in an effort to understand it, he turns to the worst possible source—the critics, who praise the unintelligible thing with such hauteur the poor reader may be tempted to give up reading literary fiction altogether, believing himself incapable of “getting” it.

Baloney. In the article I mentioned at the beginning of this post, the “authoritative” critic says people are just not reading fiction now; they’re certainly not reading long fiction, he says; they’re going for “iconic” short-cut reading—or watching videos, etc. I don’t know what planet he lives on, or what readers he’s referring to, but it’s not the planet where Lord of the Rings was written, or Kristin Lavransdotter—both over a thousand pages long, and every one of those pages treasured by countless readers. But then, the stories are real stories. Things happen in recognizable time and space (never mind if the earth is Middle-Earth, or medieval Norway.) Characters are real—we know and understand elves and hobbits far better than we know or understand some of the pseudo-characters in the kind of fiction this critic would have us read, the kind that has forgotten that stories have beginnings, middles, and ends. They make sense. Plots are events in chronology, not random clips in a Zen cosmos. Characters, even if they’re orcs, are flesh-and-blood real—and above all, intelligible.

When a reader opens a book, he puts his trust in the writer. He has a right not to have his head bashed about by somebody who doesn’t respect that trust, who merely wants to impress the reader with a display of mind-bending, kiddie-band virtuosity. That sort of thing has its place—somewhere. But not in good fiction. Good fiction is a tale, well-told. It’s that simple to define and that difficult to write. I imagine that good criticism is even more difficult to write, but I don’t know. I’m not a critic.