The New Yorker:

They didn’t mean to become critics; they probably hoped to be better known for that novel. But, when something cuts them to the quick, they need you to know.

By Parul Sehgal

In the annals of literary revenge, critics come in for as much bludgeoning as you might assume, and, somehow, still less than we might deserve. John Updike, notably, had his fictional alter ego, the writer Henry Bech, bring all his imagination to bear as he serially dispatched his harshest critics (“satanic legions deserving only annihilation”). In a blunter mode, the romance novelist Jilly Cooper once named an incontinent goat for a reviewer who had savaged her work.

But, to see the job done properly, call in a critic. In the novel “Max Jamison” (1970), which was lauded in its time and is now cruelly out of print, the critic Wilfrid Sheed paints a merciless picture of his profession. Max, a film and theatre reviewer, tramps up and down Broadway excreting opinion, as contractually obliged, and hating himself for it. He is honorable, in his way. He refuses to pander, to flatter the powerful, to build a brand. He chokes on his own stock phrases. He cannot stop reviewing himself or his surroundings. His wife begs him not to grade their lovemaking. No inventive punishments prove necessary for Max—not when he is condemned to cart around his own curdled consciousness day after day. His punishment is being Max Jamison; his punishment is life itself.

“Life Itself” is the title of the 2011 memoir by an actual film critic, Roger Ebert, and though it’s a supernaturally sunny account of the gig, Ebert allows that there is something “unnatural” about spending his days the way he does. “Man has rehearsed for hundreds of thousands of years to learn a certain sense of time,” he writes. “He gets up in the morning and the hours wheel in their ancient order across the sky until it grows dark again and he goes to sleep. A movie critic gets up in the morning and in two hours it is dark again, and the passage of time is fractured by editing and dissolves and flashbacks and jump cuts. ‘Get a life,’ they say.”

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