How to Recognize Beauty

Some of the best teachers in my life have been people I've never met. They've also happened to be teachers in the most classic sense: not people who pass on knowledge, but people who have developed strong stances that (usually) have challenged my own, people who have developed their own rhetoric and towering opinions. You struggle with them and come out a little more clearly defined, a little more sure of yourself in the end.

One of my first teachers was Orson Scott Card who, in addition to being a fiction writer, also has a column wherein he reviews whatever the hell he feels like every two weeks. At first, I was crazy about him - I thought he was deliciously vilifying to things he didn't like, and I agreed with 98% of his judgments. Over time, I came to realize that he approached his subjects with a specific set of criteria in mind - his judgments were based on how well they ticked off his OK boxes, and avoided his peeves - to the degree that he was actually unable to see the thing in front of him. My change in opinion of him was more than just that; I think it showed that I had changed as a critic as well. But he was a teacher in the sense that he was someone I approached first in awe, contended with, and eventually "outgrew."

I don't think I will ever outgrow Daniel Mendelsohn, or if I do, I don't think I will ever lose respect for him. He too writes across the board - movies, plays, classic literature. A bunch of his reviews first published in The New York Review of Books are collected in a book released just this year, How Beautiful It Is and How Easily It Can Be Broken, and I have been devouring them over the last few weeks.

Thing is, he's actually a pretty so-so writer, technically. Maybe because of the deadlines that are part of the magazine game, where most of these reviews were first published, his writing is sometimes inelegant and clumsy, as if he didn't have time to really clean something up. ("And so the classical Greek angelos, grimly transmitting his urgent report of the horrors he has seen, horrors that always result when men find themselves trapped in irresolvable dilemmas, may be thought of as the Angel of Tragedy, and hence very different from the adorable, glittering sylphs who have, lately, alighted in stationery stores and aromatherapy counters and on our television screens, bringing the comfy tidings that everything will be OK: the Angels of Sentimentality.")

But what he lacks in elegance he makes up for in seriousness of purpose, generosity toward his subject, and the deep penetration of his insights. The first half of a Daniel Mendelsohn review is typically description. For example, in his review of Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette, he spends several pages not only describing the real Marie Antoinette's life, but also Sofia Coppola's earlier movie Lost in Translation; he gives, in other words, both the artist history and the subject history. The result is that when he does get to his argument about the work in question, he has already shown you the stakes and made you care about the story and context in a way that you want this work to get it right - and if it doesn't (Mendelsohn tends to choose things that are popular and set himself against the public tide), he's already made you care so much that you feel as strongly as he does.

One of his favourite techniques - and I think it's brilliant - is to describe the reception of a work by critics, usually positive, as if he is going along with it. He is observing, and apparently endorsing the high praise that surrounds the work. But then, as if suddenly noticing something, he drops a single line that, in its simplicity, suddenly reverses the viewpoint by introducing his own view. Let me offer an example. He begins a review of the uber-popular novel The Lovely Bones (which I found insulting somehow, but for reasons that I didn't fully understand until I read Mendelsohn's review) by describing how fantastically popular it has been with both public and critics, who were all blown away by its unflinching portrayals of the worst horrors that can afflict little girls and families. He does this for a good two or three pages. And then this: "And yet darkness, grief, and heartbreak are what The Lovely Bones scrupulously avoids. This is the real heart of its appeal."

Bam! Can you get away with saying something like that without first offering any evidence? Usually, no. How Mendelsohn gets around it is by always following these brash thesis statements with a page break, and then beginning a new "section." On the page, this is really visually effective. The page break stops the reader from exploding with "But wait!", and the long passages of text seem to promise: "We contain all the evidence you need to be convinced. Just read along and you'll eventually see things the way I do." And you usually do, because he has taken so much time to give you context and information about the work in question that a) you feel like he's given you everything you need to know to make a judgment, b) he's shown you what is at stake and the deeper issues his arguments are rooted in, and c) you feel like he really cares about the subject and is really interested in finding out the truth, rather than simply going on a bash-fest.

That last point is probably the most important quality for a critic to have: generosity. You approach every work with the fervent hope that it can do well, that it can succeed and offer whatever it is that good works offer. This way, you don't punish any good works, and because of your initial optimism people tend to believe you when your opinion of something turns sour.

It is perhaps unsurprising that one of his most perceptive reviews is of another book of reviews, Hatchet Jobs, which just about accommodates the opposite theory of how critics should behave. But Mendelsohn doesn't jump down his throat, enraged that another critic could be so mean and self-serving. He is honest; he is fair in spite of what he may feel. Roger Ebert, another superlative critic of a different field, likes to quote: "A man goes to the movies. The critic must be honest enough to admit that he is that man." In other words, if a literary critic sheds a tear while reading The Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants, he might write:

"The book is juvenile, saccharine, and finally does not probe or stimulate the human spirit on any meaningful level."

Which would be a lie, because something about the work, despite whatever flaws it may genuinely have, nonetheless found a way to move him - and as a human being who comes in contact with a work, he has to recognize this. But equally bad would be this:

"This book moved me to tears. It is therefore a great book that I would recommend to everybody. I read James Joyce's Ulysses last week and I did not cry at all."

Why is this bad? Doesn't it manage to recognize beauty? Yes - but it confuses personal emotion with the value of the work. You may have been moved by it, but - why? What does it say about the work, and not about you? Look deeper.

"The book has some touching moments, and indeed one moved me to tears. Yet the sometime genuine scenes of recognition and reconciliation are founded upon a suspension of disbelief that the author demands of the reader, a suspension that, in the end, contradicts the very 'realness' of the girls' interactions with one another."

That's criticism. Honesty in recognizing your reactions and honesty of purpose and observation. Where was I? Oh yes, Hatchet Jobs. Mendelsohn admits that the author is intelligent, and that he laughed a lot while reading the book. But his eventual point is that the author's writing can't be called criticism because it accomplishes nothing of value - just breaks things down. To get there, his analyses of the text are beautiful in their matter-of-factness and vision. Of a long and verbose metaphor in Hatchet Jobs, Mendelsohn writes:

"This is a wonderful bit of writing, but two things strike you: first, that by the middle of the passage you (and, you suspect, Peck) have temporarily forgotten just where this metaphorical road trip is headed, and second, that what's really going on here isn't so much criticism as a kind of performance - it's as if Peck wants to show you not what's wrong with Barnes, but how good a writer he, Peck, is."

Not only is this right on the money, but did you notice how he assumes he knows what you are thinking? He does it often, and never was he wrong about what I was thinking. His observations are universal, and rooted in the text, rather than reflections of himself and his own biases.

I have been having many a conversation with friends and well-wishers lately about aesthetics - and specifically criticism. Mostly, I was really surprised to see that many people see criticism as mostly a negative thing - a way to say that your opinion is better than someone else's, which somehow makes you smarter or perceptive. This is not it at all. Daniel Mendelsohn is a perfect example of the idea that criticism is the ability to see clearly - maybe to be guided by instincts and opinions and feelings, but in the end to look at something in an uncompromising way. That is the value of criticism. The alternative situation can be described as one in which "everyone is entitled to their opinion" - which, I think, is an insult to just about everybody. It says that the works don't matter, because anyone could like them or not like them and they'd always be right, and it says that people can't be trusted to see beyond their own likes and dislikes. In the end, we want to be able to see others, and, finally, see ourselves - clearly. And this is what criticism teaches.