On Hatchet Jobs

As a teenager, I used to enjoy reading collections of articles and reviews. (Looking back, my social awkwardness makes a lot more sense than it did then.) Christopher Hitchens, Clive James, Martin Amis et cetera. They were reliable stalwarts of the shelves of second-hand bookshops.

Reading a review of a book that the critic liked could be interesting. You might be tempted to read it yourself — or learn something that you hadn’t grasped the first time around.

Yet reading reviews of books that critics hated was a lot more fun. I remember reading Amis on Hannibal (“Harris has become a serial murderer of English sentences”). In turn, I read Tibor Fischer on Amis’s own Yellow Dog (“like your favourite uncle being caught in a school playground, masturbating”).

Of course, hatchets have been swung throughout literary criticism for generations. Dorothy Parker read The House at Pooh Corner until she “fwowed up”. Whittaker Chambers read Ayn Rand’s “remarkably silly” Atlas Shrugged and heard:

… a voice … commanding: ‘To a gas chamber–go!’

Online, I found the hidden classics of the hatchet job genre, like John Dolan’s eXile review of James Frey’s weepy pseudo-memoir A Million Little Pieces, which somehow managed to be more damning than the articles which subsequently exposed its many fabrications (“self-aggrandizing, simple-minded, poorly observed, repetitious, maudlin drivel”). I stumbled across the website “Cosmoetica”, where the poet Dan Schneider endeavoured to bring down the reputations of Eliot (“1 of the most grossly overrated writers in the history of the world”), Hardy (“nearly uniformly terrible”) and so on.

Dorothy Parker, contemplating throwing up

A competition used to hail the Hatchet Job of the Year. I remember AA Gill winning for his review of Morrissey’s memoirs. I was annoyed when Jon Day missed out on being shortlisted for his masterful review of Craig Raine’s More Dynamite.

Yet it was obvious that hatchet jobs could be a somewhat ridiculous exercise in chest-beating. Take the front cover of Dale Peck’s 2004 collection Hatchet Jobs. The critic wields a hatchet — an actual hatchet — while displaying his shaven head and bare bicep. Criticism, the designer appears to be saying, is a macho, pugilistic exercise. No, it’s writing.

It was also clear that a hatchet job could be so entertaining that one could be suckered into swallowing its essential unfairness. Take Peck’s famous review of Rick Moody’s The Black Veil (“Rick Moody is the worst writer of his generation”). It’s a lot of fun. But it’s so much fun that it would be easy not to notice that Peck’s utter incomprehension at Moody’s use of the words “tanned mattress” obscures the obvious if flowery allusion to sweat — and that Peck’s insistence that the phrase “murder of innocents” is redundant ignores the fact that evildoers can be — and often are — unlawfully killed. The killing of Paul Castellano was a murder but it wasn’t the murder of an innocent.

What are these reviews for? Entertainment, chiefly, but not only entertainment. Sometimes, they puncture an inflated reputation — driving their critical blade into a sacred cow — though one should be careful that a hatchet job does not license dislike without informing it. Sometimes, the failings of a work of art or argumentation are illustrative of broader pathologies, though one should not make it a scapegoat.

A hatchet job demands responsibility. It is a lot more difficult to put the pieces of an object back together than it is to hack it into little parts. It is also a lot more tedious.

Still, over the years, I’ve written a few hatchet jobs. Some of the targets were sitting ducks, like James Felton, and some were bigger beasts, like Kevin Williamson. What is the motive? A scathing review attracts more readers than a balanced assessment of pros and cons, of course (which is not to say that I have deliberately ignored the merits of anything I have reviewed but that I have agreed to cover things I was unlikely to find meritorious). They are also more fun to write.

But one thing that links the books and writers I have really hated is a perceived laziness — be it or argumentative or stylistic. Incurious arguments and ill-considered prose felt like an insult to customer, and to the English language. It seemed genuinely offensive that Dave Rubin was asking his admirers to part with their cash for a rambling assortment of half-assed reflections, whereas Stacey Abrams’s legal thriller, while completely forgettable, was unignorably the product of time and care. It wasn’t good. But it was a good effort.

Yet I cannot mount my steed and lecture about laziness without recalling the time I face-planted in the mud. Someone had asked me to review the anti-Biden film My Son Hunter. Frankly, I didn’t think I had to put a lot of effort into reviewing a film that starred British provocateur Laurence Fox as Joe Biden’s crack-addled son. I watched it, hammered out a hostile response and sent it off confident that I’d never have to think about the damn movie again.

My foolishness. The filmmakers soon got in touch to very justifiably complain that I had made two big stonking errors. I’m not taking “understandable mistakes” here, I’m talking “errors no one would have made if they had invested appropriate time and thought”. Having written as if laziness was a cardinal sin, I had very clearly, blatantly epitomised it. If it wasn’t quite as colourful as a bishop being found in a strip club with his cassock round his ankles, it seemed almost as embarrassing. I still feel ashamed about being such a slob.

Perhaps “hatchet jobs” were misnamed. The words evoke images of frenzied violence. One thinks of the villain in a slasher film — chasing a scantily-clad heroine across a lakefront at nighttime. But a hatchet job should be more surgical than that. You aren’t trying to lop the head from a book or a film. You’re trying to cut it open and expose its internal organs.