In our October 22 issue, Lola Seaton reviews Jonathan Buckley’s latest novel, One Boat. “Buckley’s best fiction,” she writes, “is refreshingly free of self-regard: lovingly crafted but out of devotion to his characters rather than to exhibit his technical gifts.” This commitment to the lives of the people in his stories makes his books “alive right up to their edges,” and while that virtue “may be traditional, what the novel was built to do,” Seaton continues, “it can feel radical.”
There is something about this ethic that a critic should inhabit, as well—a craft of devotion rather than exhibition. Seaton is a prolific young critic in the UK who pays as sharp and close attention to the shifting politics of the left as she does to contemporary novels. In venues ranging from Harper’s to the London Review of Books to the Financial Times, she has written about new fiction, Joni Mitchell, and soccer. For the Review, she has also reviewed Sheila Heti, Megan Nolan, and the 2022 London heat wave. She is a contributing writer at The New Statesman and an associate editor at New Left Review.
This past week, I wrote to Seaton to ask her about close reading, switching off your critical voice (if you can), and how to be an editor who writes.
Lauren Kane: As a critic reading a novel, what is the first question you like to ask?
Lola Seaton: I suppose one question I am always asking is: What am I noticing? This may expose how gropingly intuitive my approach to criticism is, but I think I try not to come with a quiver of preformed questions aside from that. Of course, one is inevitably loaded with expectations and prejudices, but the ideal of letting the work teach you how to consider it, as the philosopher Stanely Cavell counseled, is a useful starting point.
“What I happen to notice” may sound like a flimsy basis for passing judgment, which in a sense it is. Criticism does involve an outrage of sorts, though it doesn’t feel outrageous when you’re in the throes of it because you have a method, “close reading,” by which you convert your measly impressions into authoritative claims. Kant argued that aesthetic judgments are both subjective and presumptively universal. You are working on the assumption that what you notice isn’t random, that what you notice is really there, and means something, is noteworthy.
It’s partly a matter of confidence in one’s ability to read. But what is it to read? I think that it is in part to read yourself, i.e., to be attuned to your reactions, to take them seriously, and then to try to account for them. You could say doing criticism is getting better at noticing what you notice. Then you work backward from the effects, seeking their causes—the formal features and decisions that produced them. This sounds strange: Where is the strangeness coming from? Et cetera. Over time you build trust in yourself as a kind of litmus paper.
One practical issue is that your initial reactions—what you first noticed—can be remote by the time you turn in the essay. Recently I was finishing a review when I came across a note about the pleasure I was taking in the book, scribbled down when I didn’t know I would be reviewing it. I went back to the review and restored some of the enthusiasm I had forgotten I’d felt.
I don’t feel confident about “reading” just anything—classical music or ice hockey or whatever. You see what you look at, John Berger said, but before some art forms you aren’t sure where to look. You can feel obtuse, resourceless, almost naked, as though you don’t know where to begin or lack the means to decipher your experience. But I do think a lot of this is to do with confidence, which one acquires through exposure and by learning the language of the art form and the language of its criticism.
How has your approach to novels when you are simply reading them changed since you began writing criticism?
Reviewing has shaped, or rather skewed, what I read, in ways I partly regret. It’s a pleasure to read systematically, through oeuvres, but it’s also narrowing: there is less time for classic literature and for reading desultorily. It’s so nice to pick up something random. The upside is discovery. It’s gratifying to feel your taste both expanding and becoming more defined.
As for the way I read, it must be true that you can’t easily “switch off.” I think Roland Barthes wrote somewhere that he had an “illness”: “I can see language.” You hope that on balance your reading is enriched by the self-reflexivity I mentioned—noticing what you notice. But I worry about the interference. Even though I do it all the time, I find reading to be a very complex activity, not straightforward at all.
But then again what would it be to switch off? I don’t think analysis and absorption, criticism and pleasure, is always a zero-sum game. Criticism can seem like an intrusive, cerebral activity but it is also quite natural, when we are moved or entertained or disturbed or repelled by a work of art, to want to articulate those feelings and clarify their sources. The art of receiving art, like the art of making it, seems deeply related to the need to discover what we share.
What does it mean for a critic to dislike a book? When you dislike a book but find it interesting intellectually, do you think it is worth writing about, and how do you balance those two things in your writing?
I don’t feel I’ve always got the balance right. That’s partly because of the contingencies of how a book review comes about. You might be assigned a book by an author you’ve never read, and, chuffed to be asked, you say yes before having set eyes on a galley. Then when the book disappoints, you’re committed; you have a duty to be honest. Sometimes as a result the target feels ill-chosen—one can end up attacking a minor perpetrator of a much more general crime.
Some mediocrity you just turn away from. Other kinds give you an itch. “Interesting failures” can make more rewarding subjects than unequivocal successes. I think feeling disappointed or frustrated is a fairly reliable indicator of good faith. If you are disappointed, you had hopes.
But there’s no getting around the fact that one might end up saying negative things in public about someone else’s work. If part of being a published writer is exposing oneself to criticism, then part of being a published critic is living with the knowledge of the personal hurt your criticism may cause. This isn’t nice, but it’s less bad—less existentially disheartening—than the spectacle of culture going uncriticized. That threatens to make it all meaningless. The scholar Colin Burrow, discussing Helen Vendler recently, described the goal of criticism as telling other people how good something is. That may be true in universities where the evaluative component is elided because the literature being discussed has been canonized. But Burrow is wrong; appreciation is only one mode, and arguably not the most important.
I tend to think ambivalence is a good position from which to write. If you’re ambivalent then you are curious about what you think, you may not know in advance where exactly you are going to land. Of course you are always battling baser urges: to entertain, to impress, to amuse, to be original. One tries to keep these foibles in check via the discipline of faithfulness to the object: Am I being accurate?
You are a writer but also an editor, for the New Left Review. How do you find that those two modes interact? Does facility in one help the other, or does the editorial impulse ever make it harder to write?
I think overall the ledger must be positive: the daily exposure to writing, constantly working with language, learning moves you can steal and traps you should avoid, exercising your structural muscles. In a sense editing is itself a form of criticism in that it too is premised on close, critical, constructive scrutiny. But being an editor probably makes writing first drafts harder, or at least slower. The activities bleed treacherously into each other—editing can involve rewriting, and writing, certainly in my case anyway, involves self-editing. I waste untold hours fussing over syntax and word choices in paragraphs that no one will read. But that’s the horrible, exciting thing about writing: how you say something changes, subtly but consequentially, what you are saying and what you can say next. This makes it difficult cleanly to separate writing from editing, blathering on from fine-tuning; the process forces increasing precision on you.
Writing ought to make you a more compassionate editor, and editing, hopefully, makes you a more gracious or suitably sheepish writer. Both activities are arduous, often fiendish, which you can forget when you are engrossed in one or the other. It’s good to be reminded, when you’re editing irritably, how difficult it can be to make sense on the page for any length of time. Equally, when I’m the one sending in a draft, I’m aware that I’m not only offering the great gift of all my hard work but imposing a burden, one that will require much collective exertion.
Writing is unpredictable and vulnerable, and being an editor can make it more humiliating when it goes poorly—you’re supposed to be a pro! Then again sometimes editing doesn’t go well either. A mug’s game, as the late Len Deighton said, giving up writing spy novels for fountain pen–engineering.
What are your favorite “classic” pieces of criticism, especially ones that you return to?
That I don’t have a personal canon to hand must mean that, to my shame (or not), I’m not really a bona fide criticism nerd. When I’m writing criticism I’m generally not reading much of it—too demoralizing to watch soaring ballet dancers when you’re toiling over a teddy-bear roll—and when I’m not writing criticism, I prioritize reading novels, desperate to stretch my legs. Perhaps more than particular pieces, I return to particular critics—Leo Robson, James Wood, Thomas Meaney, Janet Malcolm, Vivian Gornick, Martin Amis, to name a very motley few—as models of what can be done, but mostly for refreshment, to hear their voices, their tone, their vocabulary when your own feels cramped and dull, and a reminder, when you’re miserably lost and sick of your own monotonous, lumbering sound, that this is meant to be fun, sort of, and that you’re just a human trying to explain something to other humans.