By Adam Kirsch

Write a negative review and you can make an enemy for life. And yet, reviewing is an essential part of defining one’s artistic identity.

In “Enemies of Promise,” his classic study of literary failure, Cyril Connolly imagines a beginning writer named Walter Savage Shelleyblake, who is invited, on the strength of his debut book, to write a review for a magazine called The Blue Bugloss. Shelleyblake writes the review, and then another, and another — and soon finds himself trapped, churning out uninspired reviews of uninspired books for not enough money, as his friends go on to write proper novels and poems. “Reviewing,” Connolly writes with the experience of a lifetime behind him, “is a whole-time job with a half-time salary,” a job in which the best of a writer “is generally expended on the mediocre in others.”

That is the argument against writing even positive reviews. When it comes to negative reviews, the disincentives for a novelist or a poet are still more obvious. Write a bad review and you make an enemy for life; no writer ever forgets a pan. And these days, when so many writers work in the academy, an enemy can be a real threat to one’s career. Just wait until the victim of your bad review, or his friend or student, turns up on your hiring committee or your prize jury.

If this sounds merely mercenary, however, there’s also a more altruistic argument against writing bad reviews. At a time when few people care about literature, why waste precious time and space attacking a bad book when you could be celebrating a good one? Isn’t writing a bad review a kind of disservice to literature itself? No wonder, then, that it’s so rare to see novelists or poets actually criticize one another — rare enough that when it does happen, it’s treated as a controversy or a scandal.

Yet the idea that a novelist should steer clear of criticism, especially negative criticism, would have struck many of the greatest English novelists as bizarre. In the early 20th century, Virginia Woolf regularly reviewed fiction for The Times Literary Supplement, where she specialized in harsh verdicts suavely delivered. Take Woolf’s review of “Mummery,” which was its author’s 19th book: “Nineteen volumes cannot be brought from start to finish without learning whatever you are capable of learning about writing books,” she writes, “but the risk of learning your lesson so thoroughly is that you may become in the process not an artist, but a professional writer.”

This is more than a put-down. In contrasting the artist with the professional writer, Woolf — whose father, Leslie Stephen, was an arch-professional man of letters — was making a statement about which path she herself meant to follow. For many of the best, most adventurous novelists, in fact, negative criticism is an essential part of defining their own artistic identity.

In 1856, two years before she published her first book of fiction, George Eliot wrote a scathing essay on “Silly Novels by Lady Novelists,” in which she pre-emptively declared war on the low expectations Victorian readers had for novels by women. In the same way, David Foster Wallace blasted Norman Mailer, John Updike and Philip Roth as “Great Male Narcissists”; a couple of years later, he published “Brief Interviews With Hideous Men,” his own fictional inquiry into pathological male narcissism. Henry James dismissed even “War and Peace” as a “loose, baggy monster,” in order to justify the self-conscious formalism of his own books.