Much Obliged, Jeeves?

What to do when your book hands you the mitten

Evelyn Waugh could be wrong about a great many things, but it’s uncanny how seldom literature was one of them. Ordinarily, brilliant authors make fitful, unreliable critics, probably for understandable reasons (all the more ironic, then, that venues so often ask authors, brilliant and decidedly otherwise, to review books – but that’s a rant for another time). Although critics don’t mention it often, a good part of their job involves submission: they must open themselves to this new work they’re going to read and assess, they must be willing to let it breach their preoccupations and circumvent their certainties, or they run the risk of missing the work entirely (Of course many critics not only miss the work entirely by refusing to open their minds but also make an entire lifelong career out of doing so, but that too is a rant for another time).