The critic I have been reading most recently is Viktor Shklovsky. The Soviet theorist has come to English publication in a delayed and piecemeal manner (even now less than a quarter of his books have been translated). But what we do have reveals a revolutionary thinker and a magnificently alert reader.  

What makes a fine critic?

An impossible question: there are as many kinds of critics as there are Inuit words for snow. For me, though, the cardinal virtues are generosity, enthusiasm, and tact in the deployment of criticism. A negative review that exults in dispensing dispraise – as if some kind of victory had been won over the author – is at best self-aggrandising and at worst sociopathic. There are enough zero-sum struggles in the world without literature joining the fray.

In practical terms, the literary critic must have twinned abilities: an attentiveness to language on the level of the line (this is why so many exemplary critics – Brodsky, Auden, Jarrell, Eliot, and so on – are poets first, beautiful pedants for whom a single phoneme matters) and a macro-understanding of the larger social, historical, political context in which the work appears. True critics are hybrid creatures: half nanotechnician, half cosmologist.

Do you accept most books on offer, or are you selective?

I’m selective, though with one eye on the bank balance. There is no point lavishing your attentions on a book if you have a fair certainty (based, say, on previous knowledge of the author’s work) that you will not get much out of it. Of course, it is possible to be surprised, but I work from the theory that the strongest books elicit the best responses. I review like the number 276 seed obliged to play above his competence against a grand slam champion.

Do reviewers receive enough feedback from editors and/or readers?

If I’m doing my job properly, my editor should not have to say a word to me. I send the cleanest copy I can and we save words for occasional gossip over a bottle. But readers are slightly more complicated. If they write to inform me of an error of fact, I’m grateful. An error of aesthetic judgement is a bit tougher to accept, De gustibus non est disputandum, and all that. When you’re writing about an undertaking as marginal to mainstream culture as literature, however, it’s sometimes good to know that anyone is reading at all.

What do you think of negative reviews?

Allow me to refer to the response I offered fellow-critic Kerryn Goldsworthy last year, when she asked me the same question for a long essay on reviewing culture which appeared in ABR (May 2013):

Hatchet-jobs are momentarily entertaining yet they’re rarely helpful in understanding why a book works or doesn’t … They are the Big Macs of literary culture: a sugar and fat hit initially, after which you feel faintly nauseous. 

How do you feel about reviewing people you know?

It depends. Australia’s literary culture is fairly compact. It is hard to be involved with it, day in day out for a number of years, without becoming familiar with many of your subjects. I will not review close friends if I can help it, nor will I take on a book by someone I dislike personally or do not respect professionally. But knowing an author and their work well can also help a critic to illuminate a text. Familiarity can breed admiration as often as contempt.

What’s a critic’s primary responsibility?

Amanda Lohrey recently told me that it should be ‘a sense of mission’. I like the older sense of vocation or calling that shadow the word’s contemporary implications of martial vigour.

GEORDIE WILLIAMSON is chief literary critic of The Australian. He won the 2011 Pascall Prize for Criticism.