on the naming of names

professional norms… what are they for

Let’s say I think a book critic—we will call her Mary Lamb—mostly produces bad work for Mother Goose, the paper for which she writes. There are a number of ways I could choose to express this opinion of mine if I wanted to do so.

If I wanted to do it in the way you’re supposed to, I could say:

• “a lot of book reviews are bad now,” or

• “the Mother Goose book review section is pretty bad,” or

• “there’s a book critic I think is bad right now, and they…,” or

• “I really think it’s bad when reviews do [something Mary Lamb often does].”

All of the above would be—I think—considered the professional way of speaking about my problems with Mary Lamb’s work for Mother Goose.

If I wanted to make a big outsider splash for myself as a bold teller of truths, on the other hand, maybe I’d write something like the following:

• “Mary Lamb’s careerist dishonesty represents everything wrong with book criticism—no, the world—today,” or

• “Mary Lamb, human fungus, embarrassed herself and the entire literate population at Mother Goose once again,” or

• “coastal elite Mary Lamb’s idiotic posturing will never cease.”

In other words, I’m not simply expressing a negative opinion on a person’s body of work but practically saving the world from her malign mediocrity. I can justify breaking the code of euphemism outlined above because something about Mary Lamb is so personally noxious, so representative of everything wrong, that she has to be destroyed.

But what I am not supposed to say—under any circumstances!—seems to be:

• “I don’t think Mary Lamb’s work is very good,” or, if I think she’s good sometimes,

• “I think Mary Lamb’s work is pretty uneven,” or even, bluntly,

• “I find Mary Lamb’s work annoying.”

Why?

My “why” is a sincere question. I find it incredibly annoying when people talk about others in public without saying names in the “professional” way outlined above. It’s obviously fine to reference a general conversation or pattern or vibe, but sometimes somebody is actually talking about a specific person’s work in this way, and that is… well, I already called it “annoying” but it is annoying, that’s just the best word.

Partly I don’t like it because it feels like you are making random people in your professional world have to decide if they are or are not the subject of your own personal version of “You’re So Vain.” I also dislike it because it means there’s no way to know if the speaker is mischaracterizing their subject. But I mostly dislike it because to me it seems deeply disrespectful—it communicates that I don’t consider “Mary Lamb” to be a peer of mine, that I am happy to talk “about” her but do not ever want to talk “to” her about our shared profession. To me the subtext of the professional norms feels like I’m saying “I regard you as a baby who doesn’t know how to not take things personally.” Erasing names is supposed to make it clear it’s not personal, but to me it makes it feel personal.

But, when it comes to the other rhetorical mode, the fact is that I also don’t genuinely dislike very many people. My attitude toward most people is neutral, I guess. It’s possible I’m using some sort of rareified personal definition of dislike, so I’ll say disliking somebody means I have a low opinion of their character and prefer not to be around them. Hatred means I genuinely do not want to think of this person, ever, and can’t without great anger. And emnity would mean I want bad things to happen to this person.

So I dislike people who have (for instance) treated friends of mine poorly… but while that would mean I wouldn’t review their books, even then I don’t think I could ascribe to them so much importance. I can’t regard them as a malign influence that needs to be treated like a toxic waste spill or as some sort of a pod person. They were just shitty to somebody I knew once. I might even think they do good work, because I don’t dislike them on professional grounds, but personal ones.

Still, shouldn’t the true “professional” norm be saying you don’t like somebody’s work without doing backflips to disguise their identity? I feel sort of the same way about the maxim that one ought not respond to or even acknowledge the existence of negative book reviews. For non-fiction writers, at least, if you wrote a book that makes an argument, shouldn’t you feel free to continue that argument out in the world?

There shouldn’t be any positive obligation to respond, of course, and it’s also true that many negative reviews of books are in fact negative reviews of the people the critic imagines the authors to be, in which case there’s hardly any kind of useful back and forth possible. But I do feel like it would be a “healthier” book world if the professional norm weren’t so weighted against response.

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Of course there’s another reason to keep things fuzzy. In my case there is a real book critic whose work I think is mostly not good—Alexandra Jacobs—who writes for a real newspaper—The New York Times. And I was recording a podcast and was describing a mode of book reviewing I don’t really like in vague terms and then thought—why am I doing this? I should just like, say her name as one critic whose work I don’t like much and make a joke about how now I can’t write for their book review section now or something. Otherwise I’m just being weird.

So I did, and I supplied an example of a review of hers I thought wasn’t good, but then it turned out… somebody else wrote that review! Totally different person. If I’d been vague this never would have happened! So, learn from my mistakes. Never specify! I guess that’s the moral here… in the end we (I) follow these rules mostly because we (I) are stupid.