What Critics Mean When They Call a Book Brilliant

David Lapadat | Music PhD

21 hours ago

6 min read

A short guide to literary praise inflation—and why “good” deserves its dignity back

A contemporary novel is now published under ceremonial escort. It is luminous, urgent, formally daring, quietly devastating and, if the publicity department has left any room on the cover, necessary. Its author has reinvented grief, memory, desire, silence, the family, the body and possibly weather. The book may be 180 pages long and may take two evenings to evaporate, but the adjectives have already secured it a place in history.

The experienced reader learns to make adjustments. “Brilliant” often means very good, or good, or confidently executed, or simply that the reviewer would prefer not to spend the next week explaining a hostile verdict on social media. “Masterful” may indicate that the author has completed the intended operation without visible injury. “A masterpiece” can mean the best novel published since the reviewer’s previous deadline.

This is not evidence that critics are foolish or dishonest. Most work for modest payment inside a literary world small enough for author, editor and reviewer to meet again before the review stops circulating. Praise now performs several jobs: it evaluates the book, recommends it, reassures the publisher, declares the critic’s sympathies and supplies a sentence for the paperback. Accuracy shares a small apartment with diplomacy, commerce and collegiality. Diplomacy gets the larger bedroom.

The result is a peculiar critical dialect in which nearly every word means something slightly less than it appears to mean. We still know the vocabulary. We have quietly changed the exchange rate.

The Adjective Exchange

The complaint is old. In 1946, George Orwell described the exhausted reviewer summoning “all the stale old phrases” to meet a deadline. He then asked the question beneath the enterprise: if both King Lear and an efficient thriller are called good, “what meaning is there in the word ‘good’?” Elizabeth Hardwick found American reviewing covered in “sweet, bland commendations” in 1959. Critics have announced the death of criticism for so long that criticism enjoys the excellent health of someone who regularly reads his own obituary.

Our version has new machinery. Reviews travel instantly, stripped into promotional fragments. Authors and reviewers occupy the same visible networks. A judgment addressed to readers also reaches the person judged, along with an agent, editor and admirers. Sociologist Phillipa K. Chong’s interviews with American reviewers found that critics worried especially about authors receiving the review—often peers who might later return the favor. The finding is less sinister than human: it is easier to be severe with a book when the book does not have your email address.

Praise inflation emerges through a series of individually reasonable acts of softening. The reviewer chooses a book that already attracts him or her. The editor assigns it to someone sympathetic. A reservation becomes a qualification; the qualification migrates to the seventh paragraph; the headline selects the warmest sentence. By the time the publisher extracts a blurb, a mixed judgment has completed its metamorphosis into acclaim.

Nobody lied. The truth simply dressed for the occasion.

A Small Dictionary of Contemporary Praise

Any translation guide needs care. Sometimes luminous prose really does emit light; sometimes a devastating novel leaves genuine ruins. Trouble begins when description becomes a category label, automatically attached to a familiar kind of book.

In the more inflated regions of literary reviewing, spare can mean that little has been developed. Restrained may mean that the emotional temperature never rose. Meditative can indicate that the plot has stopped for a long think. Formally daring often tells us that chronology has been rearranged, typography disturbed or several narrators admitted to the premises. Whether the form discovers anything that conventional form could not discover is a later question, and sometimes no one asks it.

Urgent generally concerns the subject rather than the achievement. A novel about war, migration, ecological collapse, illness or political violence inherits some of its material’s importance before the first sentence is judged. Brave may describe the author’s exposure, the difficulty of the subject, or the critic’s approval of its moral position. Courage and seriousness may deserve respect without automatically establishing artistic power. A book can approach grave material with great courage and produce ordinary sentences. Suffering is not a literary technique, though review language sometimes treats it as an honorary one.

Quietly devastating is among the most successful phrases in the modern critical economy because it protects both halves of the judgment. If the reader is devastated, the critic was right. If the reader is not, the devastation was quiet. Haunting enjoys similar advantages: failure to remember the book may simply prove that it is haunting someone else.

Then comes brilliant, the universal premium grade. It can praise intelligence, prose, construction, perception, originality or all at once without identifying any of them. Its vagueness is very, very useful. Specific praise commits the critic to a claim readers can test. If I call a novel brilliant, agreement requires only a warm feeling. If I say its final chapter transforms every previous scene without violating the characters’ established motives, an attentive reader can check.

Praise becomes credible when readers can check it. The critic should tell us what the book does, where it does it and how successfully. Adjectives ought to come after the demonstration, like a receipt, rather than before it, like a request for payment. Sometimes they could never arrive at all, and it would be just as fine.

The Floor Is Not a Prison

My calibration can sound, and often was deemed as, more severe than it is. If the floor for “brilliant” is Faulkner, Thomas Mann or Tolstoy, must every novelist supply a dynasty, a war, a sanatorium and an estate in financial decline? Fortunately not. A novella need not become War and Peace in disguise. Compression can be as radical as abundance; a small domestic field can reveal an entire moral order.

Faulkner, Mann and Tolstoy are not templates. They are standard weights kept in the laboratory so the scale does not drift. They remind us what fiction can accomplish when language, structure, psychology, historical pressure and intellectual reach intensify one another. Other readers will choose other names. The essential thing is to retain some demanding reference points. Without them, we compare each season only with itself, and every competent arrival appears to have enlarged the possibilities of the form.

This standard leaves room for pleasure, charm and partial success. A novel can be beautifully written and structurally weak, perceptive about marriage, for example, and conventional beyond it. It can contain one extraordinary consciousness inside an ordinary plot. It can be fully, honorably good without entering competition with Absalom, Absalom!, The Magic Mountain or Anna Karenina.

Almost every book ever written has failed to be Tolstoy. Criticism therefore needs comfortable words for the enormous territory between negligible and immortal. “Competent” sounds like an insult. “Good” sounds like a warning. “Very good” sounds like the critic has begun backing toward the exit. So books are promoted directly from promising to brilliant, as if the middle ranks had been abolished in an administrative reform.

Let Good Be Good Again

A functioning critical vocabulary needs gradations: flawed, limited, competent, good, very good, excellent, major. Those distinctions are the critic’s material. A fair review can call a book’s sentences elegant, its emotional insight genuine and its structure too dependent on withheld information. That gives readers more than five paragraphs of admiration followed by the faint suggestion that “some may find the pacing deliberate.”

Restoring scale would also restore force to praise. When brilliant means “an accomplished book I recommend,” an actually brilliant book creates a vocabulary emergency. The critic must call it searing, shattering, towering, seismic, epochal—a work that reinvents what narrative can do while permanently altering our understanding of being alive. After that, there is nowhere to go except weather warnings.

Inflation cheapens praise. Readers notice. They buy a novel advertised as a masterpiece, encounter a capable and affecting book, and feel cheated by an achievement they might otherwise have appreciated. The advertisement has made the book seem smaller than it is.

Exact criticism is kinder to writers, more useful to readers, and open to disagreement because its claims are specific enough to dispute.

Criticism need not become cruelty. The useful critic remains alert to ambition, execution, proportion, and limit. A critic can admire a book without flattering it and dislike one without turning the review into a judgment of its author.

Good should recover its honor, excellent should describe unusual achievement, and brilliant should become rare enough to startle us. Faulkner, Mann, and Tolstoy should not stand as bouncers at the door of literature; they need only remain visible, reminding us what the form has already achieved.

Contemporary books can certainly be brilliant. When one appears, criticism should still possess a word capable of noticing.