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Isn't Charles McGrath a right voice in our time?

(Wait. Did that sound critical?)

This week the New York Times Book Review asked Charles McGrath and Adam Kirsch the question: Is Everyone Qualified to Be a Critic? It's a question I often ask myself. A question I've been asking myself for the past 20 years, in fact—throughout my reviews of many hundreds of books for print and online publications, my jottings on behalf of the competitions I've judged, and my meanderings on this blog.

What makes me qualified? Am I qualified? And do I do each book—whether or not I like it—justice?

I do know this: If my mind is dull, if I am distracted, if I feel rushed, if I've grown just a tad weary of this trend or that affect, I won't review a book, not even on this blog, where I own the real estate. Writers (typically) work too hard to be summarily summarized, falsely cheered, unhelpfully glossed. Reviews should only be treated as art (as compared, say, to screed or self-glorification). It's important, as McGrath notes, that we reviewers keep reviewing ourselves.

His words:

It’s surprising how much contemporary critical writing is a chore to get through, not just on blogs and in Amazon reviews but even in the printed paragraphs appearing below some prominent bylines, where you find too often the same clichés, the same tired vocabulary, the same humorless, joyless tone. How is it, you wonder, that people so alert to the flaws of others can be so tone deaf when it comes to their own prose? The answer may be the pressure of too many deadlines, or the unwritten law that requires bloggers and tweeters to comment practically around the clock. Or it may be that the innately critical streak of ours too frequently has a blind spot: ourselves.

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Jeanette Winterson discusses her new memoir about her troubled, larger-than-life mother, "Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?"

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These words appear toward the end of Charles McGrath's recent NYT profile of Don DeLillo:

Mr. DeLillo is 73 now and considers himself a late bloomer. He didn’t publish his first novel until he was 35, after quitting a job in advertising and after what he calls “a golden age of reading,” in which he would “consume fiction as if it were breakfast cereal.”

Asked why his first book took him so long, he answered: “I don’t have any explanation for that. All I know is that one day I said to myself, ‘I think I’m a writer.’ I started making sentences I didn’t know I was capable of.”

I think I'm a writer.....

I am reminded of a certain correspondence that sprung from a certain 1996 Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, to which I'd gone at the invitation of Jayne Anne Phillips, whom I'd come to know the year before in Prague. I met Brooks Hansen, the extraordinarily imaginative, genre-hopping author of such books as The Brotherhood of Joseph, The Chess Garden, The Monsters of St. Helena, John the Baptizer, and Caesar's Antlers, at Bread Loaf. We exchanged a few notes afterward, and in one, Brooks—perhaps inadvertently—shifted the way I thought of myself, insisting that it wasn't what one had published that rendered one a writer. It was what one could do with words.

Not a writer yet, is what I had thought of myself up until then, for I only had short story and essay publication to my name, no book. Becoming a writer, is what I began to understand—a category that I continue to slot myself into today: still becoming.

For how boring it would be, how anti-climactic, to have already arrived.

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As some of you might have read today in the New York Times, 85-year-old Gloria Vanderbilt has a new novel due out next week. It's called Obsession: An Erotic Tale, and it is, in the words of Charles McGrath, "the story of Priscilla Bingham, the widow of a Frank Lloyd Wright-like architect who, after his death, discovers a cache of letters, wrapped in magenta grosgrain ribbon, revealing in considerable detail his secret, kinky sex life."

I'm just wishing that I had an imagination big enough for magenta grosgrain. Or that someone would say about me, as McGrath says about Vanderbilt, that I could easily pass for someone 25 years younger than my actual age. I'm thinking, Gosh, how does it come to be that my own Nothing but Ghosts, also due out next week, will have to compete with a Gloria Vanderbilt novel? (The thought of such a competition staggers.)

But then I'm thinking, Now wait a minute, just hold on. Does G.V. have friends like I have? Does she, for example, know Tirsa, who offered, today, to make me my very own dulce de leche cake? Does she have a friend like Amy, who is all the way across this country, scheming? Is Anna in her life, listening? Is Sherry out there rooting for her? Does she know Tessa and her brilliant paintings, brilliant life? Has Lenore offered to interview her (we're talking Lenore)? Has she been honored by Colleen, HipWriterMama, Melissa, Lorie Ann, Little Willow, Priya, Maya, Alea? Does she have Miss Em in her corner, or the curly Q, or Ed, or Woman in the Window, or Becca or LN, or Kelly, or Grete, or Lib, or PoetJaneS, or Sierra Rix, or TTTC, or...well, you all know who you are?

Does G.V. have, like I sometimes have, the stardust of your minds? Star glimmer?

I might not have magenta grosgrain. I might not have Minus 25 or the truly wonderful (I met him once, long ago) Charles McGrath of the New York Times. But I've got you.

And you is lovely.

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