Kieran Setiya announces the results of his competition to find the best exquisitely mean review. The criteria were:

  1. The review must have a worthy target. Thus, I was forced to ignore, among other things, A. O. Scott’s review of Gigli.

  2. The review may be grossly unfair, but…

  3. It has to give good arguments, or memorable ones that contain a grain of truth.

  4. Finally, preference was given to reviews that made good use of sarcasm.

Kieran’s readership is composed mostly of philosophers, and his list of reviews reflects this. The prize has already been awarded, to Miles Burnyeat’s enfilading of Leo Strauss’ Studies in Platonic Political Philosophy. But I have a late entry from another field. For sheer mean-spirited, grossly unfair (not to say misguided) but nevertheless well-written and funny attacks on worthy targets, you can’t beat Philip Larkin’s criticism of modernist Jazz, especially his stuff on John Coltrane and Miles Davis. He thought Coltrane was “possessed continually by an almost Scandinavian unloveliness.” For example, here he is reviewing A Love Supreme:

It is of course absurd to suggest he can’t play his instrument: the rapidity of his fingering alone dispels that notion. It would be juster to question whether he knows what to do with it now that he can play it. His solos seem to me to bear the same relation to proper jazz solos as those drawings of running dogs, showing their legs in all positions so that they appear to have about fifty of them, have to real drawings. Once, they are amusing and even instructive. But the whole point of drawing is choosing the right line, not drawing fifty alternatives. Again, Coltrane’s choice and treatment of themes is hypnotic, repetitive, monotonous: he will rock backwards and forwards between two chords for five minutes, or pull a tune to pieces like someone subtracting petals from a flower. Apart from the periodic lashing of himself into a frenzy, it is hard to attach any particular emotional importance to his work.

And on Miles Davis:

He had several manners: the dead muzzled slow stuff, the sour yelping fast stuff, and the sonorous theatrical arranged stuff, and I disliked them all.