The poet tasters

The Geraldine Pascall Prize for Australian Critic of the Year has been awarded on 25 occasions, each time by a panel of eminent critics, often themselves past winners. It has gone to critics known for their reviewing of fiction (7), film (5), music (3, including once shared), theatre (2), art (2), architecture (1), food and wine (1) and to reviewers-at-large (3). The first award went to David Malouf before it was decided that the prize should be specialised for criticism. Not once has it gone to a critic known principally for poetry reviewing. If this is anything to go by, ‘literary critic’ in Australia means ‘reader of novels’. In an unprompted spray at Australian book reviewing in The Conversation last year, for example, we find John Dale commenting that a good review ‘gives readers a taste of the prose and the narrative so that they can decide whether to buy the book’. It might also indicate that while film reviewers no doubt reach many more people, and probably more directly influence public taste, there is a certain shimmer to writing about novels. No matter how naked the commercialism that pushes some novels into the light of public comment and others into obscurity, the novel review is yet a core activity of the contemporary belletrist. And if so much novel reviewing is really a haughty kind of product advice, we should not attribute this only to a flaw in the character of the critics. There is just about enough of a literary fiction market to incite professional aspirations, which means that their interpretations are subjected to the demands of editors and a broad readership, leading to habits of reading and writing that can produce the sincere belief that good contemporary fiction exists on a continuum between David Foster Wallace and Joyce Carol Oates.