For me, writing a negative review feels like being the child in Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” Few of us remember how the tale ends: The child cries out that the emperor is naked, which the emperor knows, but the procession continues anyway, “stiffer than ever.” This might cast some doubt on the efficacy — the point — of the negative review, but it also casts some light on the child in the story, who isn’t necessarily trying to expose the dishonest weavers or the hypocritical courtiers or oblige the emperor to get dressed. He just can’t help telling what he believes is the truth.

Francine Prose is the author of 20 works of fiction and nonfiction, among them the novel “Blue Angel,” a National Book Award nominee, and the guide “Reading Like a Writer,” a New York Times best seller. A new novel, “Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932” will be published next year. Currently a distinguished visiting writer at Bard College, she is the recipient of numerous grants and awards; a contributing editor at Harper’s, Saveur and Bomb; a former president of the PEN American Center; and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

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By Zoë Heller

Writers are not kindergartners making potato prints for their parents; they’re grown-ups who present their work to the public.

Image Zoë Heller Credit... Illustration by R. Kikuo Johnson

Last fall, the critic Lee Siegel wrote a long blog post for The New Yorker in which he explained his resolve “never to write a negative book review again.” Not long afterward, Isaac Fitzgerald, the newly appointed books editor at BuzzFeed, announced in an interview that he would be instituting a positive-only book review policy at the website. “Why waste breath talking smack about something?” he said. “You see it in so many old-media-type places, the scathing takedown rip.”

A few common themes emerged from the two men’s remarks. Both contended that the bad review was an anachronism, no longer relevant, or even viable, in the Internet era. Both maintained that the signature critical style of our times was compassionate and “generous.” Both felt it was more important to respect and protect an author’s feelings than to pass judgment on an inferior book. “Nowadays,” Siegel observed, “the abstractions of aesthetic and intellectual criteria matter much less to me than people’s efforts to console themselves, to free themselves, to escape from themselves, by sitting down and making something.”

Several writers have since taken issue with these pronouncements. They have questioned the value of criticism that is unable or unwilling to criticize. They have defended the importance of wearisome “abstractions,” and refuted the virtue of putting manners before beliefs. Of course, had these writers followed the compassionate credo that Fitzgerald and Siegel espouse, they would have kept their objections to themselves. They would have considered the possibility that Fitzgerald had worked very hard on formulating his editorial policy; they would have pictured Siegel alone at his desk, shoring up fragments against his ruin. Thus chastened, they would have remained respectfully silent.