BuzzFeed’s engagement of a new books editor, Isaac Fitzgerald, caused a stir last week. Fitzgerald is the former managing editor and co-owner of the popular-culture blog The Rumpus, and the former director of publicity at McSweeney’s. His remarks to Andrew Beaujon in an interview on Poynter appear to have set off a, er, rumpus.

BuzzFeed will do book reviews, Fitzgerald said, but he hasn’t yet figured out what form they’ll take. It won’t do negative reviews: “Why waste breath talking smack about something?” he said. “You see it in so many old media-type places, the scathing takedown rip.” Fitzgerald said people in the online books community “understand that about books, that it is something that people have worked incredibly hard on, and they respect that. The overwhelming online books community is a positive place.”

At Gawker, Tom Scocca lost no time in writing a hilarious and incendiary response focussing on Fitzgerald’s recent tenure as a publicity director (slug: “Niceness”).

Publicity is a job where you try to help people become interested in books and feel positively toward them, so that they buy books and the books’ authors feel successful and everyone enjoys things very much. In some sense, it could be argued that the publicist is the best friend that books have. Now BuzzFeed will also be a good friend to books. This is very nice news.

The suggestion is that BuzzFeed’s books section is in danger of providing not books coverage, but mere publicity.

Scocca is a blunt-force critic, and, on the face of it, his reaction seemed both obvious and appropriate. BuzzFeed has come under fire before for blurring the line between advertising and editorial content. Will Fitzgerald’s “positive place” philosophy become an additional tool for the blind monetization of everything, or even a final erasure of that once-bright line? Whether or not Fitzgerald is putting forward the idea of positivity from a purely intellectual point of view, the fact remains that he will be holding the reins at BuzzFeed Books. Is this how the “Minority Report” version of consumerism—ubiquitous, completely inescapable—is going to slip into every corner of our culture? Through the spread of “niceness”?

Maybe, or maybe not. For one thing, it bears mentioning that Fitzgerald’s views are very much in line with those of the San Francisco literary establishment whence he hails. The influential essay by Heidi Julavits, published more than a decade ago in the Believer, “Rejoice! Believe! Be Strong and Read Hard!” was written explicitly against “snark” and in favor of more positive book reviewing:

I fear that book reviews are just an opportunity for a critic to strive for humor, and to appear funny and smart and a little bit bitchy, without attempting to espouse any higher ideals—or even to try to understand, on a very localized level, what a certain book is trying to do, even if it does it badly. This is wit for wit’s sake—or, hostility for hostility’s sake.

This essay drew no sharp contrast between readers and critics (and was fairly vague on the matter of “higher ideals”), choosing instead to encourage broad-minded, generous reading as a general principle for all. Fair enough. That it failed to make a clear case for the purpose (and, by extension, the value) of literary criticism was a serious flaw.

While I share the Julavits view that censure itself is worthless, it should be obvious that bare praise is equally empty unless it is accompanied by an honest and serious engagement with the ideas in question. When real engagement is present, no snark is too sneering; without it, no praise is worth a sou. If he can persuade an author into a better understanding, surely that is the consummation most devoutly to be wished. The reader who disagrees clearly and well is the greatest treasure of all. How else can we progress? What else is the point of all that hard work?

Some might argue that there’s no particular reason that the establishment of a positive place shouldn’t be a perfectly viable goal for a books site. But I find the very idea that one should “respect” the authors of books by publishing only positive reviews to be absurd. I think that, rather, the exact opposite must be true: real respect means having balls enough to publish the unvarnished results of a close reading. No adult author writes for praise alone. Surely any serious writer writes because he has an urgent message to impart, one that he hopes will be of some use to the reader. I don’t know the origin of the idea that writers are such delicate creatures, barely able to withstand public scrutiny of their genius, but it seems ever-present.