While introducing a section devoted to Christopher Priest (who else?), Paul Kincaid makes a claim which—to my mind, and apparently to Kincaid’s, also—is a reliable marker that one is reading a critic rather than a reviewer: that writing a positive review is a far greater challenge than a negative one.

Kincaid is referring to his closeness to both Priest-the-man and Priest-the-author, to a familiarity with, and instinct for, the totality of an oeuvre which, counterintuitively, makes communicating one’s conceptions of the work under consideration that much harder. In my own case, the challenge is not born of an excessive closeness to Kincaid’s oeuvre (he’s too damned prolific for me to keep up with, as the TOC of Call and Response amply demonstrates) so much as a more reflexive—one might even say narcissistic—concern: how to praise the work of a fellow critic without it looking like said praise is rooted primarily in the similarity of our critical positions?

Kincaid and I appear to have both a text-level aesthetic and a generic ontology in common: we tend to like the same books for similar reasons, and our conceptualisations of the ways in which genres are (self-)constructed have a considerable overlap (even though I mutter about modality where he fulminates on fuzziness; he’ll come round eventually, I’m sure). But while it’s very pleasant to find oneself in concord with a critic one admires and respects, there is a sense in which this is precisely the least valuable sort of criticism one can read. If there is a point to criticism beyond the simple commercial recommendation (or otherwise) of the review—and again, Kincaid and I agree that there surely is—then it lies not in having one’s a priori prejudices and preferences affirmed. On the contrary: the best criticism (as subjective a “best” as any other, to be clear), the criticism that sticks with you, is the criticism that challenges your preconceptions, changes your thinking. As such, and perhaps paradoxically, Kincaid’s is the wrong criticism for me to be reading; we attend the same church, you might say, and sometimes even harmonise from the same hymn-sheet.

So why, then, is Call and Response a valuable book, as well as a pleasurable one? It is this case to be made, the case for a less subjective sort of praise, that problematises the positive review: how to separate the ends from the means, the conclusions from the discussion. Or, to put it another way: how should one make the case for the value of the work to a hypothetical addressee who may not agree with its conclusions?

Fortunately for your not-so-humble interlocutor, Kincaid makes this easy, as it’s a question he wrestles with constantly and earnestly, whether in the abstract (as in his introduction to this volume) or in the concrete (as in the reviews and essays which follow it); there is a dutiful current of reflexivity in Kincaid’s writings, manifest in both the foregrounding of his personal and subjective relationships with particular books, oeuvres and authors, and his unshowy considerations of his own positionalities. Shorn of anthropological verbiage, what this means is that we don’t just see Kincaid’s opinions, but the criteria upon which they were based; we get to observe and share in the process of their interrogation. We see how the sausage gets made, in other words.

What might seem surprising, at least at first, is that this transparency and rigour is the hallmark of a critic who has concluded that the purpose of criticism, “as both a reader and a critic, is to help me explore the books I read.” Doesn’t that sound solipsistic and selfish? Doesn’t it sound like exactly the sort of ivory-tower attitude that “reviewers” so deplore in those with the lofty temerity to call themselves “critics”?

Of course it does—because it’s a conclusion taken out of context. And that, to me, is the reviewer/critic dichotomy in a nutshell: the reviewer attempts, consciously or not, to isolate a text in a sort of literary laboratory where its qualities can be examined with a false sense of objectivity; while the critic knows, instinctively or otherwise, that literature is neither created, consumed or discussed in a cultural vacuum, and that the text without context is mostly a mirror in which we glimpse our own face and mistake it for the author’s. Kincaid is not a scientist of science fiction, but an anthropologist; he understands that all accounts are partial, all positions subjective, and that all authors—himself included!—walk the world with Barthes’s bullet lodged in their chests. He thus achieves the nearest possible thing to objectivity, by merit of operating on the assumption that objectivity is unachievable.

The value of the work, then, lies in the exposure of the process. We read Kincaid not to be told what to think, but to be shown how we might decide for ourselves.