Every now and again, I will wake up in a terrible sweat. I hear Flaubert Gustave’s famous line, that the worst thing about the present is the future, repeating itself in my head. The quip gives way to the nagging questions which all critics face: what is the point of criticism? Isn’t everything running down? What gives me the right to note what is trash and what is treasure? With tired eyes, I check my phone for messages and, inevitably, find myself looking at what many of the imbeciles of the world call (for once, aptly so) ‘brain rot’. Is Shrek a cautionary tale? Tropes are necessary for books! Romantasy is totally a new kind of fantasy, and definitely not something we have been doing since the Renaissance. Have you heard about the black holes at the bottom of the ocean? Let me tell you about why this Disney movie from last year is peak cinema. Shakespeare was a woman, you know…one feels that they are in a nightmare and they need to wake up. And yet, I am awake. And thus, the tragedy continues for we, the critics.

One sees this, day in and day out, and begins to feel wicked. In my wickedness, I utter that famous phrase, spoken by Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens, ‘I am Misanthropos, and hate mankind’. I begin, in earnest, to plan on placing fireworks in the nearest nursery or slipping Plan B drugs into the drinks of trad-wives—and maybe their trad-husbands too, just for funsies. And as the heights of such irritation begin to boil my blood, I close my eyes and think of what is now called ‘Apemantus’ Grace’, another part of Timon of Athens.

‘Immortal Gods, I crave no health. I pray for no man but myself. Grant that I may never prove so fond to trust man on his oath or bond. Or a harlot for her weeping. Or a dog that seems a-sleeping or a keeper with my freedom. Or my friends if I should need them. Amen. So fall to it. Rich men sin, and I eat root.’ (Act 1, Scene 2)

Ah, Apemantus, I hear your scorn. Never prove to be so fond. I open my eyes and I get a little cheery. I cancel my order of fireworks on Amazon and I happily accept that I do not need to turn to thievery to get contraceptives—a crime only necessary because the barbarians now run the nation. Haven’t they always been in charge? Well…but I am digressing. All of this began with a night terror: what is the point of being a critic?

This is a question that seems rather pertinent now. In this world, the consumer has revolted against the critic specifically and criticism generally. I personally witnessed Broey Deschanel get chased off of Twitter for a very good review of the movie May December (2023), while everyone heard of the death threats aimed at Alexis Petridis of The Guardian and his review of Taylor Swift’s album, not to mention the more recent piece by Adam Morgan in World Literature Today titled ‘Criticism Is Literature. Why Is It Vanishing?’

I won’t quote or reference any of these here, on the grounds that to do so is unnecessary. To the review of Taylor Swift’s last abysmal album by Petridis, I can only say that it did not deserve the reaction it got. After all, it was not very interesting nor all that harsh. As to Deschanel and Morgan, I suggest you go watch and read them yourselves. The modern word processors who call themselves ‘writers’ love to cut up other people’s works and put it out of context. It saves them from uttering any thoughts of their own, as well as shields their audiences from having to think. 

I submit all of these exhibits to you, learned readers, as I craft a defense for criticism. As I do, I withhold one exhibit, unsure if it ought to be among the other. That exhibit is the subject of my review today: A.V. Marraccini’s We the Parasites. 

But we shouldn’t get ahead of ourselves; first, about critics. In nearly every corner of culture, we suffer an agonizing death by a thousand platitudes. One such platitude that has been around for too long: ‘everybody’s a critic’. For our species, homo stultus, it is par for the course that the moronic statement of yesteryear becomes the platitude of today, and the platitude of today becomes the mindless dogma of tomorrow. ‘Everybody’s a critic’ has become the dogma that nobody should be a critic. And while some like to attribute this turn against critics to absolutely anything (and I do mean anything), I would like to point out that the hate people hold for critics and criticism precedes our postmodern world. From the death of Socrates to that time Karl Kraus was beaten in the streets by Felix Salten, author of Bambi, to our recent mob of ignorant netizens running Deschanel off of an app, criticism has always been opposed by the species at large. You see, criticism is always on trial. The charge is always impiety, be it towards gods or human prejudice or political nostrums. And the punishment sought is always the death penalty. 

This is why, every so often, critics are called before the kangaroo court of public opinion and asked to defend it. I immediately think of Matthew Arnold defending (and explaining to the very Philistine English public) criticism in The Function of Criticism at the Present Time in 1865. I think of Oscar Wilde’s ‘The Critic as Artist’, published in 1890, referencing and criticizing Matthew Arnold’s view of criticism. I think of H.L. Mencken’s essays ‘Criticism of Criticism of Criticism’ in 1919 and his revisiting of that in ‘The Critical Process’ in 1922. I think of remarks made en passant by Gore Vidal in essays like ‘Literary Gangsters’ in 1970, ‘Edmund Wilson: This Critic and This Gin and These Shoes’ in 1980, or ‘V.S. Pritchett as “Critic”’ in 1979. I…but you get the point. Anyone who knows the history of criticism is aware that many-a critic, finding their efforts futile and the doors of the public closed to them, turn to their craft and ask what the point is. They put pen to paper, finger to key, and, occasionally, their head against the wall, and present a brilliant argument that saves criticism from its executioner. It is like something out of Law and Order. Or, for hicks like me, something out of Boston Legal.

And so, as I shrug off the lingering visions and phantoms of those night terrors that so bother all critics, I return to our subject for today: A.V. Marraccini’s We the Parasites, and offer my criticisms of it—everybody’s a critic, after all. A.V. certainly is, and so am I.

I

Join me as I step on yet another platitude in the name of criticism; that is, I plan to judge a book by its cover. One of the more irritating things I come across while reading reviews or, appearing with an infrequency matched only by Haley’s comet, criticism, is how most reviewers will skip telling their customers about the cover, inner flaps, and back endorsements and synopsis that adorn the books they review. Perhaps they think it is all quite unimportant. But I care not for what they think—after all, thinking is to the human race what guilt once was to our legal system: you do not presume people think until proven so. And so, without much evidence in the way of thinking, I ignore this nonsense.

I am currently in possession of a royal red book, standing a little higher than my raspberry Snapple tea bottle and a little wider than a dry erase marker. The girth of the volume seems slight, and it is adorned with a stylized kind of roughed up font, set on its side, that says the title of the book: We the Parasites. I chuckle a little at this, and the questions begin to flow. We? We who? I am certainly no parasite. I joke quietly that maybe Robert Kennedy Jr’s brain worm wrote this. I mentally cancel this joke out—too easy, the lowest hanging fruit in the orchid of humor. I can’t help the thought…you know what else like low hanging fruit? Specifically apples?…I pass on. I see the name of the author on its side. A.V. Marraccini. Whenever I see any initials in a name, I always  wonder what they stand for. H.L. Mencken? Henry Louis. C.P. Snow? Charles Percy. P.G. Wodehouse? Pelham Grenville (what a name). A.V. Marraccini? I don’t know. While I have been mildly familiar with A.V.’s writing for the last few months and I have talked with her directly, I never thought to ask. On one hand, it is because of the fun I feel in calling her, for short, ‘A.V.’ A.V. Club, anyone? On the other hand—the left one, in which this book now rests—the decision to initial a name tends to be due to a need to stylize a name that is either embarrassing or boring. Charles Percy? Henry Louis? It was once said of Virginia Woolf that the only reason she married her husband was because no one would care much for a book written by Virginia Stephens. By who? I forget, but ask Gore Vidal—this quote comes from his memoir Palimpsest. 

I turn the book over: I see a picture of A.V. Black and white picture of a woman whose face is cut through by a smile that conveys mischief. I instinctively make sure I am not missing anything. Wallet? Got it. Keys? Yes. Lighter? Oh dear…anyway…I see round glasses. Of many archetypes and tropes, the round (but thin!) glasses have always been how we determine that someone is intelligent. Her hair flows over her head and frames her face, and I hear the song ‘The Sharpest Lives’ by My Chemical Romance come on in my headphones. I chuckle again. Black and white, messy hair, and leather jacket—the uniform and presentation of an emo kid. I make no judgments here; I only have these funny little thoughts. And such fun musings are interrupted by the bold, white text to the left of this handsome picture. It reads:

‘…restores art and criticism to the dangerous adventure that it is.’

The quote is attributed to Ryan Ruby. I audibly grumble. I don’t much care for Ryan Ruby. Why? A good question, but that is for another piece. I am not here to write about Ryan Ruby—I am here to write about A.V. I move past it to the synopsis. It tells me A.V. is exploring how we ‘inhabit works of art’ which shows us how ‘our sense of longing changes our relationship to [works of art]’. The word ‘panoply’ catches my eye. I read the sentence. This book is a ‘vividly rendered panoply of histories and myths from classical antiquity’. I chuckle once more (am I in a good mood?) as I think of the etymology of panoply—panoplia, ‘complete suit of armor’. I move on from this to the end of this synopsis:

‘We the Parasites both tells a strange love story and makes a slantwise argument about reading with the body, and what it ultimately means to know, and to want.’

I am tickled, which perhaps explains all the giggling. This book, so far, restores art and criticism to being a dangerous adventure, explores how we inhabit works of art and how longing changes our relationship to art. It has a panoply of histories and myths from classical antiquity. It is a love story. It is a slantwise argument about reading with the body, what it means to know, and what it means to want. I have questions. I see that there is more text, and so I hold on to these questions. I keep reading.

We see a small bio-blurb of A.V.; she is a critic, essayist, and historian of art. She writes scholarly work, and she writes on both visual culture and literature for publications ranging from…I had to check the acronyms to make sure I understood. I remember when only politicians were so obsessed with acronyms. Anyhow: TLS is Times Literary Supplement. LARB is the Los Angeles Review of Books. BOMB is…just BOMB. I wonder if anyone has ever tried to sneak this magazine through airport security. The magazine Hyperallergic makes an appearance. How do people pick the names for their magazines? What is in a name? Ishmael, come here. I have a question…

Finally, we get to the bottom. Another quote, this one from Lauren Elkin, author of Flaneuse: Women Walk The City:

‘A.V. Marraccini stops you in your tracks, urges you to think with her a while about the delicious joy of art, how we grow huge and terrifying on it, and how this thievery, this parasitism is necessary both for its continuance and for our own.’

Now I am at the bottom of the cover, and the questions roll in. The restoration of criticism and art to a dangerous adventure—dangerous how? I squint at the word inhabit suspiciously. And my longings (specifically to date Linda Cardellini and to live in Bordeaux, perhaps?) change my relationship with art…how? Apparently through the complete suit of armor of history and myths. Right? And finally, reading with the body…is there anything else we read with? Our vibes? Our eternal souls? Maybe with one’s third eye? Did I get possessed again?

The reason I enjoy beginning any reading of a new book with an overview of a book’s covers and flaps is because it is fun. Why is it fun? You learn about how the publisher, if not the author, wishes for you to see the book before you read it. They tell you not to judge a book by its cover, and yet the only point of the cover of a book is to try to frame the text that is to come. Fantasy books in the 1980’s put bulging biceps and voluptuous breasts on their covers for a reason—and the books of our more intellectual deforesters put bulging blurbs and voluptuous words like ‘panoply’ on them for similar reasons. 

And yet, I am no fearmonger regarding advertising, especially not here in these tentatively United States. Advertisement is our only high art, and without it our writers would starve. Further, I do not assume that advertising is, essentially, deceitful. Exaggerated? Sure. The average advertiser, of which publishing houses are the Shriners among circus folk, wants your attention more than they need your beliefs. This book wants my attention. And yet, it doesn’t seem sure what it wants me to pay attention to. I read the cover and felt as though, confronted by a less-than-slick copy writer, I was not told what product was being sold but rather was offered options—it could be about art and criticism and its dangers, or about inhabiting art and my relationship to it, or it might be a love story or a slantwise argument…

My anticipation soars. So much uncertainty. So many options! What will the book tell me? It is now time to stop judging the cover and start judging the text.

II

I begin to type this review as I close the book, having made it half way. The book is small, only 170 pages total. So why is that, only at page 85, do I feel like I am at the bottom of a well, yelling for Lassie? The answer to this is long, and coming about. But to be direct, I blame the text. You see, learned reader, the text of We the Parasites is organized into five parts of varying length, with the longest part being Part 1 and the shortest being Part 4. When one opens the book, the first thing one encounters is the full version for those partially referenced quotes on the back cover of the book. The full context does not really change the boiler plate bits we already saw; just a reference to the ‘erotics of criticism’ and Susan Sontag’s quote about the need for ‘an erotics of art’. I read them. I shrugged. Erotics of criticism? Of art? I passed this by. Once I got to the text of the book, I naively assumed, this and many other things would make sense. 

One is introduced, in Part 1, to any variety of metaphors, themes, and references; critics as fig wasps, Centaurs from both antiquity and Updike’s The Centaur, the idea of ‘rubbing two novels together like children who make two dolls “have sex”’, tics, bees, Twombly’s art, fish-louses, A.V.’s dreams about art theft and Genet’s The Thief’s Journal, lice, tapeworms and …by the time one gets to page 62, where Part 1 ends, one gets the feeling they are among a variety of sticker statues on an unkempt lawn. Where curiosity had drawn you to the assembled dreck out of awe for its sheer quantity, you spend most of your time negotiating small spaces and unclear pathways in the increasingly desperate attempt to leave.

And when one sees ‘Part 2’, one’s desperation turns into uncertainty. Will it get better? Or am I going back among the sticker statues? I continued from pages 62 to page 85, having given up hope but not curiosity. Part 2 begins with quotes from Blake and Xenophanes. We are then tossed upon a grill heated by Marraccini’s rage. The cause of this rage? Some ‘emeritus professor’ does not like a piece A.V. wrote. She tells us of his intellectual failures. She ‘bristles’. She imagines herself ‘eating him, the hapless professor, literally tearing apart the steaming guts of his corpse’. She ‘bares [her] teeth at you’. At me? Is this a warning for me, the critic? I note that the only difference between a smile and a hostile barring of teeth is intent. The rage continues; more references to the Greeks, the stated ambition that A.V. wishes to be ‘terrifying’. More references to Ancient Greece, this time the Furies and Eumenides. The emeritus professor, who became the hapless professor, becomes ‘the petty email man’. The raging continues. And continues. And…

At this point, I am more amused than anything. Anyone who has to tell you they are terrifying, who has to express it so bluntly, is never going to be terrifying. They have a lot in common with the Saturday morning cartoon villains of yesteryear, who played both the part of comic relief and the simplistic enemy to the ever chipper heroes of the day. A.V.’s rage is something of a monologue shouted at the reader, and as it goes on for five pages, one gets bored. Eyes begin skipping this word, jumping to that reference, sometimes checking to see how many pages sit between you and Part 3. I took personal notice of her use of the word ‘shrill’ on page 69. Not for its significance in the context of the text, but because it made me think of Gore Vidal, for whom the word ‘shrill’ was a word he loved to hate.

In Chapter 2, the rage subsides—or so we are told. COVID (‘the virus’) is offered like a time stamp. We are told A.V.’s ‘reflex is always to perform, dazzle’. As I considered this claim to perform (no need for the added ‘dazzle’, A.V.), I realized that, in trying to field all these metaphors, references, and anecdotes, I had not considered the aesthetics of this book. I was a bad critic for doing so…but a much happier reader before I committed myself to such a task. After all, Lauren Elkin gets one thing right; as I considered the prose of this book, I was stopped in my tracks. What she urges, however, isn’t for you to think (even with her) but to close the book. Take a few sentences from page 72:

‘If it was France I could maybe count on my barely-there credit, emerging belles lettres maybe, and parasitize my way to a breathing apparatus if I am dying.’

Or:

‘Since I mostly feed off dead things anyway, the art and the books, maybe I am suited for our new Necropolis.’

And:

‘Scraps of skyline, of memory, of urbanities which necessitate also, the risk of quick spread of disease. Is to feed off this, as I am writing now, to look at arts and things of death, an ignoble parasitism especially? A necrophilia?’

The word ‘maybe’ is employed like a stumble block in an old W.C. Fields production. While Oscar Wilde and Karl Kraus used to obsess over whether a comma should be added or removed, this sentiment never enters A.V.’s writing. To her the comma is almost decorative in the way Christmas lights in the middle of June are; distracting and out of place. She haphazardly uses them to string together words that quite clearly belong in separate sentences. Some editor should have come to her aid. The worst they could have done is shortened a book whose style makes it read like an torment Dante would sentence a character to in one of his circles of Hell.

From here, A.V. talks about the Romans—specifically Hadrian and Antinous. We are told of the love Hadrian had for the boy and about those mosaic floors that now sit in the Vatican. We also get this sentence: ‘Antinous too became a cast-off thing, and if we are to believe he cast himself into the Nile.’ There is no need for the ‘and if’, just an ‘if’ please. From here we get hymns to a love A.V. is too busy for, and we hear about wasps and maggots again, and more about Twombly as A.V. tries to rise to the heights of poetry using the carpet tiles of her prose. And when carpet tiles are dropped from on high, they only shatter—much like my anticipation by the time page 85 came around. I check how many pages I have left. Part 3 comes on page 95. I switch my tea to a pilsner and tell myself, with unconvincing encouragement, that ‘it’s only ten more pages to Part 3’. 

Ten pages too many.

III

Parts 3 and 4 are mercifully short, and Part 5 was only enjoyable because the end of this book was in sight. I gave an audible cheer. I have decided that Part 3 is the only part worth discussing out of these last three parts. Why? Well, you’ll see:

Part 3 begins as usual for this book. A.V. tells us about time—or mentions the word, before she moves on to discussing reading Rilke under neon lights. And then…Twombly is back again. COVID makes an appearance every now and again with its rubber time stamp. And then it is back to Rilke, this time discussing that severed torso of Apollo and the command that ‘you must change your life’. Gore Vidal read this at a time when he was writing for television, and it caused him to go back to writing novels, starting with that wonderful historical fiction Julian. As for A.V., this acts as a segue to…Twombly. 

The rest of Part 3 is a balance between quoting passages from Rilke, the Petelia Gold Tablet, and the plentiful references to…Twombly. And yet, Part 3 is a fair bit better than the rest of this book—after all, we at least get to see some criticism in action. A.V. gives us her interpretation of Rilke through a direct reference to herself. I was rather happy to see this, and I appreciated the pattern in these 27 pages. By the end, I concluded that this is how A.V. writes criticism—to read a passage, see a work of art, read a book and then ask herself how it relates to her. There is an inner vision central to her form of criticism.

As I made my way through Part 3, with its thicket of Twomblys and Rilke, Orpheus and Romans, I had a realization about what so irritated me about this book. It was not just the prose, or the commas, or the way you get hit over the head with every metaphor presented. The learned reader will read this book and expect it to have something to say. Something about art and criticism, say. Maybe about the relationship of art to our longings. Perhaps one expects that slantwise argument to be made. When this doesn’t pan out, then one might expect this book to dramatize something; perhaps that love story we were promised, or any other actual relationship of the very few that exist in this book. 

As one gets to the end, the reader feels like they were just dog walked by a tour guide who didn’t actually know where she was going. One finds themselves tricked into a conversation with that one aunt you are always trying to avoid because she tells you stories that do not have a clear beginning or end, and which go on and on until you decide the only way to end the conversation is to end it all. One finds themselves reading a book with nothing to say and a really earnest desire to say it. This book does not restore art and criticism to anything—it mentions it. This book only stops you in your tracks when you stumble over the commas and ‘maybes’ and out orderings of its grammar. It is not a love story or a slantwise argument or any of its advertised claims. These claims are shot gun beads that, by some miracle of physics, all missed the target.

This book is a memoir. It is a memoir that focuses mostly on the visions, thoughts, dreams, distress and triumphs of exactly one person: A.V. Marraccini. Every subject its cover claims this book ‘explores’ is never explored. They are mentioned. Sometimes they are asserted. Each time, it is brought up and, without fail, A.V. tells us her opinions on them, or she weaves them into an anecdote about herself. If it weren’t for Part 3, no criticism would be done in this book, it would only discuss it in relation to lectures and petty email men and walks in Primrose Hill. Even with Part 3, criticism is only inadvertently expressed as a relationship between the inner visions of a critic and a work of art. It is always more important, in this book, for all thoughts to be contextualized within the recording of life of its author, rather than her thoughts about life.

This is not a bad way to do criticism, even if it is a bad way to write about criticism. And yet, We the Parasites doesn’t seem to care very much if its opinions on criticism are expressed. In fact, We the Parasites doesn’t seem to not want to express anything at all. Its text is as uncertain as its cover; neither can tell us what it has to say. And that is because it has a lot of inner visions but nothing at all to say.

I put this royal red book down, situating it on top of the stack of books that sit to the left of my computer desk, all waiting to be reviewed. I sigh deeply, getting to the bottom of my glass of pilsner as I get to the end of this review. I will not be calling A.V. Marraccini to the stand in this never ending trial that criticism is put through, nor will I add her book into evidence. It is not entirely the fault of the book; after all, it is not about criticism, it is a memoir of one critic. But where the book is at fault, it is because the case made for the kind of criticism it mentions is deadly to the field of criticism at a time when the mob moves against the near extinct species that we call critics.

It is deadly because criticism that relies on only inner vision is a form of criticism in retreat. At a time, like so many other times, that criticism needs to go on the offensive, to sound the retreat to inner visions is to accept defeat. 

We the Parasites is a short book; mercifully so for the learned reader. And yet, were it submitted as evidence in favor of criticism, this short book would become a short case–in opposition to criticism. Were it read into evidence for the kangaroo court, I think by the time one gets to the middle of it, the mob would have criticism strung up from a tree, and criticism would finally be found guilty.