'Why,' Peter Carey's partner, Alison Summers, asked earlier that week, 'do the literary editors of newspapers give books to reviewers they know will hate them?' Let us momentarily allow that this notion is true, for it is, in part, at times, at least. The salient fact is that the literary editors of newspapers are more often than not, by training and experience, journalists, with an interest in news and controversy. A review fed on 'hatred' or at least respectful demurring is more likely to breed controversy and generate news and possibly even sell books than one deriving from 'love' or at least polite admiration. The literary editor as journalist likes nothing so much as a 'stir', even if (s)he regards that stir as nothing more than 'all good fun'. Those expressions -- `stir' and `all good fun' -- were certainly used by one newspaper literary editor of my acquaintance (I have served under at least ten in my time, five of them at The Sydney Morning Herald) , were indeed used when my agent was moved to protest on my behalf, but not at my urging, about the person to whom one of my collections of reviews, columns, and essays had been given.

She was protesting not so much about the review as the reviewer -- in her and my opinion, it was an insulting choice; to have called this reviewer shallow and scatterbrained would have been a monumental understatement . To which the editor replied that it was `all good fun', and good for a `stir'. I tell this story not merely to indicate that I who, as an opinionated columnist of long standing, surely have no right to resent criticism, also have my batrachian moments, but to cast light on how some literary editors conceive of the role of reviews and reviewers. And who is to say that they are completely mistaken? It is, of course, a tactical error to write complaining letters to them for, as Paul Fussell observes in his wise essay, 'Being Reviewed. The A.B.M. [Author's Biggest Mistake] and its Theory' (reprinted in his The Boy Scout Handbook and Other Observations , 1982) , after citing three pages of ABMs from the TLS, the NYRB, the NYTBR, and the New Statesman, to leave acronyms behind: 'Editors are very fond of printing these letters. One reason is fairly obvious; they add the drama of personal conflict to their normally grey pages.' He invokes Boswell on Johnson: 'He [Johnson] remarked that attacks on authors did them much service. ''A man who tells me my play is very bad is less my enemy than he who lets it die in silence. A man whose business it is to be talked of is much helped by being attacked."' (Perhaps my generation may take comfort from this, as from so much of Johnson's great good sense, in the month in which Mark Davis's Gangland has been published. How could Helen Garner, and Germaine Greer, and Robert Hughes, and Paddy McGuinness, and Richard Neville, and David Williamson possibly resent being opinionatedly confronted?)

We have recently witnessed a glaring example of the literary editor as journalist in The Age's reporting of Janet Malcolm's review of the U.S. edition of Helen Garner's The First Stone in The New Yorker for July 7. A news story by literary editor Andrew Clark headed, 'Garner's Book Slated in US', reported that The First Stone 'has been slammed' by Janet Malcolm. Those of us who have read Malcolm's review find it difficult to find the 'slamming'. The Age's sensationalising seems more a case of 'slam drunk' than 'slam dunk'. We should however note that Clark was offering a news story rather than a review, and that headlines, like screamers, are a genre unto themselves, obliged to be attention-grabbing if not attention-seeking. And negative criticism can sell books. Paul Fussell notes that Anthony Powell was so moved by an unfavorable notice in the then stuffy Times Literary Supplement of e.e. cummings' The Enormous Room that he went straight out and bought a copy.