3. "Snark," by David Denby (2009)

All throughout this slim volume, I found myself nodding at one of David Denby's points or shaking my head at the next debasing example of snark he had retrieved. It'd be easy to draw a thought-bubble above Denby's author photo and write, "Get off my lawn!" but the fact is that he's right. Snark is a dead-end, and it's about time someone diagnosed it. Whether Denby succeeds is another matter.

My own rudimentary definition of snark has always been that it's insult simply for the sake of insulting, without some aspiration for social change (satire) or to expose hypocrisy (irony), and that there's never a standard to which its practitioners hold themselves to. It's easy to make fun of everything, but without some idea of what you actually do like, those insults just become hollow and exhausting, and, most of all, every bit as predictable as the people snarkers rail against. If you like something, that means you stand to be judged by X amount of other people, and the snark generation is paranoid of being judged.

Denby, to some extent, covers all of those points, and yet I'm totally underwhelmed by his book as a whole. He does a nice job giving us a primer of snark's history, and he competently identifies snark as a growing problem. But we all know this. Who's going to disagree that what Denby defines as snark has become the prevailing tone of our generation? It's everywhere. Seinfeld, (whose motto, recall, was "No hugging, no learning"), feels almost quaint these days. But snark relies on words, and words are just the expression of deeper feelings and motivations. As such, this book feels like half an argument, with the psychic and more lasting implications of snarky behavior left for another author.