Novelist and critic Lionel Shriver has a piece in The Telegraph on why any sane or self-respecting writer would review books. “Tossing off reviews of other people’s novels when I’m poised to receive reviews of my own feels like throwing knives in a rubber room,” she writes. With a new novel, The Post-Birthday World, coming out, the best plan would have been to lie low or praise widely. Instead, she tore new ones for both Norman Mailer and Graham Swift. Why does she do it?

I am an idiot. Given that publishing honest and thus sometimes unfavourable assessments of the work of colleagues is violently at odds with a writer’s self-interest, it’s surprising that literary editors can cajole any author into reviewing. But then, plenty of writers like me don’t know what’s good for them, and some writers plain need the money.

Why is writing criticism self-destructive? Because reviews are deeply personal. The average book represents years of hard work. Most novelists will have invested heart and soul into their text, imbuing characters with a measure of themselves. Although a necessary conceit, the line between the writer and his book is a smudge. The experience of having your book rubbished is of having your character rubbished - for all the world to read. The adversaries you bring into being by writing negative appraisals are like diamonds: forever.

Of course, one thing a writer-reviewer can do to help ward off all those adversaries is to write a long piece for a major newspaper that makes clear who those adversaries are, and thus blunts their attacks in advance. Though Shriver refers at one point to her “naïvete,” she performs a clever preemptive strike on at least one hostile critic:

The professional critic Jonathan Yardley - a humourless man, I discovered too late - despised my sixth novel. After a brief email exchange that went off the rails, he dispensed with the artificial distinction between author and book and now unabashedly despises me. If Yardley ever gets his mitts on one of my novels again, I am toast in the Washington Post.

You see? Now, if Jonathan Yardley does review her book harshly, it can be chalked up to sour grapes. Very clever. Never let it be said that these supposedly self-destructive writer-reviewers don’t have equally strong instincts for self-preservation.

(We should point out that Q&Q has a number of published writers who regularly risk their careers, reputations, and the occasional launch-party snub to review for us – Mary Soderstrom, Zachariah Wells, James Grainger, Christine Walde, George Fetherling, Robert J. Wiersema, Sarah Ellis, Joanne Findon, John Wilson, Etta Kaner, Darren Wershler-Henry, Maureen Garvie, Paul William Roberts, Heather Birrell, and John Lorinc, to mention a few. Brave fools, all.)