Picture, if you will, a kind of revision of Frankenstein, or “Herbert West — Reanimator,” or really any kind of narrative in which an enterprising, hyper-enlightened medical student sees fit to conduct a bit of necromancy. He or she sets out in search of the freshest possible parts, stitches them together, and through some Elon Musk–level sorcery brings that which was once dead back to life. Now imagine that this creature then does . . . nothing. It does not escape, it does not demand companionship, it does not acquire knowledge. It just sits and fidgets, maybe shuffles outside for a few minutes. Far from embodying man’s hubris or existential dread, it achieves a kind of stasis, and dies in relative peace, leaving only the faintest impressions upon the world.

This is a crude and dull metaphor, I admit, and one that sounds a little too much like a neutered Edward Scissorhands the more I think about it, but it is also the best way I can describe the beast that is Better Living Through Criticism, by New York Times film critic A. O. Scott. Like the vaguely Johnny Depp-ish monstrosity I’ve conjured, Better Living Through Criticism is a book born of bold ideas, given life through stitch work from several seemingly disparate sources: from philosophy, Greek mythology, poetry, fictional characters, avant garde artists, essayists, obscure academics, and other critics. Yet it never really rises up to fully live, whether happily or menacingly.

Better Living Through Criticism is an uncommon kind of book. I started it not knowing quite what to expect, and managed to finish it still not really knowing. We imagine much-talked about idea books like these (and, let’s be frank, their reviews) to be rhetorical barnburners, to ignite conversations in the kind of parties you see in Annie Hall into scotch-symposiums on The Way We Live Now. We imagine them to be a stick of dynamite wrapped like candy — to borrow Lewis Mumford’s assessment of The Theory of the Leisure Class, the Ulysses of idea books. But Scott’s book is not quite that, and I’m not certain it intends to be.

Better Living Through Criticism opens with one of four dialogues the author carries on with himself. So already we’re off to a less than promising start. Here he lays out the germ of the book, which was effectively a rude tweet from Samuel L. Jackson in response to Scott’s negative review of The Avengers. Not exactly a “General Kael” moment, but one whose ensuing Internet backlash seems to have sent Scott on a quest to, if not defend his job exactly, get to the heart of the matter of why we judge, and perhaps more grandly, to defend the act of thought itself. He hopes to himself that the book is “a celebration of art and imagination” as opposed to a “manifesto against stupidity and laziness.” It will be “an examination of our inborn drive to cultivate delight and of the various ways we refine that impulse.”

Through six chapters, Scott proceeds to do something close to the task he laid out for himself. He defends criticism as an art, examines how we cultivate taste, defends the honor of being wrong, and wrestles with the contradictions inherent in criticism and the increasing elusiveness of what exactly constitutes the job title “critic” in a world overstuffed with things to react to and mediums with which to react. The structure of each chapter is roughly the same: an inviting, conversational opening (“Everybody likes to be right. It feels good to win an argument . . . ”) before diving headlong into a digressive funhouse of (mostly) high-culture references and examples to attempt to illustrate his points. Chapter Two goes from summarizing Kant and contrasting him with Burke to a kind of eros-heavy triptych of Marina Abramović, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Philip Larkin. Scott, of course, is knowing and well-versed in all of this, and is a clear enough expositor. Yet the information easily gives way to overload, usually clouding the gist of his argument until the final paragraphs in which he ties it, however forcibly, back in.

#share#Scott has points to make, of course, but, as other writers have noted, they are largely points we already know. In fact, some of them are drier renditions of ideas and opinions put more succinctly by others. His contention that the great writers and artists we revere where “tools of patriarchy, Western hegemony, capitalist dominance, and other bad things” recalls Dave Hickey’s point that “bad taste is real taste . . . and good taste is the residue of someone else’s privilege.” When he says that “no one will tell you that you have a duty to like, or even look at, certain things” he echoes Brian Eno’s dictum that “culture is everything that we don’t have to do.”

This approach continues into the latter half of the book as Scott engages in mini-explainers on the cycle of “buzz,” on contrarianism, on professional critics’ perception of bloggers as basement-dwelling malcontents and bloggers’ view of professional critics as coddled guardians of privilege, and on the general state of media. In the course of this analysis, The New York Review of Books, the academy, and Yelp are brought under the same vocational umbrella.

The book’s weaknesses, then, are twofold, as I see it.

That Scott constructed Better Living Through Criticism from an idiosyncratic patchwork is perfectly fine. It has an air of Cyril Connolly about it. But that form gets along about as well as a freshman-year roommate with his New York Times–thinkpiece-style exposition. The book is not without its straight-shooting clarifications, to be sure, nor is it devoid of clever turns (“modern culture, as surveyed in the annals of modern criticism, looks like a series of funerals punctuated by episodes of zombiism”), but the wielding of his knowledge and the briskness of his assessments can, at worst, have an effect that risks patronizing nearly every reader. This is to say nothing of the self-interviews, where attempts at self-aware levity read more like anxiety.

Once one digs out from under all of his digressions and into the light, one mostly stands in a fog. Scott himself warns against “scrambling too hastily towards a temperate middle ground,” and then goes on to do precisely that. He describes and contextualizes conflicts such as the culture war and old versus new media, and notes mostly how cyclical they are. (Today’s tweet storm was yesterday’s blog post, or ’zine tirade, or pamphlet polemic.) This is not entirely unfair. No one really has much clarity on the future of criticism as a profession. But the more-things-change-the-more-they-stay-the-same line of reasoning he is offering is more resignation than position.

This leaves one to wonder who, exactly, the book is for. Scott seems to be speaking from the Olympian heights of criticism where the likes of Mencken, Wilson, and Kael dwelt, when the hegemony of print allowed seemingly fewer opinions a longer reach. Yet his audience is the mortals in today’s more fractured world, where the overabundance of information gives way to subgenres and sub-reddits. It is as if, to borrow yet another metaphor, Prometheus came to earth and, upon finding the world well-lit by fire, just chained himself to the rock.