Hunting the snark is a more common pastime than Charles Lutwidge Dodgson could ever have imagined. “They sought it with thimbles, they sought it with care;/ They pursued it with forks and hope;/ They threatened its life with a railway-share;/ They charmed it with smiles and soap.” These days, it seems, his mad crew would need neither forks nor railway shares — a simple glance at the literary pages of any newspaper would apparently suffice.

The novelist Alice Hoffman got herself into hot water last week when she objected — via Twitter — to a review in The Boston Globe of her latest novel, The Story Sisters. The critic Roberta Silman opined that “this new novel lacks the spark of the earlier work. Its vision, characters, and even the prose seem tired.” Hoffman tweeted that Silman was “a moron”, and posted Silman’s phone number and e-mail, inviting fellow-tweeters to “tell her what u think of snarky critics”. Hoffman later apologised and took herself off Twitter. Recently, too, the usually genteel Alain de Botton lost his cool (that would be putting it mildly) over Caleb Crain’s review in The New York Times of his book, The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work. If you’re not squeamish, check out Crain’s blog, steamthing.com, for details; suffice here to say that de Botton included the phrase “I will hate you till the day I die” in the comment he posted online.

I’m interested in the definition of snark — and I am not alone. David Denby, the film critic of The New Yorker, is so interested that he has written a book about it, to be published by Picador in September (what will the reviews be like, do you think?). It will be “an essay about a strain of nasty, knowing abuse spreading like pinkeye through the national conversation” — and ruining that conversation, he contends.

Let’s be grateful that he’s opening the debate; not all criticism is snarky. You can read Silman’s review of The Story Sisters on boston.com. Is it snarky? I think not. It’s true that she doesn’t like the book, but she sets out her case clearly in a tone that’s neither knowing nor backbiting. That’s not snarky. That’s a bad review. Authors don’t love those, traditionally, but they learn that it’s part of the game.

In any case, the world would be the poorer without reviews such as the famous dismissal by Dorothy Parker, who wrote, as Constant Reader, of A. A. Milne’s The House at Pooh Corner: “Tonstant weader fwowed up.”

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