Defenders of Chuck Palahniuk’s “Diary,” which recently got a bad review in Salon, suggest that the critic was predisposed to not liking the book and therefore ought not to have reviewed it. Alex Good begs to differ: “This reaction struck me as bizarre. As Auden pointed out, every critic is at heart a polemicist. If you think a book is representative of something that is wrong with our literary culture you have a duty to take it on. There is nothing personal about it. Alas, in a celebrity culture everything is personal.”