realthog | the occasional lit-crit intervention

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the occasional lit-crit intervention

So there I was minding my own business tonight when into my mailbox popped this:

Just finished reading The Far Enough Window [a novel I wrote a dozen or so years ago] for the purpose of writing a review.

I found the book fascinating up to a point. The point is the place where Joanna returns to what she thinks is her present time and sees herself lying in the bed. The problem for me were all the alternating dimensions, I guess you'd call them, considering she was first one place, and then another enough different times as to cause confusion. Having finished the book, I see no reason for all of those alternating scenes, broken in places by other scenes, always returning to her in the house as the truth for Joanna comes to light. Not only do those scenes seem unnecessary and confusing, they also slow down the story.

I don't mean to be harsh. I only mean to let you know what one reader thinks.

The instinctive reaction of any sentient author, on receiving this kind of unsolicited insult, is to write back a measured response somewhat along the lines of the late Abigail Frost's patented expression:

Fuck off and die.

Me, though, I've spent a small fortune on online courses to help me improve my social skills, so I knew I should strive for something a bit mellower, a bit more considered -- something more like

Please fuck off and die.

In the end, of course, I did nothing this crass. I sent a reply so dripping with cordiality, courtesy and sincerity you coulda puked:

Thank you for your note.

I'm not 100% sure, to be honest, why you're writing in advance of your review to let me know your opinions, but I'm grateful nevertheless.

"Not only do those scenes seem unnecessary and confusing"

I should hope they're confusing; I very much disagree that they're unnecessary. I was trying to do a little more with the novel than just produce an amiable yarn.

I was offering a bit of yer tactful here. The novel was an attempt -- during an era when every fantasy story involving Fairyland was about the cruel, incomprehensible Sidhe -- to reclaim for fantasy the Fairyland of the Victorian authors; I wasn't trying to demolish what the other fantasists were doing, just to make sure that something I thought had a wonderful vitality of its own wasn't lost. There were a few references to Carroll and Alice in Wonderland/Through the Looking-glass involved (these were picked up mightily by most of the book's few reviewers) and buckets more to the works, for both children and adults, of the great George MacDonald (these were largely ignored or unperceived by the reviewers). However, the novel's by no means simply a recursive work; rather, it's a metafiction, in that one of its significant concerns is to comment on the nature of fantasy literature itself. O' course, I hoped to keep all that heavy stuff back for when the reader thought about things later, so I gave the book the subtitle: A Fairytale for Grown-Ups of All Ages.

One reviewer cottoned on precisely to what I was doing -- the Foundation's librarian Andy Sawyer (

andysawyer) -- and the rest, usually in abashingly flattering terms, treated the book as a more straightforward fantasy novel/fairytale, even as they quite clearly understood there was something a bit more going on. (No criticism implied: my intention was that it work on this level too.)

Whatever, I was startled by tonight's correspondent's attitude, which struck me as displaying the kind of blithe arrogance you expect from pre-adolescents whose minds are aswim with the realization that they've finally learned how to read without moving their lips. This wouldn't have been my interpretation had I come across the opinion in a published review: then I'd simply have shaken my head wryly, a wistful half-smile toying with the fringes of my mouth as I whispered -- but who might hear? -- the immortal words of Kilgore Trout: So it goes. You gotta learn to take the dimwits with the smooth.

(As you may have guessed, I don't belong to that auctorial school which regards adverse reviews as things from which one might learn.

(Well, you learn something: you learn who'd be best to put first up against the wall come the revolution . . .)

After sending my almost unendurably seemly note, I found an idle moment and did some googling. My correspondent proved to be not the bubbly high-school cheerleader pubertoid I'd assumed but someone who is, at least to guess from her photo, in her 30s -- a presumed grownup, in other words. She has a blog which purports to review.

The subjects are . . . well, the first review I encountered was of a book of Bible stories for kids, so I knew I wasn't going to be compulsively seeking out the RSS feed option.

Reading on down, I found there were items about a few fantasy novels of the kind I'm never going to read and then -- huzzah -- a review of a movie Pam and I watched recently, Gone, Baby, Gone. We thought it was a surprisingly good movie, even though this expatriate Brit could often have done with subtitles. (Laugh derisively? Right: Next time I see you I'll give you a dose of raw Aberdonian. That's the English language too, fit rod wid ye think it wisnae.)

I boggled a tad at my correspondent's review, however. My memory of the movie isn't overwhelmingly sharp -- we were watching it late at night just for fun rather than with critical faculties akimbo -- but I do recall that the character played by Amy Madigan, the person who commissioned our somewhat numb P.I.s to find a kidnapped child, was not the child's grandmother but her aunt. And then next I came across a smug, nudge-nudge, I'm-an-insider-type hint that the movie's star Casey Affleck might be the son of its director Ben Affleck; what's bizarre here is not the ignorance of the fact that they're brothers but the obliviousness to the idea that it might be a bright idea to check in, say, Wikipedia or the IMDB before trying to play the smartypants.

What really got to me, though, came next. It seems Ed Harris's claim to fame is that he was good in The Abyss, although he's appeared in some damn' fine movies since. This is kind of like saying that Tilda Swinton was true triff in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and not bad in her various other movies.

The point of all this is not to defend my novel (contact me offlist and I'll tell you how wonderful it really is) and not even to mock someone who thought it was her Christian duty to e-mail me for purposes of gratuitous unpleasantness, but to demonstrate that, while the information revolution that has come about through the rise of the internet has probably overall had beneficial effects, one of its detrimental aspects has been the precipitous decline in the average standard of reviewing. Note the word "average": the best reviewers are still ace, whether they appear online or in print (and some of the best of all might never have been discovered by the old media); the average has been dragged radically downward not because of any deterioration of the best but because of the extraordinary proliferation of the worst.

One of the advantages of the old media was that it cost money for someone to publish a review; they therefore expected reviewers to meet some kind of professional standard, however low. And low that professional bar very often was; but at least one knew that a review in (to use UK examples) the Exeter Express and Echo was likely to be less reliable than one in the Independent. Nowadays we're very often choosing between one blog and another; far more importantly, the corporate book-industry gods who decide whether authors' careers thrive or die, whether authors pay their mortgages or suffer foreclosures, are increasingly relying on the views of people who're unwilling to test those views against anyone other than themselves.

Don't believe me? Consider how important the Amazon reader review has become despite the known enormous corruption in this area. Before, say, Hillary Clinton's memoir was published it built up an impressive number of adverse reviews on Amazon, all written by people who could not possibly have read the book by the time they were writing their review. (The one that made me giggle a lot was by the dittohead who claimed he'd found the book so bad his friendly local bookseller had taken it back from him and refunded the money. Yeah, right.) All those reviews were complete fiction; yet, somewhere, they'll have been totted up by a mindless computer and believed important by a mindless Borders buyer . . . or perhaps I'm being tautological.

It's possible, I suppose, that my correspondent was hoping to initiate some kind of literary debate; but I think this is not so. My guess is that she was trying to play a power game: I should have cringed and supplicated on receiving her stern warning.

Well, dammit, I'm proud of The Far-Enough Window, so my response to this sort of bully-pulpit stuff is . . . hey, shucks, I quoted it above . . . a resounding

Fuck off and die.

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I feel like saluting you, with a prideful tear in my eye.

Well, shucks. A manly shrug to you by way of return.

What boggles me is the people that charge money to do such reviews. Actually, that doesn't. It's that other people are prepared to *pay* them when there are so many places who'll do it for free.

I find something infinitely corrupt in the notion of publishers (or authors) paying reviewers.

Funny how some people can give a criticism more easily than a smile.

I wonder if the email you got was copied to the rest of his/her critique group.

Oh, and thanks for 'dittohead'. Great insult, I'll remember that one :)

It wasn't the criticism that . . . disturbed me, it was the gratuitous effort to send me a snarky e-mail.

Oh, and thanks for 'dittohead'. Great insult, I'll remember that one :)

Believe it or not, it's the term Rush Limbaugh fans use -- with pride! -- to describe themselves.

I think the appropriate response in such a case is not the baldly brutal FOAD, but the slightly more subtle "Why your mother didn't consider abortion I cannot understand."

Oh, I dunno . . .

For use on the next excessively smarmy fundie to cross your path.

"For use on the next excessively smarmy fundie to cross your path."

Like "What a pity your parents weren't gay"?

That might also work. As might a polite inquiry as to the colour of crayon she'll write it in.

I think you may find relief in this thought "when her novel comes out, you can review it." but of course, IT'S NEVER GOING TO COME OUT. if Salman Rushdie trashes your book, or Joe Haldeman says the ending is too drawn out, or Anne Rice chimes in that it needs more teen vampires, listen to them and take their words to heart. until then, I think the appropriate response is just "thanks for taking the time to write."

your book sold, it's in print, people are reading it, it's all good. though it is a testament to who we are that in a cacophony of praise the one un-satisfied teenager is the voice we hear at night while we're trying to fall asleep.

i wonder how hillary clinton does it.

Criticism from Salman or Joe I might (just conceivably) listen to, but . . .

There's a difference between criticism from someone who knows what they're talking about, and criticism from someone who doesn't.

It's a shame that a lot of people are apparently content with not thinking too hard about the books they read for "reviews". It's one thing to identify a feature of a book and say, "I don't think this works" -- but it seems as though this person has not even stopped to think about what the feature she's talking about is there for.

And then to e-mail you and tell you so... Personally, I never bother to tell an author if I've written a negative review of his/her work, because what's the point? They're unlikely to agree, or even have sympathy for the reviewer's viewpoint -- particularly when the critique is as ill thought-out as this one.

(NB. I'm not trying to suggest that I never get it wrong, never make a mistake in reviewing -- of course I do; anyone who writes reviews probably will at one time or another. But I do think it is part of my task as a reviewer to engage with and think about what I'm reviewing as fully as I can. It saddens me to come across reviewers who apparently don't think so.)

As you say, every reviewer, no matter how good, gets it wrong sometimes; one learns to put up with the occasional ~~moro~~ . . . ~~idio~~ . . . off-target review. (More difficult to accept are the "reviews" by people who patently haven't bothered to read the book -- I got one of those a few months ago.)

What really got to me here wasn't that the individual was, going by all the available evidence, a poor/careless reader; it was the arrogance of her sending me her views, as if I had any interest whatsoever in what this complete stranger might think.

I am, of course, now waiting with the bated proverbial for her review itself.

I'm curious: would it have made any difference if she'd backed up her criticisms properly? Or if she'd liked the book? (Presumably it would in the second case...)

I'm curious: would it have made any difference if she'd backed up her criticisms properly?

What would have made a difference might have been the nature of the criticisms -- if they were well thought out and constructive. But really, even so, they should have been kept for the review itself.

(Presumably it would in the second case...)

Very much so! I'm not quite sure why, but the two circumstances -- contacting with praise vs contacting with dispraise -- aren't true converses: spreading a little happiness is meritworthy, but spreading a little misery? Not so much.

Dead right. Contacting you personally to make sure you knew they didn't like your book = way too much free time.

You know I like your writing - but with reviews I'm firmly in the "Only good reviews" camp. If a book sucks, why publicize it more? Why not devote time to pointing readers towards GOOD books instead of trying to point out the LOUSY ones?

But to give a book a crappy review, and then point it out (in ADVANCE) to the author... yeah, no thanks.

"with reviews I'm firmly in the "Only good reviews" camp. If a book sucks, why publicize it more? Why not devote time to pointing readers towards GOOD books instead of trying to point out the LOUSY ones?"

I both agree and disagree. There's definitely a purpose, when the marketing depts of publishing conglomerates and bookselling chains are ramming it down the public throat that some heap of steaming bullshit is a literary masterpiece, for reviewers to say that, au contraire, readers should avoid it like the plague lest they find themselves victims of what's essentially a con trick. In that way, the reviewer is making a probably futile but nevertheless valid attempt to contribute to the raising of standards, or at least toward ameliorating their yet further degradation -- should such a thing be possible. I know you can think, and certainly so can I, of dozens or scores of books/authors who should, in the public interest, be treated to a dose of the Emperor's New Clothes principle.

So in that sense there's a definite role for the negative review.

The reviews I find most useful are the ones that point out both the flaws and the glories of the book in question: then I know if it's likely to interest me or not.

Hey - wasn't sure if you saw this, but I thought it would interest you:

http://syndicated.livejournal.com/larbalestier/365322.html

I particularly liked what Justine said after Adrienne's quote.

Well, here's a somehow relevant bit from the latest issue of Ansible, which popped into my mailbox just a few moments before your comment did:

WHO WAS THAT MASKED MAN? June saw familiar fun and games at Amazon.com as a posse of anonymous reviewers with strangely similar styles ambushed fantasy author Patrick Rothfuss -- and his much-praised, bestselling debut novel -- with copious one-star reviews, a 'rothfuss is a fraud' discussion thread, and claims that all the five-star feedback came from the author plus friends and family. Recalling _Ansible_ 219 et al, our informant expected follow-up recommendations of _really good_ fantasy by George R.R. Martin, Robert Jordan, and Robert Stanek ... but no. Interestingly, though, one of Rothfuss's attackers ('Andrew') had a reviewing history confined to exactly three authors: he also rubbished books by David Louis Edelman and Jim C. Hines, who by sheer coincidence had both blogged conspicuously about the self-promotion of Robert Stanek. Then various Rothfuss attackers started to plug a particular writer by 'tagging' him in their Amazon profiles, and (although these tags quickly vanished when someone blew the whistle), the lucky author proved to be none other than Robert Stanek. [AW]

Another farkin' idiot who shd FU&DIE.

Love, C.

If you want to put it succinctly, yes.

Weird that she wrote to you. She's a nut. Don't let her get under your skin. You're the published writer with awards: she isn't. Obviously she knows nothing about writing (especially Fantasy) else she'd have never emailed you such a ridiculous note.

"Don't let her get under your skin."

I haven't -- I thought (and think) the whole thing was very funny.

When I found her blog I also found that it linked to a site advertising a freelance-editorial company in which she seems to be involved. My suspicion (which may be awry) is that she's been sending similar notes to lots of supposedly rich'n'gullible authors in the hope of drumming up some business -- you know, I was supposed to write back saying "Gaw blimey, Lucille, I shoulda known that orl along, wot wouldn't I give to 'ave a skilled editor wot'd point these ~~greivous~~ grievous ~~floors~~ flaws out unto me!" -- at which point, quick as a flash, she could leap in with: "Fear not! For I -- yeah, moi, none autre (as they say in Greece) -- is the one wot can help you sort out your syntacks and things (for a modest five-figure fee payable in advance, we take PayPal), though I ain't the tops in getting my verbs to agree with my nouns."

Is my guess.

'Prolly.

The Internet is an interesting place where we can meet exciting people and make new friends.

yeah

Well, dammit, I'm proud of The Far-Enough Window, so my response to this sort of bully-pulpit stuff is . . . hey, shucks, I quoted it above . . . a resounding

Fuck off and die.

This made me giggle helplessly for an hour.

And I agree, the downside to the internet is that everyone now has an audience.

Glad to have given a little pleasure, ma'am . . . and apologies about the French.

... People do that?

I try to ignore the fact that I've reviewed a few of their books in my general online interactions with authors, but more importantly, unless the author specifically offers me his/her book for review, I do not, under any possible circumstances, even notify them that I have already posted the review. Ever. Yikes.

I don't pretend that I'm a pro -- at the moment, I'm a professional data entry wench -- but I at least like to retain a certain amount of dignity, and that means that in general, I don't rip books to shreds unless 1.) the author can handle it (i.e. s/he has sold, say, a million books and a movie already) or 2.) it drove me that crazy and I have no personal connection with the author, the story, the publisher, the agent, the editor, the city in which the book was set, etc. . . . Which means I think I've shredded three books to date, out of about 300 reviews.

(OK, I'm mostly popping in to say, IT WASN'T ME!)

"IT WASN'T ME!"

I knew that! Just look at how badly her e-mail is written.

This issue is, for me, a peculiar one; I review DVDs. I do this for a site that does not charge me money to post my reviews. The DVD's themselves, often expensive Box Sets, I get for free, and of course it is quite easy to have such things converted to common currency when I'm done with them. I have no qualms about any of this, but I like to think that I have no illusions of superiority either. My opinion is worth no more than any one else's; the fact that I'm profiting off of it means nothing more than that I'm a lucky fuck who was at the right place at the right time.

The arrogance found in most internet-reviews is disgusting, and has actually served to turn me off most criticism altogether (Roger Ebert;s still got it, though). Your little helper was a surprisingly mild case, in fact. As you mention, it is likely she was just hoping you would hire her, in which case I applaud her initiative. You could have gotten an e-mail from someone who actually wanted to tell you how you should write books.

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the occasional lit-crit intervention

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