Tagged: Reviews

The Last Policeman

Still, the conscientious detective is obliged to examine the question of motive in a new light, to place it within the matrix of our present unusual circumstance. The end of the world changes everything, from a law-enforcement perspective.
The Last Policeman, Ben H. Winters

Post-apocalyptic fiction is not uncommon, and indeed has been quite unavoidable in recent years. Pre-apocalyptic stories, on the other hand–stories set in the shadow of a known and anticipated end of the world, or at least end of the world as we know it–are rarer. On the Beach is to some extent–much of the novel’s power comes from the inevitability of the radiation clouds’ southward trek–but most end-of-the-world fiction is more interested in the aftermath than in the lead-up.

Ben H. Winters’ The Last Policeman is very solidly a pre-apocalyptic story; indeed, it closes well before the anticipated apocalypse (though with two more books to come in the series, there’s a good chance that the end will arrive). Set in a recognizably contemporary United States, the doom that will be visited on the world comes in the form of an asteroid, Maia: having avoided detection because of its long eliptical orbit, the 6-kilometer-around hunk of rock will collide with Earth on October 3rd. With just months to go before the asteroid hits and plunges the world into chaos, society is in disarray: many people have abandoned their posts to pursue “Bucket List” dreams, suicide is rampant, and mistrust is endemic. With no future to plan for, the physical and virtual infrastructure is collapsing, and a general malaise permeates everyday life.

In the midst of this breakdown is Henry Palace, a recently-promoted detective on the Concord, New Hampshire, police force, who is committed to carrying on as though police work still mattered. He’s a recent police academy graduate, and tries to stick to a by-the-book approach even when the book is roundly ignored both in and out of the police force. When processing what appears to be an all-too-routine suicide (Concord has earned the nickname “hanger town” because of its citizens’ preferred suicide method), he becomes suspicious that there’s more to the case than just another hanging, and finds himself navigating a maze of narcotics trafficking, insurance fraud, and conspiracy theories. Palace is a novice detective, and it shows: he often misses important clues and connections, and chases many dead ends.

At one point I suspected that The Last Policeman was heading in a direction like The Pledge, which is in many ways the anti-detective novel: fabricating a murder around a desperate suicide seems just the right kind of break with reality someone like Henry Palace would have in the face of global doom. But while the novel is thoughtful, and conscious of the genres it’s playing with, it isn’t quite as outside its declared genre as that; Palace does uncover real crimes, but they’re complicated and nuanced by the “unusual circumstance” of the asteroid.

The Magicians

That’s what makes you different from the rest of us, Quentin. You actually still believe in magic. You do realize, right, that nobody else does? I mean we all know magic is real. But you really believe in it. Don’t you.
The Magicians by Lev Grossman

Lev Grossman’s The Magicians offers a fantasy world cribbed heavily (and quite openly) from the Harry Potter and Narnia books: schools for magicians, portals to magical realms, a gang of school chums who face danger and adventure together. But Grossman’s world is more emotionally and morally fraught that Narnia and Hogwarts: the characters are a little older than the child adventurers in the source books, and are navigating the realms of love, sex, loyalty, and responsibility at the same time that they’re learning to cast magical spells and travel to the mystical world of Fillory. In her blurb, Kelly Link compares “The Magicians” to Jay McInerney; to me it seems a bit more like Bret Easton Ellis’ “The Rules of Attraction” and Donna Tartt’s “The Secret History.”

The novel is broken into three sections: the world of Brakebills, an American school for young wizards based on the Hogwarts model; the post-Brakebills world, in which the school’s graduates slip into self-indulgent debauchery because their magic can provide them with everything except purpose; and finally an ill-fated and tragic adventure in Fillory, the Narnia-like world of the childhood books that formed the characters’ earliest impressions of magic. The Brakebills section takes up a little more than half of the novel, and is the most deeply realized, with the school’s traditions, curriculum, and rivalries brought wonderfully to life: it’s an enjoyable read, very much a Harry Potter for grown-ups built around the coming of age of Quentin, a boy plucked from the tedium of Brooklyn and brought to the magical hothouse of Brakebills. But it’s the middle section, where the characters navigate (mostly badly) their early adulthood in Manhattan, that is the moral core of the book. When given so much power so young, how can the Brakebills children find their way in a non-magical world?

The Fillory section feels a bit thinner than the rest. Though it’s interesting to watch the characters encounter the talking animals and sinister characters that have been hinted at all along while they discuss their childhood fascination with the Fillory stories, the world of Fillory is not as well-realized as Brakebills. The end of the Fillory story feels rushed, as if Grossman were trying to wrap things up but also trying to include more Fillory details that had been foreshadowed in the first section.

The very end of the novel also feels contrived and tacked on. Quentin’s emotional and moral growth after Fillory has been built around a renunciation of magic and the embrace of a non-magical world (though he has no qualms about using his Brakebills connections to secure a job that requires only that he show up and occupy a large corner office); it’s not a full nor especially well-considered transformation, but for a young magician who has gone through a pretty horrific chain of events it’s a significant change. And then a magic globe shatters his office window: this sets things up for the sequel, but doesn’t feel like an organic development. It’s a little like Doc Brown’s sudden return at the end of “Back to the Future,” and we all know how that turned out …

The characters in “The Magicians” are solid enough, though, that they may be able to withstand a sequel. Provided, of course, that they continue to grow up in tragic, tentative, and clumsy ways.

a year in reading, 2010


photo by happy via

As 2010 comes to a close (with over a foot of snow and more coming down outside my window), I’m looking back over some of the books and such I’ve enjoyed; there have been some great and thought-provoking reads in the last year, and some that were pretty good but didn’t quite hit their potential. All in all, though, a good year for reading. Here are some of the books and articles that have made their way to these pages this year.

I closed 2009 and started 2010 with Hans Fallada’s Every Man Dies Alone, the story of a German couple’s quiet but daring campaign against Hitler. The novel is gripping as both a moral exploration of the German people under Hitler, and as a police procedural; and even the back story of the novel, and of Fallada’s own life under the Nazis, is a harrowing tale.

In the Spring, I was inspired by a series of posts by Ta-Nehisi Coates on The Atlantic Magazine’s web site to learn more about life under another repressive regime: the plantation system in the South during the Confederacy. Andrew Ward’s The Slaves’ War is drawn from the words of the people who survived the war, particularly from a rich collection of interviews with ex-slaves and their descendants from the 1930s. The slaves emerge as actors in their own liberation with some ambivalence toward both sides of the Civil War.

Also in the Spring I read Empire of Illusion by Chris Hedges and Ill Fares the Land by Tony Judt, two books which complement each other well. Hedges’ book is a Jeremiad against a cruel, crass, and corporate-controlled culture, with an all-too-brief ode on the “human capacity for love.” Judt, in contrast, is largely level-headed and reasonable, offering a history of the decline of the welfare state, politics’ retreat from “the common good,” and the uncritical acceptance of a rhetoric of perpetual market growth. A combination of Hedges’ passion and Judt’s analysis, bolstered by the empiricism of The Spirit Level, seems a good, if unlikely-to-be-followed, way forward.

I also made a dent in my stack of New Yorker magazines, though they’ve crept up on me again in the last couple months. (The current blizzard might be a great opportunity to revisit that project.) Of the stories and articles I read–an Italo Calvino fugue, a report on free diving, and stories by Joshua Ferris and William Styron–I think it was Sherman Alexie’s War Dances that I enjoyed the most. Alexie is always true to his voice, and voice matters a lot.

Marc Jacobson’s The Lampshade also deals in voices–ranging from a blues historian to Holocaust deniers to museum curators to a Santaria priestess–to tell the story of a voiceless object, a lampshade that appears to have been made from human skin of unconfirmed provenance. Jacobson pulls together the Holocaust, Hurricane Katrina, 9/11, the Jim Crow South, and Mardi Gras to tell the story of this lampshade and his quest to find it a home.

Charles Yu’s How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe is less a time-travel sci-fi tale than a family drama about a son searching for his secretive father’s inner life. It uses the tropes of science fiction in some interesting and original ways. But it has some stylistic quirks, tics, foibles, follies, that drove me a little nuts, batty, crazy, around the bend. Another round of editing might have helped.

The last book I’ll likely get up on this site this year, given my holiday and other obligations, is The Word for World is Forest by Ursula LeGuin. It’s a story of colonial exploitation not unlike “Avatar,” but without that movie’s colonial baggage: LeGuin’s exotic green aliens don’t require a human helper to stage their revolt; indeed, their only human ally turns out to be a bumbler who does more harm than good. A LeGuin novel, even a very short one like this (a slightly different version won the 1973 Hugo Award for best novella), lives up to the promise of speculative fiction: a rich collection of ideas, an extended thought experiment, and a human moral drama in an alien place.

In the Year of Long Division

We looked out from indoors. Nose to glass, we looked, fogging, we looked, through the damp of our exhalations, downstairs, upstairs, piggyback–we saw scenes through see-through curtains, a shadow boxing with a shade, something bubbled, tubside–every which we could find to look, we did; one and the other, and once–or was it twice?–both, in a wash, shriveled and skin-shedding, soaked in looks of bathroom-window-frosted boy. Rings ringed the tub. We left smudges in our wake of who knew what.

In the Year of Long Division, Dawn Raffel

The stories in In the Year of Long Division show the ultimate end of the minimalist impulse: prose becomes poetry, external description subordinated to an internal dialogue, scenes sketched so lightly they become feathery suggestion. It is perhaps no surprise that Raffel calls out her thanks to Gordon Lish at the beginning of her acknowledgements: this is the short story shorn of traditional plot and character as was only hinted at in Raymond Carver’s work.

At its best, this style of storytelling is hypnotic and incantatory. Raffel uses the tools most associated with poetry: repetition, meter, and close attention to the feel as well as the meaning of words mark stories like “In the Year of Long Division,” “We Were Our Age,” and “Somewhere Near Sea Level.” Short sentences and phrases pile up into long, complex structures, and the reader is carried along on the flow of rhythm. The most memorable stories in the collection are told from a child or young adult’s viewpoint, and the elusive style closely matches the misprisions and confusions of adolescence: the central consciousness doesn’t quite understand what’s going on, and we share in that uncertainty.

Other stories, though, are less well-served by the style. Try as I might, I couldn’t quite make sense of “The Seer” or “City of Portage,” even after several readings; there wasn’t enough structure on which to hang the striking images and language to support a narrative sense. “The Trick” and “Table Talk” feel like Carver stories stripped of setting, and lose emotional impact for their lack of concreteness.

This collection is best read the way you would a collection of poetry: slowly, carefully, with long pauses between stories. The experience is rewarding and disorienting, in the way the best poetry can be, and is also demanding like poetry: Raffel’s stories are not for the distracted reader. Her voice is distinctive, though, and her use of language wonderfully disturbing; expect to be haunted by her rhythms and repetitions long after you turn the last page.

a different kind of peer review

[W]ho but a fictional character could be better qualified to review … well, new fiction? Isn’t that the very essence of peer reviewing?
- Lawrence S. Rainey and Nicole Devarenne, Modernism/Modernity

The story of a literary hoax/inside joke in Modernism/Modernity suggests some tantalizing possibilities for a new literary (meta)genre: critical essays by fictional characters.

In 2004, Modernism/Modernity ran a review of David Foster Wallace’s Oblivion written by Jay Murray Siskind. Jay Murray Siskind is not, however, an associate professor at the (equally fictional) Blacksmith College: he’s a character in Don DeLillo’s White Noise. The essay is very much in character, with musings about “what fun it is to talk to an intelligent woman wearing nylon stockings as she crosses her legs.” It took five years for the whistle to be blown on this review, at Mark Sample’s blog; whether the delay was due to the deftness of the hoax or the fact that no one reads reviews in critical journals is an open question.

If Siskind can review Wallace, what other missives from across the fictional divide might be possible? I can imagine a whole unread journal dedicated to the genre.

  • What would Holden Caulfied make of On the Road? Would he be inspired by Saul Paradise’s wild ride, or see through him as just another phony in a phony world?
  • How about Adolf Verloc on Against the Day? What would a “real” anarchist make of Pynchon’s balloonist communards?
  • The Wife of Bath finds Fear of Flying delightfully bawdy.
  • Hamlet wishes Chris Van Eenanam, protagonist of What I’m Going to Do, I Think, would just make up his mind.

The inside joke possibilities are just endless! There’s nothing quite so fun as literary types laughing up their sleeves.

Cecil and Jordan in New York

I worry about when the day comes for Gabrielle the Third to learn to fly. One missed step, and all of their work is for nothing.

Gabrielle Bell’s Cecil and Jordan in New York pulls together several stories told in comic book format that are held together by themes of social awkwardness, nostalgia, and the search for personal meaning in an all-too-meaningless world. Their settings range from the mundane to the fantastical, with the two often bleeding into each other: an independent filmmaker’s girlfriend turns into a chair, an unlikely meeting with a Latin American novelist causes worlds to collide uncomfortably, a woman who falls upward travels fugue-like through bizarre and disjointed adventures.

In a recent review of another graphic novel, C. Max Magee identifies the “mope” factor that mars the genre:

Too often, no matter how visually accomplished and how intricately plotted, the characters (paradoxically perhaps) are too one-dimensional. To put it simply, they are mopes.

And to be sure, there’s a good deal of mopiness in “Cecil and Jordan in New York.” A “woe-is-me” miasma hangs over many of the stories (“I Feel Nothing” and “Hit Me” stand out as examples): the characters don’t drive the action, are indeed inactive and at the mercy of external forces and the insights they reach aren’t terribly enlightening.

But some of the stories stand out in their exuberant use of the visual form, or because their characters are in fact well-rounded and real. “Felix,” a strange love story of an art student, a famous artist, and the artist’s young son, is as affecting as any story by Miranda July or Mary Gaitskill. “One Afternoon” hinges on an O. Henry gimmick, but it’s well-told and affecting. And the last story in the collection, “Hopeless,” is so full of piss and vinegar and wild play that I felt the need to go back and read it again, just to revel in the characters’ small transgressions.

Graphic novels aren’t really my thing–I was a big fan of “Ernie Pook’s Comeek” back in the day, but I’m certainly not well-versed in the contemporary genre–but approached as a collection of stories, “Cecil and Jordan in New York” is as strong as most that are told without benefit of illustrations. These stories have many beautiful and haunting moments, even if they mope on occasion.

partisan reviews

Girl InspectorL’affaire de Botton, in which a bad review prompted some outrage on the part of Alain de Botton and some thinking about the ethics of the book review, led me to look again at John Updike’s rules for reviewers. And while I think Updike’s rules set the standard for the kind of book review done in the New York Times and most of the remaining newspaper book pages, they really only cover a particular genre of writing about books. There are other types of book essay, where these rules aren’t entirely applicable, and would in fact be an onerous strait jacket.

Book reviews are sort of like a “Consumer Reports” article: their purpose is to give an overview of a book, point out its most obvious features, and guide the reader in whether or not to select it. This is a pretty narrow contract, and as such most book reviews are ephemeral. Their usefulness is worn out once the reader has made that decision. In these short-form reviews, it makes sense for the reviewer to avoid books they are “predisposed to dislike” and not to be “warrior[s| in any ideological battle.”

But there are other genres where it makes sense for the writer to disregard these caveats; writing about literature would be no fun at all if one couldn’t occasionally skewer a book with which we disagree, or use a book as a missile in an ideological battle. I’m thinking of the long-form critical essays that are the meat of the offerings in journals like “The New York Review of Books,” “The Times Literary Supplement,” and “Commentary” (the “old guard”) or “Rain Taxi” and “The Complete Review” (the “young Turks”).

For these sorts of essays, Updike’s rules about fairness still apply, but not so much the rules about focus. “Review the book, not the reputation” wouldn’t be useful in Julian Barnes’ Updike overview, for example, or Sue Halpern’s roundup of books about success. This sort of essay uses the book as a jumping-off point, building an argument (whether in support of the book or opposed to it) that can pull in evidence from any source. A book review is bounded by the book under consideration, with little external context offered; the critical essay is all about context.

I’ve re-read Caleb Crain’s review of The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, and I think I’ve solved the puzzle of de Botton’s outrage. While masquerading as a book review, Crain’s piece is really just the first half of a critical essay. Crain is engaging the ideas in the book, not the book itself, and he has some strong criticisms of them, and of how the ideas are executed. But because of the strictures of the book review form, the piece is weirdly truncated. Crain sets up his partisan take on the book, makes some hints at where it goes wrong, but cannot make his own counter-argument because he’s already out of space.

That makes the piece fundamentally unfair, both as a book review and as a critical essay. In a critical essay, Crain would be required to go further and build his own case, drawing on other sources than de Botton’s book and proposing an alternative understanding of work and meaning. Had Crain’s piece done that (and since it would almost certainly be much longer than the NYT Book Review would permit, he can’t), the reader could have fairly assessed Crain’s argument. This leaves de Botton with little recourse (though I still think “I will hate you till the day I die” is a bit much): Crain’s argument against the book might be good, or it might not; we can’t know from what is given in the review.

The market for the long-form critical essay is probably pretty small: certainly smaller than for the book review, which is already pretty rarefied. But they still have a place in the world of literary journalism; it would be nice if, in the larger space that online publishing permits, outlets like the NYT Book Review would augment its reviews with criticism: Crain’s essay deserves to be expanded, and de Botton deserves to have a better case made against his book.

rules and contracts: reviewers, writers, and readers

As a way out of the morass of hurt feelings, embarrassing outbursts, and grand posturing in the recent reviewer-writer donnybrooks, take a look at what John Updike had to say in his six rules for book reviews. “[S]haped intaglio-fashion by youthful traumas at the receiving end of critical opinion,” they lay out a guide for civil, ethical, and useful criticism.

They insist first on fairness: “do not blame [the author] for not achieving what he did not attempt.” It would be unfair, for example, to criticize a pulp science fiction novel for failing to offer well-rounded characters, just as it would be unfair to criticize a literary short story for lacking tentacled aliens. Next, they insist on thoroughness and accuracy: let the book speak for itself, giving “enough direct quotation . . . of the book’s prose so the review’s reader can form his own impression, can get his own taste.” And finally, they demand that the reviewer exhibit humility: “[d]o not imagine yourself a caretaker of any tradition, an enforcer of any party standards, a warrior in any ideological battle, a corrections officer of any kind.”

These guidelines imply a contract between the reviewer and the writer, and between the reviewer and the reader (of the review, and potentially of the book). Between reviewer and writer, the contract stipulates a fair and accurate review, without an agenda that poisons the well. The book, not its author, should be the focus, and it should be assessed on its own terms. Between the reviewer and reader, the contract stipulates an accurate assessment of the book’s interest, and its success in its goals; by providing evidence in the form of direct quotation, the reader has the chance to sample the book, and to judge whether the review is accurate.

Things tend to break down when the review fails on one of Updike’s points. In the Alice Hoffman case, her legitimate complaint against Roberta Silman’s review is that Silman gives away too much of the story. This is a fair complaint in a review of a plot-driven novel, and it breaks the contract not only with the book but also with the reader.

As for Caleb Crain’s review of Alain de Botton’s “The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work,” the offense is subtler. On first glance, Crain appears to comply with Updike’s rules: he takes the book on its own terms, and provides ample quotation to make his points. And yet the review is scathing, and on occasion ad hominem: de Botton is accused of being superficial, mocking, and beset by class anxieties. It would appear that Crain has broken the fuzzy sixth rule that Updike proposes, “accept[ing] for review a book [he was] predisposed to dislike.” Crain appears to want a journalistic account with populist, or at least sympathetic, leanings, and that’s not what de Botton has delivered.

Updike’s rules offer very helpful guidelines for approaching the issue from the reviewer’s perspective. They are less helpful, though, for the writer faced with a negative review. When Updike published them in 1975, authors had fewer recourse to vent: no Twitter, no blogs, just the letters column in the offending publication, or space in a rival publication, and the postal service. (Unless, of course, you were Norman Mailer and could punch out your critics, or Proust and challenge them to a duel, but those seem well outside any guidelines for civil discourse.)

It is reasonable for writers to hold their critics to these rules; when a critic strays, the writer is well within her rights to say so. But it would be wise to keep that sixth rule in mind, which implies that all three parties have a contract with something larger than this review and this book: do nothing that will harm the “presumption of certain possible joys of reading,” and keep your vitriol aimed more at the review than the reviewer.

the pleasures and sorrows of reviews

Hot on the heels of Alice Hoffman’s very public tantrum, another writer pops up to confront a reviewer. Is it time, perhaps, to mount the barricades? I hadn’t heard the call to revolution, but if I must dig up cobblestones, then so be it: Sous les pavés la plage!

This time, it’s Alain de Botton responding to Caleb Crain’s NY Times review of The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work over at Crain’s Steamboats Are Ruining Everything site.

In de Botton’s defense, Crain’s review really is negative (unlike Roberta Silman’s review of Alice Hoffman’s novel, which was much more mixed). Crain assesses de Botton’s tone as dismissive, petty, and pompous. The best praise he can muster is that ““The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work” succeeds as entertainment, if not as analysis” in a few isolated sections; for the most part, he implies that the book doesn’t live up its billing.

De Botton, however, rises to the challenge and sinks to schoolyard taunts (if somewhat pompous taunts). After accusing Crain of “killing” the book (“two years of work down the drain in one miserable 900 word review”), de Botton closes with:

I will hate you till the day I die and wish you nothing but ill will in every career move you make. I will be watching with interest and schadenfreude.

Goodness!

De Botton returns 30 minutes later (apparently not a sufficient cooling off period) with what amounts to a declaration of war:

. . . there’s a point at which a review becomes so angry, cruel and mean-spirited that perspective just disappears and one is into new and uncharted terrain. I’m responding to this review as a way of proposing that forgiveness is perhaps not always the only option when the provocation has been enormous.

Compared to the Hoffman affair, de Botton’s response to Crain is mild, almost gentlemanly. But I’m still uncomfortable with it. Perhaps it’s my Quaker heart that’s shocked by any declaration of war, even a literary one, but I don’t see how this pattern can bode well for writers, reviewers, or readers.

One of the pleasures of reading reviews is running into contrary and controversial opinions. Before I settle into a book (especially a biggish one: de Botton’s is over 300 pages, which has some heft), I like some warning: is this book something I’ll enjoy? Is it carrying baggage I should be prepared to heft? If the review is by someone whose opinion I trust, a positive or negative review can be very useful; and on the other hand, a review by someone with whom I’m not familiar, or whose opinions frequently clash with mine, gushing praise might keep me away. When a book is widely reviewed (which de Botton’s certainly has been), the range of responses starts to build a composite portrait, which will guide me deciding whether or not to add it to my stack.

But if the “enormous provocation” of a negative review is now going to be casus belli for writers (whether engaged as a gentlemanly duel like de Botton, or a sustained sniping campaign like Hoffman), there can only be a chilling effect on honest book journalism. The response will be either falsely positive reviews, bland and non-committal reviews, or no reviews at all. In any case, readers will have fewer resources on which to base their reading decisions, and that can only cause suffering among the innocent bystanders in the literary war zone.

I’m not convinced that a negative review really can “kill” a book like de Botton’s, which has significant publisher backing and has been positively reviewed elsewhere. I suppose that an especially savage review in the NY Times or Kirkus could kill a smaller book, but smaller books usually don’t make it into those venues. And even if a negative review really can do financial and even reputational damage to a book, I’m not convinced that responses from the author help matters.

So please, Ms. Hoffman, Mr. de Botton: come down off the barricades. You’re like Bakhunists hurling cobblestones at the Marxists while the Prussian army camps outside the gates. The real enemies aren’t in the review pages. Politely and cordially agree to disagree with the reviewers, and keep your rebuttals private; give your readers (who are also your critics’ readers) the respect they deserve. We can identify snark by ourselves, and balance the reviews we read.

The Hoffman Twitter-tantrum: how’s the weather in Patagonia?

ScreamAlice Hoffman’s very public meltdown over a slightly unfavorable review of The Story Sisters is one of those pity-and-fear inducing Internet moments. In a series of Tweets (27 in all, according to Gawker), which included swipes at the city of Boston and the publication of the reviewer’s personal phone number, Hoffman showed herself to be, in Edward Champion’s words, “the most immature writer in her generation.”

I’ve seen this kind of meltdown in the business world, where e-mails become more and more heated, further and further from the original affront, until all proportion is lost and one side or the other (sometimes both) begin calling down the apocalypse. It’s an ugly and heart-pounding sight, and stepping in to try to add perspective, reason, or humor is a sure-fire way to be flattened in the carnage. Sometimes the explosion has a cathartic value–Lucy Kellaway offers some great practical advice for the novice oath-taker–but sometimes, especially when behind the anonymous barriers of electronic communication, it simply leads to tears and embarrassment.

As a writer of short fiction, published in obscure corners, I don’t have to worry much about snarky reviews. Sometimes a story of mine shows up in a blog post, but usually if someone bothers to comment on my writing, it’s because they liked it. A short story you didn’t enjoy is probably not worth a comment; a bad novel, on the other hand, is an affront to the reader, who invested far more time in hoping it would turn around.

One of my stories was once singled out in a review at a respected online journal as an example of what’s wrong with fiction on the Internet. It wasn’t one of my favorite stories (though it did make the long list of notable stories for the Million Writers Award), and the reviewer’s comments weren’t far off the mark. I privately thanked the reviewer (because, as Hoffman should recognize, there’s value even in a bad review: the criticism can be useful to one’s future efforts, and contrarian readers may be tempted to see if the review is accurate), we exchanged pleasantries on the value of literature (because writers and critics are really on the same team when it comes to the important things), and life went on. Though this was a pre-Twitter exchange, I can’t imagine feeling the need to “tweet” it (except maybe to offer a link to the review). Remember: your words aren’t you, even if you did labor long and hard to put them in the right order, and a reviewer’s opinion is an unscientific and wholly anecdotal sample of one.

Alice Hoffman’s Twitter account is gone now (check the cache while you can!), so perhaps she’ll be less able to shoot her foot off in the future. But just in case someone else gets the idea that they need to have a tantrum online about a review, consider Iris Murdoch on the topic:

A bad review is even less important than whether it is raining in Patagonia.

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