Oh, man. Why do I do it? I made the mistake this afternoon of looking at the Amazon page for my forthcoming novel, and to my astonishment found that it had already been reviewed, by fourteen people, two and a half months before it comes out. (There is apparently a new program at Amazon, to which it appears my publisher has subscribed, that provides advance copies of books to prominent reviewers.) And of course the reviews are terrible, and I am quaking with rage.
Well--I was for a minute. Now I'm just angry at myself for looking. Of course the reviews are bad, and of course they make me feel bad, which is why I don't tend to ever read them. Indeed, I haven't read the Amazon reviews of any of my books since my very first, back in 1997. But it's been a while since I've had a book out and I just couldn't resist.
Writers should never read reviews of their work. There is nothing--I'll repeat that, nothing--in it for you. Even if the review is spectacular, you read it at the expense of a little tiny piece of your soul.
Writing is paradoxical. The impulse to do it (if it's done right) comes not from a need for recognition or appreciation, but a need to express something, some obsession or impression or emotion, which is essentially inexpressible. The pleasure in it comes from seeing how close you can get to that elusive something, or seeing what other things you uncover on the way. Every book is a failure, in that you never get it right. But insofar as the journey is as important as the destination, every book is a success, as well. Like I was saying the last post, only the writer can define success for herself; during its creation, the writing should only serve, and can only serve, the writer.
But of course that's not the whole story. Even though you aren't doing it to impress anyone, you retain the expectation that it will be seen, and the hope that it will be understood. If you're lucky, you'll get the former. But you will never get the latter. Nobody will ever see it the way you want it seen. Even if people like it, they'll never like it the right way.
This can be socially awkward. When people praise your work, you're supposed to be happy. And you are--you hope a good review will make people buy the book, and you enjoy the pleasure of someone else's admiration (or at least appreciation). But there's a part of you--a part of me anyway--that is horrified by praise. You know that your reader doesn't really understand, because only you can understand: and because this reader actually likes the work, there will be no way to convince them that they didn't get it. At least, with a bad review, you can tell yourself the review was bad because the reviewer didn't get it. (That's what I've spent my afternoon doing, in fact.) But there is no deflecting praise.
OK, I'm exaggerating here. Everyone likes praise, myself included, and I'd definitely rather have it than not. But this is the calculus that goes on in every writer's mind when a review comes out. They're poison--they're nightmares. And when you read them anyway, young writers, don't say I never told you so.
Showing posts with label book reviewing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label book reviewing. Show all posts
Tuesday, January 13, 2009
Tuesday, February 5, 2008
Who Should Review Books? And Where?
Posting has been light lately, as W6HQ has been overwhelmed with scheduling oddities, including one of us (Rhian) working the polls for Super Tuesday. Personally, I threw in for Obama. Hillary looks just as good on paper, if not better (Paul Krugman is very persuasive on the subject of their competing health care plans), but Obama's got the mojo, and America could use a little of that stuff right now. In any event, tonight's result will neither make my day nor break my heart.
What would make my day, though, is the magical appearance of excellent book reviews all across the land. Fat chance of that! I don't think there's any aspect of literary culture that people complain about more than book reviews. The superstar reviewers are routinely disdained, sometimes because their superstar status seems undeserved, mostly because, if you disagree with them, their prominence only serves to remind you how powerless you and your opinion really are. Everyone hates The New York Times Book Review--in part because they're the primary popular book section in the country, but mostly because they let lightweight writers review other lightweight writers, resulting in embarrassing over-praising of work that shouldn't be featured in the first place. And because, ever since McGrath swept through town, they appear to consider fiction and poetry to be less important than nonfiction. And then there are the jacket-blurb factories, Kirkus et al., who review book many months before they're published, and can cause entire publicity departments to give up on a writer in an instant--all under an anonymous catchall that leaves nobody at all responsible. We do, of course, have The New York Review of Books, Bookforum, The London Review of Books--genuinely excellent publications that nevertheless are not widely read by the masses of people we hope will want to buy our books. These magazines are about as good as book reviewing gets, but they leave me unsatisfied--not in my reading of them, which is enjoyable, but in the way they make me long for writing that was more succinct but just as intelligent, and widely available.
What do I really want in a critic? I used to think that professional critics were no good--that writers should be judged by other writers. But that's even worse--the whole thing would just be horribly incestuous and overwhelmed by blatant logrolling and the discharging of vendettas.
No, what I want is for smart readers to review books. Intelligent, incisive people who praise reluctantly, criticize respectfully, and take the time to figure out what makes a writer tick. The reviews of my own work which I most treasure are not necessarily positive--indeed, the best one ever went out of its way to observe how undercooked my first couple of novels were--but rigorous, respectful, honest, and even-handed. And these are rare.
The best thing said in recent years about critics was said by a critic: Anton Ego, of the Pixar movie Ratatouille, which I consider to be very nearly a masterpiece of a flick. (You should see it if you haven't--it's a children's picture about artistic integrity!) Over the closing scenes, the dour Frenchman intones:
The discovery and defense of the new! That's what book reviewing should be all about--accepting the new and different at face value, and trying to judge it on its own terms. If it falls flat, so be it--but take it seriously.
Rhian might already have said this, but I think she's right--some of the most useful book reviewing of recent years has appeared in the customer comments of Amazon.com. (I don't need to hotlink that, right?) It's true! There are smart people on there, saying what they think, without guile, without preconceptions. Of course, most customer comments are crap, or worse, but it turns out to be very easy to weed these out. The good ones are by readers who are rooting for the new and interesting--they want books to be excellent, because they want to have a good time reading them. They're not getting paid, either--they're offering up their opinions because their opinions mean something to them, and they want them out there.
The internet is not entirely there yet, I think, as an organ of cultural evaluation. It needs to develop a history, a track record. But it's coming along. People bitch about bloggers all the time, but we don't need less of them--we need more. It doesn't matter if most of them suck. Most of everything sucks. What matters is that they're honest. And this is increasingly how I feel about book reviews--excellence would be wonderful, but when you get down to it, shitty honesty is better than brilliant disingenuousness.
Now go Barack the vote!
What would make my day, though, is the magical appearance of excellent book reviews all across the land. Fat chance of that! I don't think there's any aspect of literary culture that people complain about more than book reviews. The superstar reviewers are routinely disdained, sometimes because their superstar status seems undeserved, mostly because, if you disagree with them, their prominence only serves to remind you how powerless you and your opinion really are. Everyone hates The New York Times Book Review--in part because they're the primary popular book section in the country, but mostly because they let lightweight writers review other lightweight writers, resulting in embarrassing over-praising of work that shouldn't be featured in the first place. And because, ever since McGrath swept through town, they appear to consider fiction and poetry to be less important than nonfiction. And then there are the jacket-blurb factories, Kirkus et al., who review book many months before they're published, and can cause entire publicity departments to give up on a writer in an instant--all under an anonymous catchall that leaves nobody at all responsible. We do, of course, have The New York Review of Books, Bookforum, The London Review of Books--genuinely excellent publications that nevertheless are not widely read by the masses of people we hope will want to buy our books. These magazines are about as good as book reviewing gets, but they leave me unsatisfied--not in my reading of them, which is enjoyable, but in the way they make me long for writing that was more succinct but just as intelligent, and widely available.
What do I really want in a critic? I used to think that professional critics were no good--that writers should be judged by other writers. But that's even worse--the whole thing would just be horribly incestuous and overwhelmed by blatant logrolling and the discharging of vendettas.
No, what I want is for smart readers to review books. Intelligent, incisive people who praise reluctantly, criticize respectfully, and take the time to figure out what makes a writer tick. The reviews of my own work which I most treasure are not necessarily positive--indeed, the best one ever went out of its way to observe how undercooked my first couple of novels were--but rigorous, respectful, honest, and even-handed. And these are rare.
The best thing said in recent years about critics was said by a critic: Anton Ego, of the Pixar movie Ratatouille, which I consider to be very nearly a masterpiece of a flick. (You should see it if you haven't--it's a children's picture about artistic integrity!) Over the closing scenes, the dour Frenchman intones:
In many ways the work of a critic is easy. We risk very little, yet enjoy a position over those who offer up their work and their selves to our judgement. We thrive on negative criticism, which is fun to write and to read. But, the bitter truth we critics must face is that, in the grand scheme of things... the average piece of junk is probably more meaningful than our criticism designating it so. But there are times when a critic truly risks something... and that is in the discovery and defense of the new.
The discovery and defense of the new! That's what book reviewing should be all about--accepting the new and different at face value, and trying to judge it on its own terms. If it falls flat, so be it--but take it seriously.
Rhian might already have said this, but I think she's right--some of the most useful book reviewing of recent years has appeared in the customer comments of Amazon.com. (I don't need to hotlink that, right?) It's true! There are smart people on there, saying what they think, without guile, without preconceptions. Of course, most customer comments are crap, or worse, but it turns out to be very easy to weed these out. The good ones are by readers who are rooting for the new and interesting--they want books to be excellent, because they want to have a good time reading them. They're not getting paid, either--they're offering up their opinions because their opinions mean something to them, and they want them out there.
The internet is not entirely there yet, I think, as an organ of cultural evaluation. It needs to develop a history, a track record. But it's coming along. People bitch about bloggers all the time, but we don't need less of them--we need more. It doesn't matter if most of them suck. Most of everything sucks. What matters is that they're honest. And this is increasingly how I feel about book reviews--excellence would be wonderful, but when you get down to it, shitty honesty is better than brilliant disingenuousness.
Now go Barack the vote!
Monday, May 21, 2007
This Week In Stinginess
A few bloggers got themselves worked into a fairly justifiable tizzy not long ago, when this article about book reviewing ran in the New York Times. The article is about the peril that literary culture finds itself in, but there's quite a humdinger of a quote right at the end, that has been much reprinted over the past couple of weeks:
It is unfortunate to see a writer as good as Richard Ford betray his insecurity in the face of the teeming literate masses. Of course he likes the literary establishment; the literary establishment likes him. But does he really think that decent criticism still needs to be vetted by the big boys to mean anything? Has Richard Ford actually read the newspaper book reviews lately? They are crap--and nobody is to blame but the establishment itself. The Times Book Review has long indulged in the bizarre tactic of only assigning intelligent reviewers to challenging books, then assigning swooning newbies to quasi-populist hackery; the result is that shitty books get great reviews and interesting books get nitpicked.
The fact is, the literary establishment has discovered it likes making money. Ford is one of the few writers who makes it money because he can actually write. But I can promise that, if his novels quit selling, his institutionally-backed admirers would quit admiring him right quick, and those of us who write online about literature for fun will keep on feeling the same way about him we used to, and who would he be grateful to then?
Anyway, the Ford flap isn't so terribly irksome, not in the face of the latest odious screed from Mark Helprin, which appeared in the Times over the weekend. It seems he would like copyrights to extend forever, thus allowing Disney to get rich off its stale creations for eternity. Here, though, is the money quote:
Can you see the mistake? No, no, not the parenthetical "again?", which is almost too pathetic to mention. The mistake is that the rights to his imaginary masterpiece would not be "stripped" from his heirs--in fact, his heirs would keep all their rights. They would just have to share them with everybody else.
Copyright law is odd in that it codifies the egalitarian idea that ideas themselves cannot be owned, at least not forever. An idea changes the moment it enters somebody's head. You may publish the book you wrote, but the book your readers read is never the same one; their interpretation of your prose is unique to them, the characters altered, the themes personalized. And when they go to write their own books, your book will inform their style, their approach, their execution. Students all over America are right now sketching copies of your painting out of Artforum. Amateur actors are mangling your play. The ambulating whistler is adding trills and arpeggios to your hit single.
Writers ought to be rewarded for their work, even Mark Helperin. But after a while, they have to let go, to let the world have what they wrote. Helprin's heirs could publish their own "definitive" editions of his books after he's gone, if they wanted; and more readers than not, if Helprin actually has readers after his death, would choose them over the other editions published under the public domain. The Helprin Touch can still feel special, even once his personal claim to the material has weakened. It's just that his heirs would have to actually come up with a worthwhile edition to make money. In other words they would have to, you know, earn it.
The alternative is a world in which ideas will forever belong to people like the people who now own Happy Birthday To You, a song the Hill Sisters simply ripped off in 1893, by changing a single note of an already popular tune. For this little appropriation, Warner Chappell owns your aging ass until 2030. Sorry, grandad!
As for Helprin, I suspect his bloated tales of triumphalist self-actualization will be about as popular after he's gone as the neocon horseshit he's been ghostwriting for the past decade or two. But what do I know, I'm just a guy writing on the internet.
Of course literary bloggers argue that they do provide a multiplicity of voices. But some authors distrust those voices. Mr. [Richard] Ford, who has never looked at a literary blog, said he wanted the judgment and filter that he believed a newspaper book editor could provide. “Newspapers, by having institutional backing, have a responsible relationship not only to their publisher but to their readership,” Mr. Ford said, “in a way that some guy sitting in his basement in Terre Haute maybe doesn’t.”
It is unfortunate to see a writer as good as Richard Ford betray his insecurity in the face of the teeming literate masses. Of course he likes the literary establishment; the literary establishment likes him. But does he really think that decent criticism still needs to be vetted by the big boys to mean anything? Has Richard Ford actually read the newspaper book reviews lately? They are crap--and nobody is to blame but the establishment itself. The Times Book Review has long indulged in the bizarre tactic of only assigning intelligent reviewers to challenging books, then assigning swooning newbies to quasi-populist hackery; the result is that shitty books get great reviews and interesting books get nitpicked.
The fact is, the literary establishment has discovered it likes making money. Ford is one of the few writers who makes it money because he can actually write. But I can promise that, if his novels quit selling, his institutionally-backed admirers would quit admiring him right quick, and those of us who write online about literature for fun will keep on feeling the same way about him we used to, and who would he be grateful to then?
Anyway, the Ford flap isn't so terribly irksome, not in the face of the latest odious screed from Mark Helprin, which appeared in the Times over the weekend. It seems he would like copyrights to extend forever, thus allowing Disney to get rich off its stale creations for eternity. Here, though, is the money quote:
Were I tomorrow to write the great American novel (again?), 70 years after my death the rights to it, though taxed at inheritance, would be stripped from my children and grandchildren.
Can you see the mistake? No, no, not the parenthetical "again?", which is almost too pathetic to mention. The mistake is that the rights to his imaginary masterpiece would not be "stripped" from his heirs--in fact, his heirs would keep all their rights. They would just have to share them with everybody else.
Copyright law is odd in that it codifies the egalitarian idea that ideas themselves cannot be owned, at least not forever. An idea changes the moment it enters somebody's head. You may publish the book you wrote, but the book your readers read is never the same one; their interpretation of your prose is unique to them, the characters altered, the themes personalized. And when they go to write their own books, your book will inform their style, their approach, their execution. Students all over America are right now sketching copies of your painting out of Artforum. Amateur actors are mangling your play. The ambulating whistler is adding trills and arpeggios to your hit single.
Writers ought to be rewarded for their work, even Mark Helperin. But after a while, they have to let go, to let the world have what they wrote. Helprin's heirs could publish their own "definitive" editions of his books after he's gone, if they wanted; and more readers than not, if Helprin actually has readers after his death, would choose them over the other editions published under the public domain. The Helprin Touch can still feel special, even once his personal claim to the material has weakened. It's just that his heirs would have to actually come up with a worthwhile edition to make money. In other words they would have to, you know, earn it.
The alternative is a world in which ideas will forever belong to people like the people who now own Happy Birthday To You, a song the Hill Sisters simply ripped off in 1893, by changing a single note of an already popular tune. For this little appropriation, Warner Chappell owns your aging ass until 2030. Sorry, grandad!
As for Helprin, I suspect his bloated tales of triumphalist self-actualization will be about as popular after he's gone as the neocon horseshit he's been ghostwriting for the past decade or two. But what do I know, I'm just a guy writing on the internet.
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