Bad Reviews

I like this post on The Millions by Emily St. John Mandel. It brings to mind a few interesting questions: How important should feedback be to a writer? What's the point of a negative review?

We've talked a lot about feedback here recently. As for the point of negative reviews: I guess there are two valid raisons d'etre: as a kind of consumer warning ("Don't waste yer money!") or as a contribution to a larger discussion, both of which are mostly only relevant to big books. There's really no defending a negative review of a small press book by a non-famous writer -- ignoring that book, if you don't like it, is enough. Since so much of reviewing is a matter of taste, you risk sinking a person's nascent career because of your fickle whims. I don't approve.

Of course, the real reason for reviews is publicity... and if all of a publication's reviews are positive, that would undermine the validity of their reviews in general. A reviewing publicity organ needs to distribute a certain number of negative reviews in order to maintain its credibility. Kind of depressingly arbitrary, isn't it.

Three weird new books

Well! We are all back at the grindstone after multiple Thanksgivings and various nefarious activities, so I thought we'd offer up a triple-header of brief book reviews. Since my semester is drawing to a close, and I have been teaching the undergraduate edition of my Weird Stories class (which ends with a reading of perhaps my favorite weird book ever), today's theme will be New Weird Novels.

First up, Padgett Powell's new novel, The Interrogative Mood. We've been fans of Powell's for many years, particularly the short story "Mr. Irony Renounces Irony," which for the better part of a decade we walked around the apartment/house quoting at random. This new novel isn't quite a comeback, as Powell never stopped writing, but it does represent a new public interest in the man, which Rhian commented upon in an earlier post. Powell deserves it; the book is great fun--very smart, unexpected, bizarre, and just long enough. It consists entirely of questions, much like William Walsh's recent book Questionstruck, which I also liked, and in fact blurbed. Powell's book is different--much breezier, less rigorously po-mo, and about more stuff than pretty much all the other novels this year combined. The only reasonable response to it is to answer, at random, a page of questions. And so, my answers to page 64: 1) Any old paper is fine. 2) I have no idea. 3) Halberd yes, halyard no. 4) Yes. 5) Sometimes, I suppose. 6) I doubt it. 7) Probably not. 8) Yes, I certainly can.

Up next, Margaret Atwood's new one, The Year of the Flood, which is a sequel to her wonderful Oryx and Crake--indeed, the new paperback editions of that earlier novel now declare it "Book one of the MaddAdam trilogy," which suggests that the inventor of the LongPen is not through with this particular post-apocalypse. Personally I'm glad of it. I love Atwood in her sci-fi mode, and this book is every bit as good as the first, if perhaps a bit too dependent upon it in its formal approach. It consists of two parallel narratives, one in first person, one in third, from two narrators, onetime members of an environmental religious cult, and now two of the only surviving people in the world, in the wake of the events of the first book. The narratives here consist of a brief frame story in the ruined present, with generous helpings of flashback, just like Snowman's narrative in O&C, and we get to see some of the same characters again, this time from a new perspective, and with new contextual weight. Atwood is doing a marvelous job creating this world, and she sketches out the religious cult ("God's Gardeners") with something resembling breathless glee.

Finally, and I'll keep this short, is Stephen King's new one, Under the Dome. For several years I enjoyed nothing more than obsessing over my obsession with King, but all of a sudden I don't feel like talking much about it. I gave up about a third of the way through this one, and I think I have given up on King for good. There's a reference in the note in the back of UTD to some kind of heavy editing that supposedly took place, but I see no evidence of it here, as the plot, delightful as it is (inexplicable force field surrounds small Maine town), plods along dreadfully, with the exact same kind of gloomy events (rapes, beatings, murders) repeating themselves over and over every 25 pages or so. (King's embarrassing loathing of academia, by the way, is on display here as well, with probably the most pathetic portrayal of an English professor I've ever read. In what world are people really like this? And does he think professors don't ever read him? Hell, some of us even teach him.) It ought to be light, quick, and fun, and ends up being ponderous and depressing. I dunno, maybe it's me that's changed. But 35 bucks is a lot to pay for a book, and I think I've just dropped my final wad of scratch on the Master of Horror, alas. Great cover, though--lurid, glossy, and over the top. Tell you what--just grab this cover image, print it out, stick it to your fridge, and call it a day.

Ben Marcus on Lydia Davis

So our friend Jeffrey Frank, apropos of nothing, suddenly got us a gift subscription to Bookforum...thanks dude! Bookforum is an arm of the art magazine Artforum, and judging by this one issue, I don't think it's quite as satisfying as its sister...it seems to be striving, on one hand, for a New York Review of Books feel, but can't resist throwing in a little dash of Entertainment Weekly here and there, as in the very silly Literary Calendar column, with its fey segues and disembodied floating head graphics, or in the dorkily punning article titles. But overall it's a solid mag and a fine addition to the coffee table.

The current issue has a review of the new Lydia Davis, Varieties of Disturbance. I'm glad to see this, because Davis is one of our favorite fiction writers ever, and her recent Proust translation pretty much kills every other one on the planet. Ben Marcus, the reviewer, likes the book, and I'm glad; and I'm glad to see Marcus writing about it, because I think Marcus's nonfiction is excellent.

But he says something weird at one point, before quoting a highly restrained passage from one of Davis's stories:

The remarkably bullheaded story "Jane And The Cane" doesn't give an inch toward the acknowledgement of emotion...

B-b-b-but it does, it totally does! Here's part of the passage:

Mother could not find her cane. She had a cane, but she could not find her special cane. Her special cane had a handle that was the head of a dog. Then she remembered: Jane had her cane...Mother called Jane. She told Jane she needed her cane.

See, to me, that is just packed with emotion. I picture the author sitting perfectly still, her hands folded, looking like she's going to explode at any second--Davis is intentionally writing as though she is a very precocious child grappling with feelings too huge to put into words.

Now, granted, I haven't read the whole thing yet--and Marcus does get around to saying that Davis indeed packs her fiction with emotion, in her own way. But the funny thing is, the description Marcus initially offers seems closer, to me, to a description of Marcus's fiction--indeed, his books are so bullheaded I can't get through them.

Are we all doing that? Seeing ourselves in the books we read, and taking writers to task for seeming to be like us? The prospect is depressing. I think maybe I am, anyway--my last couple of book reviews, when they were critical, were critical of things I myself am often guilty of, like excessive jokiness or overly loose structure. I didn't realize this until they were published.

In all fairness, Marcus isn't really taking Davis to task at all--he greatly admires her, as he should. As do I. As should you. And when I read the new book, I'm going to try to avoid seeing my goony mug glaring back from its pages.

Zadie Smith's On Beauty... and Amazon

I just finished On Beauty and have to say I loved every page of it. I kept looking up from the book as I was reading to tell JRL about something I thought was particularly great. But this afternoon, when I was thinking about blogging about the book, I decided to check out what Amazon had to say about it. YIPES! On Beauty gets a mere three stars out five, considerably less than the typical four to four-and-a-half out of five. Even the book that currently qualifies as The Worst Book I Ever Read (a "cozy" mystery that shall remain nameless) gets a full five.

Why? I was staggered by Smith's ability to fully inhabit so many different characters so convincingly. She can snap a scene into full color with just a sentence or two -- she has a faultless ear for the way people speak and an eye for the detail that makes everything real. Her depiction of a teenager working at a Virgin record store was perfect -- I don't need to get a job there now; I know what it's like. And a scene between a middle-aged Englishman and his elderly father was just as spot-on.

What? Did you say something about plot? Oh, yeah. Well, there was an affair. Hmm... let's see... Okay, so there's not much in the way of a conventional plot. But did I miss it? No, actually; I didn't even notice until I read the Amazon reviews. The constantly shifting relationships between the characters kept me riveted. Zadie Smith is very, very smart (I don't even want to think about how much younger than me she is) and it was just a pleasure to spend some time in her mind.

I don't know whether to despair at the book's relatively low Amazon rating or to just shrug my shoulders -- after all, according to the tenets of popularity McDonald's is a great restaurant, and anyway, it's not like On Beauty didn't win about 9,000 awards.

But won't that low score prevent some people from buying the book? It will, and that's a shame.