I haven't read this book. I read The Lovely Bones and thought it to be a very good first novel: well-written and a great concept, maybe less than fully successful perhaps, but certainly a fine first novel.Sebold's second novel, The Almost Moon, is now being subjected to reviews that seem to foam at the mouth in their effort to savage this book. Several, and no need to say which ones, are so negative that as a reader I cringed when reading them. There is no reason to write reviews that personally attack the author's motives. No reason to get such pleasure out of the task. You can taste the blood they draw.
Yet the The Almost Moon is #40 on Amazon right now. Most people don't read reviews for better or worse, it seems.
I think of David Montgomery who has said on his blog that he usually refrains from reviewing books he really doesn't care for. Is this the proper tact to take? Do reviewers owe their audience a scathing review of a book if it deserves it, or is it more about taking revenge on a writer who was too successful their first time out of the gate? What are the duties of a reviewer? Of course, they must sometimes write poor reviews but they shouldn't be so hateful. Or should they?
8 comments:
I think you have to be able to separate the story from the way it's written. A lot of people were taken aback by the ending of The Lovely Bones because it wasn't "properly" literary, but I thought it worked all right. The same thing happened to the movie Signs. People wanted an alien shoot-em-up; what they got was a religious theme, so they slammed the movie without taking the time to note that as a story, it was fully realized.
I've read a few books that I didn't care for because I gravitate toward particular styles of writing, but as stories, they were absolutely solid. If I were to review them, I'd focus on that. Other elements I'd work in separately - how good are the characterizations, setting, etc.
I wouldn't want to avoid reviewing something I didn't like... I'd be too afraid that the author (especially a friend) would know it because it's not on my blog!
Didn't you just know they were going to get her the 2nd time out? There's no need to savage a writer because the book is less than you want it to be.
I remember one review in the NYTBR that started:
"This is an awful book." I knew the author and it made me sick all day. Was that line necessary?
There are many ways to do many things. I think a mean and nasty review says more about the reviewer than the book.
BTW, I liked The Almost Moon.
I'm going to read it and obviously so are a lot of others from her numbers of Amazon.
Truly I don't know how writers endure this sort of thing. And this new approach of the NYT where they review certain books multiple times is nuts.
I think the reviewer's duty depends on where and how they're writing the review. If the reviewer has a lot of discretion, then I have no objection to a focus on books the reviewer enjoyed. If there are a lot of books being reviewed, or little discretion, then I would expect to see positive and negative reviews.
Personal attacks don't have any place in a review, and I agree they say more about the reviewer than the book. You can certainly make an argument for dredging up the author's personal history if you're writing a full-on critical piece...but you can't really do that in the couple hundred words usually devoted to a review.
I haven't been looking for reviews of the new Sebold, so hadn't seen the flamers...I couldn't get very far with THE LOVELY BONES, which seemed to me excessively sentimental while striving not to be, so perhaps the even less sentimental subject matter here is part of what's outraged the easily outraged. (I have heard Sebold interviewed on various NPR programs, so have a sense of the new one w/o reading it.)
I like Algis Budrys's dictum: A book should be good. To paraphrase from memory, he goes on to note that growling at bad books to make them go away is no sin. I do agree that an ad hom attack on the writer's character is not justified, but to note that a book is bad right away in a review isn't to me a crime. I've had a couple of Really Dense reviews that clearly didn't understand what I was getting at. Irritating as they are, one must learn to shrug them off, particularly if one is to be a more productive writer than I (not tough).
Christa, I'll have to take issue with one of your examples...I could clearly see that SIGNS was meant to be a religious allegory, but its surface story was so inane that it deserved all the contumely it received, and more...and not solely because the invaders could make their way across whatever distance they had to, and attack so well, yet would expose themselves to a water-surface planet when they found water utterly corrosive.
Hateful? Personal attack? It's hard to tell without seeing examples. I have the freedom of an amateur in the best sense of that word, so discussions on my blog take a similar tack to David Montgomery's.
It's probably far too late to use Dan Brown as a relevant example, but off the bit of The Da Vinci Code that I've read (the first sentence or so), the writing is of semiliterate level. If I reviewed the book, I'd be compelled to say so.
It's wrong to suggest that a review should refrain from personal attacks if those attacks are relevant. It may be pertinent to suggest that a given author is semiliterate, a fascist or a moral idiot as long as the reviewer explains his or her reasons for doing so and those reasons are relevant to the book.
Now that blogs let everyone share feelings on everything with everybody, I've seen a worrying hint here and there that some authors feel they are owed love. They are owed no such thing. All a reviewer owes an author is enough respect to write a thoughtful review and one that the book deserves, however unfortunately painful that might be to the author or anyone else.
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Detectives Beyond Borders
"Because Murder Is More Fun Away From Home"
http://www.detectivesbeyondborders.blogspot.com/
I see what you're saying, Peter, but this was an extremely nasty review in a newspaper. I think authors who have a blockbuster first time out are treated to more severe sophomore reviews.
I have to defer to you in this matter at least for now, Patti, since I've read neither the book nor the review. You could be right about the treatment of authors who debut with blockbusters.
I suppose it's also possible that the reviewer may resent having to read a book that he or she does not like and lets that resentment seep into the review. It is also, of course, possible that the reviewer is an idiot with malevolent intentions. I was not discounting that possibility. I was just expressing understandable wariness in this time of easy, reflexive, self-interested media-bashing and of confusion between criticism and promotion.
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Detectives Beyond Borders
"Because Murder Is More Fun Away From Home"
http://www.detectivesbeyondborders.blogspot.com/
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