reviewing the situation
Mar. 4th, 2011 08:15 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
calimacA number of authors on LJ have been posting statements pledging not to mind bad reviews of their novels. Admirable of them, I suppose, but perhaps a little beyond what is called for. It does give me an opportunity to talk about authors who do mind, and what they mind about them.
Sometimes I have seen authors complain about reviewers who appear not actually to have read the book, or, if they have, to give an impression of not having read it even more remarkable if that's not the case. I can rarely comment on these, since it's not always easy to find the review even when I've read the novel myself. I've seen little of this particular complaint online, and authors discussing this in print are understandably reluctant to quote liberally or give citations.
The most infamous such case I do know is that of Edmund Wilson's review of The Lord of the Rings.. (Though in this case the author is not known to have made any comment beyond "The Lord of the Rings is one of those things: if you like it you do; if you don't, then you boo!") Wilson's inability to see what was right in front of his nose, down to and including the spelling of the characters' names, was so staggering in a reviewer who claimed to have read the entire book aloud to his children, that in the long run it's hurt his once-towering reputation a lot more than it has Tolkien's. When a review is that incompetent, it's wise for the author to swallow pride, keep silent, and let your friends console you.
What I've seen more often - but not from the authors taking the pledge - is denunciations of reviewers, the whole pack of them. This often approaches hypocrisy, because the same authors seem very happy with the perception and wisdom of reviewers who like their work. A couple oft-repeated of these denunciations are particularly foolish. The composer Jan Sibelius famously said, "Nobody ever put up a statue to a critic." That's not actually literally true (see the comments here), and while the ability to be a great creative artist and a great critic do not often coincide, sometimes they do - Bernard Shaw was one, C.S. Lewis another, and among composers, Robert Schumann in particular - and they could get statues, back when statues were fashionable. More pertinently, critics aren't in the business of being deemed worthy of statues. They're in the business of deeming who is.
The other silly authorial remark about critics is the one about how they're like eunuchs in the harem: they can observe, but they can't do. Again, that's not always true: see the above critics who can do both. But it's also really beside the point. Sure, there are reviewers who reek of petty jealousy; they're called bad reviewers, just as there's such a thing as bad novelists. But that's not the cause of all negative reviews: more usually, the reviewer simply didn't like the book. And most reviewers are what I used to say on convention panels when asked to define myself as a reviewer. A reviewer is just a reader: an articulate reader with a forum. (These days you don't even need a forum: see the Web.) An author who disdains reviewers on that ground disdains their readers, because every reader has a reaction to the book, even if they don't write it. If you only want to be read by people who can create fiction as well as you can, you're going to have a mightily small readership. (And if you really are a good author, even smaller.)
Then there's the "I cried all the way to the bank" approach, which is to say, so what if the reviews are bad, you do sell lots of copies, even so. True enough, but also beside the point, since the reviewer isn't denying your sales, just criticizing your work. If sales are the mark of achievement, wouldn't you like it if the same book minus its flaws had sold even better? And for anyone who really just wants to make money, there are other careers more remunerative and less challenging than even best-seller authorhood.
Authors may be well advised not to read their reviews; it depends on the author. Not just bad reviews: a really perceptive review, or critical article, that points out unconscious patterns and themes in your work may make you self-conscious of them, like the centipede that suddenly realizes it has no idea how it manages to walk, and then can't move a step. Or too glowing a review may make you too self-critical of your next work. Other authors can learn from their reviewers, and I hope they do.
Sometimes I have seen authors complain about reviewers who appear not actually to have read the book, or, if they have, to give an impression of not having read it even more remarkable if that's not the case. I can rarely comment on these, since it's not always easy to find the review even when I've read the novel myself. I've seen little of this particular complaint online, and authors discussing this in print are understandably reluctant to quote liberally or give citations.
The most infamous such case I do know is that of Edmund Wilson's review of The Lord of the Rings.. (Though in this case the author is not known to have made any comment beyond "The Lord of the Rings is one of those things: if you like it you do; if you don't, then you boo!") Wilson's inability to see what was right in front of his nose, down to and including the spelling of the characters' names, was so staggering in a reviewer who claimed to have read the entire book aloud to his children, that in the long run it's hurt his once-towering reputation a lot more than it has Tolkien's. When a review is that incompetent, it's wise for the author to swallow pride, keep silent, and let your friends console you.
What I've seen more often - but not from the authors taking the pledge - is denunciations of reviewers, the whole pack of them. This often approaches hypocrisy, because the same authors seem very happy with the perception and wisdom of reviewers who like their work. A couple oft-repeated of these denunciations are particularly foolish. The composer Jan Sibelius famously said, "Nobody ever put up a statue to a critic." That's not actually literally true (see the comments here), and while the ability to be a great creative artist and a great critic do not often coincide, sometimes they do - Bernard Shaw was one, C.S. Lewis another, and among composers, Robert Schumann in particular - and they could get statues, back when statues were fashionable. More pertinently, critics aren't in the business of being deemed worthy of statues. They're in the business of deeming who is.
The other silly authorial remark about critics is the one about how they're like eunuchs in the harem: they can observe, but they can't do. Again, that's not always true: see the above critics who can do both. But it's also really beside the point. Sure, there are reviewers who reek of petty jealousy; they're called bad reviewers, just as there's such a thing as bad novelists. But that's not the cause of all negative reviews: more usually, the reviewer simply didn't like the book. And most reviewers are what I used to say on convention panels when asked to define myself as a reviewer. A reviewer is just a reader: an articulate reader with a forum. (These days you don't even need a forum: see the Web.) An author who disdains reviewers on that ground disdains their readers, because every reader has a reaction to the book, even if they don't write it. If you only want to be read by people who can create fiction as well as you can, you're going to have a mightily small readership. (And if you really are a good author, even smaller.)
Then there's the "I cried all the way to the bank" approach, which is to say, so what if the reviews are bad, you do sell lots of copies, even so. True enough, but also beside the point, since the reviewer isn't denying your sales, just criticizing your work. If sales are the mark of achievement, wouldn't you like it if the same book minus its flaws had sold even better? And for anyone who really just wants to make money, there are other careers more remunerative and less challenging than even best-seller authorhood.
Authors may be well advised not to read their reviews; it depends on the author. Not just bad reviews: a really perceptive review, or critical article, that points out unconscious patterns and themes in your work may make you self-conscious of them, like the centipede that suddenly realizes it has no idea how it manages to walk, and then can't move a step. Or too glowing a review may make you too self-critical of your next work. Other authors can learn from their reviewers, and I hope they do.
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no subject
Date: 2011-03-04 05:33 pm (UTC)There are writers who denounce copyeditors, the whole pack of them. While there are bad copyeditors (as there are bad reviewers), it looks to me as if some of the denouncers are the writers who most need copyediting.
no subject
Date: 2011-03-04 06:41 pm (UTC)Frank M. Robinson once delivered to me a discourse on what editors hate about writers, and then turned right around and delivered an equally pungent discourse on what authors hate about editors. He, of course, had been both.
no subject
Date: 2011-03-04 11:06 pm (UTC)I think copyeditors should have tattooed across the back of their hands: Its Not My Book. It's my mantra.
no subject
Date: 2011-03-04 06:22 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-03-04 06:24 pm (UTC)I wrote my first letter of comment about that - both my outrage that Morris couldn't have bothered to finish reading the book and my pleasure in the book itself. And it got printed.
At the time, I was aware that there were certain stylistic aspects about the novel that might have been tiresome to Morris: it is loaded with a lot of parallelism which is intended to be obvious. That might have been heavy handed for a Western reader (although given Morris' wide travels, you'd think she could have handled that). And it was laden with a lot of cultural detail - but that was present to show what Musashi (who starts out rather barbaric) grows to appreciate.
These were points that could have been made in a review. But Morris couldn't have been bothered to do the job. It's strange that I wouldn't have minded a negative review of the book, if she had finished reading it. I could then have just written in and said that what she disliked, I appreciated. But instead, she insulted the readership and the magazine by not even finishing the job she was paid for: read the book and review it. It disinclined me to give any credence to any other review she made.
no subject
Date: 2011-03-04 06:37 pm (UTC)Generally, in such cases, the person should just fob off the job of the review. But there can be special circumstances, and I've seen them, in which the reason why the reviewer found the book unreadable is a legitimate critical observation, so long as it's clearly labeled as such, and the reviewer refrains from judging that part which wasn't read. I've never written such a review myself - I went all the way through the first volume of the Iron Tower trilogy just so that I could review it - but I have certainly commented informally on why I was unable to finish a book, and once or twice used it to spark off an essay that I didn't label a review.
By the way, in lit class in college, I developed a knack for writing my term papers on the first two-thirds or so of novels too boring to finish. The prof never noticed, or didn't say anything if he did.
no subject
Date: 2011-03-04 07:40 pm (UTC)But that didn't seem to be the case in that particular review. I wish I still had the magazine at hand. But since I had read the book in toto, I found the claim that it was impossible to read dubioius. Like I said, since I had read the whole, I could see what points might not satisfy a Western reader, and wouldn't have minded if they had actually been cited as causes. But that wasn't what Morris did: it was a rather short, curt "This bored me, and I didn't finish it." I got the feeling that she hadn't even begun reading the book until shortly before the review was due. I had been tracking the title's release because I'd seen advance notice of it in Publishers Weekly, so I was on top of the book well before the review came out.
On top of that, we're not talking about some obscure Japanese novel. This was the book that got called "the Japanese Gone With the Wind", a novel that had, by the time the English translation was published (the first such, remember), inspired nine films adapting the whole or parts of it. It was a work that deserved a complete read, whether one liked it or not.
Heh. Yeah. Guess I'm still worked up about it, for this specific instance.
On principle though, I concede the point that "Could not finish this," with an explanation of why, can provide a legitimate review.
no subject
Date: 2011-03-05 05:11 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-03-04 07:15 pm (UTC)- - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
What is film criticism all about? Praise for our product, says the industry. Recognition, or failing that, constructive suggestions, say the film-makers. Reliable guidance, says the public. All of those things, say the reviewers, except, of course, praise only for good products. None of these things principally, say critics. Critics are after something harder and more elusive: pursuing their own reactions down to the rock bottom of their subjectivity and expressing them with the utmost artistry, so that what will always elude the test of objective truth will at least become a kind of art: the art of illumination, persuasion, and good thinking and writing. The industry is not to be indulged, any more than the film-maker is to be told how he should make movies: the one would be dishonest, the other presumptuous. The public, to be sure, is to be guided, but not in the simplistic way it hopes for.
It is not for the critic to do the reader’s thinking for him; it is for the critic merely to do his own thinking for the reader’s benefit. This may seem like a slight difference, but it is in fact tremendous.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
A note on terminology: whereas most of us use the terms "reviewer" and "critic" interchangeably, it is a fairly common shorthand in film writing to distinguish, broadly speaking, between shorter, journalistic articles on new work (especially by what Roger Ebert has termed "quote whores") and longer, semi-scholarly essays taking a broader view. However, for Simon I think the difference here is strictly one of purpose and/or quality: what you're describing is what Simon would call "criticism" rather than "reviewing"; he certainly saw his own work that way (and surely would describe reviews by Shaw as criticism), even though he typically wrote 2,500 words (covering two or more films) every other week.
Apropos of scribblerworks' remarks: Simon, also a theater critic, is known for walking out of plays he dislikes at intermission, and yet reviewing them, with a note on his early departure. (Probably about one percent of his reviews concern such occasions.) He has compared the practice to a food critic choosing not to finish a bowl of rancid soup. Some people may find the analogy faulty.
-MTD/neb
no subject
Date: 2011-03-05 05:13 am (UTC)Criticism: primarily analytical, intended in the first instance for an audience that has read the work being discussed.
no subject
Date: 2011-03-05 07:06 pm (UTC)