Tim Relf is back again with more musings.
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If you’re worried about people not liking your book, don’t publish it.
It’s quite simple. Keep it on your word processor. Print it off and stash it away in a box in your garage. Become one of those bores who bang on incessantly about how they’ve written a potential bestseller (your mum’s sure of it) and you would show it to a publisher, you really would, but it’s so good they’d only steal it.
You accept, when you shepherd it to the shelves, that opinions on it will vary. You want reviewers to review it. Some will like it, some won’t. That’s the deal.
Writers, sadly, seem incapable of remembering this. They get a good review and critics are incisive and thorough. Get a bad one and suddenly they're oafish and probably didn't read the book anyway.
Take Alain de Botton and that business with the New York Times reviewer. He declared: “I will hate you till the day I die and wish you nothing but ill will in every career move you make.” Alice Hoffman also recently took offence at a Boston Globe reviewer, encouraging fans to bombard said critic direct expressing their displeasure.
Come on, guys, loosen up. Get over it. Grow up. Bad reviews are a fact of life. Have you never heard the old saying: ‘The vocabulary of criticism is infinitely more varied than the vocabulary of praise.’
No one enjoys having nasty things said about their work, but at least it sparked a reaction. At least it’s been noticed. Most aspiring authors would kill for a review in The New York Time or Boston Globe, however withering. Be a bit more gracious.
De Botton’s gripe was that the reviewer wasn’t even-handed, but why should they be? Critics are paid to have polarised views: that’s what they do and, ultimately, that’s why we read them. Retaliation won’t achieve anything. It might make you feel briefly better but so, sometimes, does thumping someone in a pub – and you usually regret that afterwards.
It’s not as if lashing out at a critic will make them reconsider. It merely risks increasing the likelihood of a bad write-up of your next book. They’d never admit to that, of course, but a lot of critics are like elephants: as well as having very thick skins, they’ve got very long memories.
It wasn’t even a particularly good insult by de Bottom – wishing the man in question, Caleb Crain, nothing but ill will in his career. It’s more Last of the Summer Wine than Tarantino. A bit like saying: “I do hope your house depreciates in value”. Or: “With any luck the lease repayments on your Mondeo will prove slightly higher than you’d budgeted”.
I’ve never read any of de Botton’s work so can’t give an opinion on that (I’m trying to be even-handed here, because I wouldn’t want him wishing some dreadful calamity on me – like, for example, my pension annuity proving to be considerably less than I’d hoped), but the man obviously is a talented writer.
A piece by him in the Observer recently about Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Illich described the novel as “terrifying... the literary equivalent of receiving the news that the dark shading across your liver is, unfortunately, the worst possible of the 12 scenarios you’d Googled.” That’s nice writing.
To his credit, as well, at least he had the good grace to apologise for his outburst. Who knows, maybe the publicity the whole episode has generated could outweigh the negative effect of the original bad review.
An irony, indeed – and one, presumably, that would leave de Botton hoping the critic in question gets promoted and does rather well in his career.
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Tim is a novelist and blogger. You can find out more about him here.
I agree with all of this, aside from -
"Most aspiring authors would kill for a review in The New York Time or Boston Globe, however withering."
I genuinely believe that most aspiring novelists would rather no review than to be publicly humiliated on the largest of all stages. I am biased though, as my novel got slated by the NYT (although my Canadian publishers did manage to pull one insult out of it which read like a veiled compliment and put it on the cover of the paperback. Negative reviewers should be more careful with their prose.) It really wasn't a pleasant experience.
Bad reviews may be a fact of life but I don't think most writers would kill for them. The best you can hope for is to tolerate their existence, shrug them off, find something to laugh about. But to prefer them to nothing? I'm not sure.
Aspiring novelists, you tell me, what's better: no review, or NYT ripping your book to shreds?
Posted by: Marie | July 17, 2009 at 09:04 AM
Unlike you, Tim Relf, I have read practically everything Alain de Botton has written. He is mischievous and has a terrific sense of humour. I believe his remark was taken too seriously. Anyway, even if he meant what he wrote, it just shows philosophers are just like the rest of us: human beings with 'emotions'.
Posted by: Bela | July 17, 2009 at 06:06 PM