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| Photo by Leo Brent Robillard |
A writer
must have thick skin. This is among the
first things I tell my students.
Rejection is part of the game.
Send out ten submissions, expect nine to come back with a form
letter. Oh, but how sweet the one that
comes back positive.
Writing and publishing is tough a tough
racket. The story of J.K. Rowling’s
repeated rejections are now the stuff of literary legend. Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone was turned down by twelve British
publishing houses, before it went on to break sales records around the
world. Louis L’Amour claims to have been
turned down 200 times before Bantam picked him up. William Golding, Margaret Mitchell, William
Faulkner, and Stephen King are just a few of the other literary giants to have
been put off. This only speaks to the
vagaries of the modern aesthetic.
But these rejections slips are private affairs
– shared in retrospect. These writers can now look back with a smug shrug,
history having proven them right. What
about the far more public rejection of the dreaded negative review? Or worse, the ‘hatchet job’?
Better to buy armour.
As a writer and teacher of writing, aesthetic vagaries
and negativity are often on my mind – and never more so than in the wake of a
newly published book. I count myself lucky to
have been on the receiving end of a hatchet job only twice in twenty years of
writing and publishing – both times made bearable by the timely appearance of
better tidings. But over these same years, I have also found
myself on the flip side of this story. I
have written more than fifty reviews, myself – many of which appear on this
site. Others were published in small
press journals and newspapers. For a time, I even edited two such journals –
assigning books sent from literary presses across Canada to other reviewers. In neither of these roles did I ever pen or
publish a hatchet job.
Perhaps I have a weak stomach.
No. It’s
not that. I have been critical. I have been negative. But I have been fair. I suppose that I espouse Jan Zwicky’s philosophy
of reviewing. Like Zwicky, I believe
that reviews should be “appreciative.”
This is not to be confused with blithely ‘positive.’ To review a book is to weigh and to
evaluate. As Julienne Isaacs writes in The Puritan, “The reviewer must be
allowed to retain the option of proclaiming some books superior to others in
the canon.” In her thoughtful essay, “In Defense of the
Negative Book Review: Can Hatchet Jobs Build Strong Literary Culture?”, Isaacs
sifts both sides of the argument, but eventually concludes: “Should the
literary critics throw out the hatchet? Very probably, if it means discarding
the vitriol that occasionally clogs the valves of otherwise reasonable negative
reviews.”
I consider the review as the beginning of a
discourse. It is a public conversation
concerning a book’s aesthetic. However,
the hatchet job is not a discourse. It
is a diatribe. The author of a hatchet
job sets himself up as ‘the’ authority. This
authoritative voice is thuggish and brokers no disagreement. In a Bookends
column for the New York Times Book Review, James Parker writes, “The reviewer
desires not-quite-consciously to ‘master’ the text, to prove his superiority to
the book under review…and this desire, unless acknowledged, warps his lexicon
and inflates his language.”
It can be argued that the author of a hatchet
job is doing the public a service by warning off unsuspecting consumers;
however, in a strictly Canadian context, it seems unlikely that there are
hordes of duplicitous small press authors hoping to wrest hard-earned dollars
from a blinkered public. Isaacs says:
In the limited confines of Canadian literary
culture, damning reviews matter. To
small-press writers who must already work much harder than writers with
mainstream presses to promote their books, negative reviews add insult to injury…Why
should reviewers take the time to lambaste a book that likely isn’t going
anywhere?
Essentially,
then, reviewers should follow the advice their parents gave them as children,
“If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all.”
Review outlets are disappearing in
Canada in some respect. Column inches
and newspaper space have been greatly reduced.
It is true that these traditional outlets have been unofficially subsidized
through public domains such as Goodreads and
Amazon, to name a few. And I believe that public taste is a valid
litmus test. However, if the traditional
review outlets, such as the Globe & Mail, National Post and Quill & Quire, are to differentiate – and therefore continue to legitimize --
themselves from the public domain, they should do so by eliminating the hatchet
and the rant in favour of the informed and the reasonable. Why fill the small space devoted to review
with contempt? Better to focus on those
books worthy of attention, which might otherwise be ignored. This ‘appreciative’ method will get us closer
to the aesthetic we desire.
Perhaps as a teacher of nineteen
years, I understand more viscerally the impact of delivering a less than
exemplary evaluation. Criticism must be
delivered with respect to the author.
Reviews, like books, are an integral part of a healthy literary landscape.
We must push each other to do better.
Not batter the other into submission.
Read
thoughtful reviews of my most recent novel, The Road to Atlantis, from Quill &Quire and Wednesday Book Review
– or watch the 49th Shelf on September 28th for my “Short-Changed
List” – Canadian books that deserve a second glance.
You can
weigh in on the topic in the comment section below with your thoughts and
stories.
