This is what it’s like when you’re a writer and you’ve had a negative review. That young man in the dairy looking shocked as you enter? He’s been re-reading your bad review. Those schoolkids grouped around a phone sniggering as you walk past? They’re poring over (and mass-sharing) your review. Those seagulls rising with derisive screams as you shuffle by? They’re all in hysterics about your review.
The state of wounded paranoia might last a day before you regroup and move on. Perhaps you’ll decide the reviewer is a fool. To be misunderstood as an artist is pretty standard, after all. Or perhaps, more rarely, you might decide you’ve learnt something. Any way you look at it, it’s rough for writers. But it’s not much fun for reviewers either. After a lifetime of reviewing, a person might almost decide they can’t be bothered with the blowback.
It’s inordinately time-consuming. You read the whole book, taking extensive notes. No shortcuts are allowed, ever. You spend time thinking about it and you write a careful piece. You search for and record every positive factor. If you’re doing your job properly you’ll say what you think in a constructive, thoughtful way. You send it off, hoping you’ll be understood. And soon the author is coming at you with an axe …
Recently, an Auckland journalist was doused with wine by an author he’d reviewed 20 years earlier. That’s obviously at the deranged end of the spectrum. Normal writers might spend a few hours dreaming about serving their critic a cup of tea laced with polonium or Novichok. A more likely hazard for reviewers is writers’ social revenge. Vicious gossip, invented slander. And we all know, surely, that this is not right. If we care about literature, we have a duty to preserve the dialectic. We need a human response, a proper, detailed discussion of books, especially in the age of likes and clicks.
A while ago, I received a newsletter from a book association listing only those who’d reviewed a particular novel positively and congratulating them for their rave reviews. It ended with something like, “This is how we support New Zealand, and create a bestseller!” It seemed to imply that non-positive reviewers had let down the side.
Is it the duty of reviewers, though, to create a bestseller? Surely the brief is to support and publicise books by paying them respectful critical attention. For my part, I had reviewed the novel positively, while at the same time conveying my sense that it wasn’t very literary. That it wasn’t psychologically complex and didn’t “go deeper”. Soon after, I was buttonholed by a man who called the review “stinky”. He asked, beadily, “You’d be supportive of women writers, wouldn’t you?”
The question was insinuating, and oddly sexist too, as if I had a particular duty to be beaming and courageous about women writers. There are ways to be supportive of women (and all) writers, financially and publicly. I back these local endeavours.
Reviewing is not cheerleading, nor is it marketing. It highlights and responds, and in doing so it effectively cheerleads and markets. But it has to retain its integrity and independence or else it becomes meaningless.
Crucially, it has to be fair, and it must be all about the work.
If I ever write a review that even mentions, let alone disparages, an author’s appearance, sexuality, use of pronouns or anything like that (followed by a haughty dismissal of legitimate protest as “PC gone mad”) then the situation will be grimly clear: I have lost capacity and must be retired to a life of daytime TV soaps and lawn bowls.
