There are many rules about writing but we somehow manage constantly to break them. One is that one should never respond to a bad review. Excellent advice you might think, but it has never stopped aggrieved writers from doing so.
The argument in favour of Olympian disdain is that silence is more dignified; it makes the critic go away, rather than poking him or her into further unpleasantness, and it avoids the unseemly spectacle of a public spat. More than this, there is an argument – perhaps the best one – that actually criticism is good for you and you should welcome it as a helpful corrective. After all, we do get things wrong and should be brave enough to admit it.
Both these arguments have a lot on their side but somehow they aren’t completely satisfying. Why, a writer might reasonably ask, should a reviewer be allowed to get away with blatant injustice? If the reviewer condemns the author for failing to mention X when, on pages 256-258, X is comprehensively discussed, then common fairness dictates that the false news be replaced by the truth. Unfortunately, many of the perceived unfairnesses of reviewers are not of this simple black-and-white kind that can be resolved by plain factual correction. When value-judgements and opinions come in to play one is on less sure ground. Readers of the letters page may be on your side but they may not. This is not now a question of being right or wrong, it is an argument of interpretation and that is a slippery slope towards rancour and losing your cool. Definitely time for a dose of Olympian aloofness.
I have to say I have been lucky. I don’t mean that I have never had a bad review (or a review that contains something unpleasant at the bottom of the packet) but I have never been the victim of an out-and-out demolition job. The nearest I came to it was when the author of a new book on Kafka claimed that he had thrown my 2004 biography of the writer across the room when he came to the bit where I discuss the idea (a commonplace in Kafka criticism) that Kafka somehow intuited the coming fate of the Jews under the Nazis. I was not suggesting that he had done so. In fact I think it is going a bit too far to claim this – though many critics such as George Steiner have explored the idea. I was simply indicating that it is an issue that has been raised by others and I felt obliged to do so.
Bad reviews come in various shapes and sizes. Some are bad because they ought to be: the book in question is a tissue of errors and obvious shortcomings. Some are bad because written in bad faith when the author has an old score to settle. Some are resentful because their book on the same subject has not been, in the reviewer’s judgement, adequately celebrated and they are determined that the newcomer be refused a triumph where they failed. Some are written by experts in the field (this one a particular failing of academics) who feel that you have not sought permission from the relevant scholarly trade guild before starting to operate in their bazaar. Something like that happened with my 1999 biography of Andrew Marvell but I took comfort from the renaissance literary scholar and critic Sir Frank Kermode who wrote me a note saying how much he had enjoyed it while pointing out that in a footnote I had referred to Modern Languages Review instead of Modern Language Review. Well, if that’s all he could find…
At the other end of the scale some reviews are blatantly partisan, lavishing praise on an old pal who, not long before, told the world how wonderful the reviewer was.
My conclusion? Grit your teeth and bear it. Almost certainly someone in the publishing house will be able to extract with a pair of surgical tweezers a quotable phrase for your blurb from that very review that appeared at first sight loathsome.
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