Negative Waves
I haven't seen the movie Kelly's Heroes in ages, but what I most remember from it is something that became a running joke between my father and myself when I was a kid: Donald Sutherland's hippie-dippie character complaining about "negative waves". If something got too tense or critical, my father would deflect with a pretty good impression of Sutherland, saying something like, "Whoooooa, watch it with the negative waves, man!"
Whenever I hear people complaining about reviewers (of books, movies, art, food, whatever) who are too negative, I can't help but hear Donald Sutherland's voice in my head. Negative waves, dude. Negative waves.
When I first started writing reviews, the question of negativity was unavoidable. After all, right around the time I started reviewing, the world of litchat was obsessed with the question of "snark". The Believer was founded to combat those negative waves. Dale Peck's eviscerative style got every pundit pontificating. Meanwhile, book blogs were suddenly becoming A Thing, with righteous denizens of newsprint denouncing the pixel-stained wretches toiling in their parents' basements. We all wanted to stake our claims, and we did, and it all got old fast, and so did we.
For years now, I've made it a principal not to get involved in any arguments about reviewing. It's not even a principal; it's just that I find the arguments predictable and tedious, because they're pretty much the same arguments people have had since the early 19th century at the latest. In any case, I barely review much at all anymore; there are other amusements.
At the risk of being tedious, though, I've been thinking about the topic this week. Having just returned from the AWP Conference, questions of writing and publishing are at the forefront of my mind. Additionally, I've got two books coming out very soon, and while one of them, About That Life, is unlikely to get reviewed much, if at all, since it's a quasi-academic book from an open access publisher, the publisher of the other, The Last Vanishing Man, is actively trying to get the book reviewed in as many places and by as many people as possible. On the one hand, it's exciting to think of these books reaching readers; on the other, it's terrifying because it is inevitable that some readers won't like them, and who among us wants to have our work disliked?
The immediate prompt for this post, however, is John Warner's thoughtful delving into this most beaten of dead horses via his newsletter The Biblioracle Recommends. Unlike me, Warner is still on Twitter, so he continues to see the churn of pointless arguments. Thus, he noticed a new flare-up of "concerns" about reviewing. ("Stop the presses! Twitter has concerns!") While arguing for the usefulness of negative reviews, Warner offers a devastating Kirkus review of his novel The Funny Man that he persuasively argues probably doomed the book. Succinct, barbed words in a powerful publication read by publishers, agents, booksellers, and librarians (at least back then) was a death blow for a first novel by a little-known writer. It's a humbling story and lends credibility to Warner's argument.
I think Warner makes a bit of a category error, though — and it's an interesting one, which is really why I'm writing this. His prompt is movie reviews and actors complaining about those mean, mean reviewers who don't love the actor's deeply skilled work in $400 million of fanservice. Plus all the fans jumping in to say that any negative review is "unfair" or "biased". (My heart sinks for the future of the human intellect.) These are the same people who hate Martin Scorsese because he doesn't think superhero movies are the equal of Citizen Kane.
The situation for books and reviews now is much different from the situation for movies and reviews. Movies are a mass art, books are not, especially works of fiction. The bestselling novel of any year might sell 1 million copies. Colleen Hoover's It Starts with Us was something of an anomaly, blowing everything else out of the water by selling 800,000 copies in pre-orders and first-day sales. (Most novels don't do even a tenth of that — heck, 1% of that — over the course of their entire time in print.)
Meanwhile, the top 10 movies of 2022 all sold over 20 million tickets each in movie theatres. Movies get reviewed all over the place. Certainly, a review in a major outlet can have an effect on films that are not blockbusters, but it's rare that any one review can make or break even a small, arthouse movie. And reviews do pretty much nothing to big spectacles. That fact leads to one of the perverse complaints made by fans of big spectacles who mistake box office success for cinematic quality. All those reviewers and their negative waves, man! We're just trying to watch a big dumb action movie that's indistinguishable from every other big dumb action movie and somebody out there is harshin' on it, dude.
The situation is different for books, particularly fiction. Few serious book review outlets remain. (I'm still in mourning for BookForum, though grateful some of its archives remain online.) Goodreads and TikTok dominate bookchat. One of the most depressing things at AWP last week was how common it was for people to talk about what they're doing to get book x, y, or z noticed on TikTok. Certainly, people talking about books in any way is a good thing, but quick consumer response to books is shallow discourse.
Like John Warner, I've suffered negative reviews and harsh criticism, though mostly for individual stories and essays rather than for books, since my books have, so far, been like most of what's published and gone generally unnoticed. While I will forever be grateful to Paul Di Filippo for his Locus review of my book Blood: Stories, the review I actually most cherish of that book was a mixed one by Redfern Jon Barrett for Strange Horizons, because even though Barrett wasn't much interested in the aesthetic of the later stories in the book, they identified what I hoped readers would notice across some of the other stories.
A story collection is, like an anthology, a dangerous target for any reviewer, especially if the book seeks some diversity of tone, subject matter, style, etc. In a mixed review I once, long ago, wrote of an anthology I said that the editor was likely the only person who could claim to be impressed by every story in the book, but in some ways that's true of every anthology and collection. "Not every reader will enjoy every story in this book," is perhaps the most banal thing you can say except, "This is a book written in words that form sentences." It's the nature of the beast and poses a real challenge for reviewers — a challenge I often failed myself when reviewing collections and anthologies, because to make the review itself interesting to read, it helps to have some contrast. And that's the problem with only trying to write positive reviews. Pure praise is incredibly difficult to forge into compelling reading!
Because it is so difficult for any one book to get reviewed at all, I generally lean toward thinking it's best for reviewers to ignore the stuff they don't like, at least if it's not by a Famous Writer who will receive lots of reviews and sales. What's the point of beating up on a book nobody's likely to read anyway? Publisher's Weekly, Kirkus, Library Journal, and the like have to — they try to review more than anybody else and really cover the mainstream publishing world — but the rest of us don't. Or, rather, we certainly ought to write negatively about books if there is a way to use the negative opinion toward a greater purpose. There needs to be some point other than just, "I don't like this book." Good for you, but hardly anybody's likely to read the book anyway, so why bother? Wouldn't your time be better spent drawing attention to books you think deserve it?
The purpose of negative reviews is, I think, to strengthen a literary discourse, not to help or hurt an individual book. The times when literary cultures have been vibrant and fertile have not been times of uniformity or positivity, they have been times of manifestoes and hyperbole, of people arguing late into the night about ethics and aesthetics, of communities building themselves in support of or opposition to now long-forgotten trends. Creative work needs the energy and passion of wanting to do things in a certain way and for a certain purpose as opposed to other ways and other purposes.
The problem is not negative reviews. The problem is a lack of reviews. The problem is the death of literary discourse, of thoughtful reflection, of historical knowledge, of careful attention to the text. We need all that to be more common if we are to have vibrant culture, but even more than all of that we need people talking about what they care about in what they read, how they care, why they care — praising to the skies and damning to hell.
John Warner quotes A.O. Scott: "A big part of any critic’s job is to be wrong…" But what is "wrong"? Something you will disagree with later? That's just human. The only wrong of reviewing is dishonesty. My feelings about books I praised or denounced 20 years ago have changed, as, I expect, have yours. That's not wrong, that's normal. The book we need today is not the book we needed a few months ago. I regret some reviews I have written — in one case, because I should not have agreed to the review at a moment when I didn't have the time or mental energy to express myself well about it (I don't think my evaluation of the book would have changed, but I do think my approach would have been different); in other cases because I overplayed my feelings and praised or condemned too strongly. But I don't regret the reviews where I honestly expressed an opinion I now have some difference with, books I don't love as I did when I reviewed them, books for which I now see virtue that previously was invisible to me.
Regardless of whether I agree with them now, I cherish my old reviews, because they preserve a different self in a different literary time and place, allowing a window into both the slice of culture I had a chance to be part of and the moment of being I happened to inhabit.
Alas, I risk repeating things I said almost 20 years ago. Unlike my opinions of various books and movies, my feeling that literature needs a robust culture of comment and argument remains the same as it was when I was young. In a February 2005 blog post about all this, I ended by quoting Gary Sernovitz quoting Henry James, and it's as good an end now as it was then:
"Art," Henry James wrote, "lives upon discussion, upon experiment, upon curiosity, upon variety of attempt, upon the exchange of views and the comparison of standpoints; and there is a presumption that those times when no one has anything particular to say about it, and has no reason to give for practice or preference, though they may be times of honour, are not times of development--are times, possibly even, a little of dullness."
Go ahead, dudes — surf those negative waves!
