Book reviews are for readers, publishers, even other reviewers – everyone but authors. If the writer is any good – a substantial conditional, granted – he or she knows better than anyone else what works and what doesn’t with his or her latest offering, even (most crushingly) why. No one who has read a book only once as a journalistic assignment can ever understand it the way an author does after the sixth round of rewrites; how the opening chapter, no matter how many times revised, still doesn’t move quickly enough, or why, regardless of how many times it’s polished, some sentences simply refuse to shine. Knowing thyself means knowing thy limitations. Knowing thyself can be a real fucking drag.
Any writer’s claim that he or she doesn’t read reviews of his or her books is a self-aggrandizing lie right up there with maintaining that one couldn’t be happier for one’s closest friends’ enormous success or that winning isn’t important, it’s being nominated that matters. Writers care what critics say because their publishers care what critics say because readers (i.e., potential book buyers) care what critics say. Young writers want to be published, older writers want to be read, old writers want to be remembered, but each needs the same sort of corporate someone to pay the printing bills and cover the cost of flying to Winnipeg to chat up one’s newest tome. Accordingly, come publication day, one picks up the newspaper and opens to the book page and hopes for more yea then nea. Hopefully a lot more yea. Aside from the gold star of an award win, nothing means more to the prospective book buyer than an unqualified rave. No matter that most award-winning books are primarily middle-brow product meant to propagate the same stale values of conventional aesthetics and accepted ideas that the publishing industry has always thrived on or that there’s no such thing as a perfect book. What every writer wants is praise, lots and lots of praise.
Publication day long past, though, one realizes that what one wanted most for one’s book was for it to be understood. Liked, of course – admired, preferably – but, most of all, understood. A bad review is one thing, but a bad review that completely misinterprets what is being panned is a whole other level of annoyance. It works the other way, too. Some of the most gushing reviews I’ve received seemed to have been written about someone else’s novel, happily highlighting themes that obviously weren’t mine and praising skills that I don’t particularly possess. If anyone wants to call me handsome I’m not going to argue with them, but it would be nice to know that it wasn’t actually the guy standing next to me that they were looking at.
So, one worries, this time pre-publication. The title character of my just-released novel, David, for example, was born a slave in 1847 but raised as a free man on the world renowned African-American Elgin Settlement near present-day Chatham, Ontario, and is a man whose life has been defined by his violent rebellion against the very person who freed him, the Reverend William King. Far from the pulpit he was intended to occupy as the Reverend King’s anointed successor, David, unlike his Biblical namesake, has lost his faith in God and humanity and turned his back on both his past and his own people. What David is not about, however, is how slavery or racism are wrong and terrible, a statement (and novelistic theme) of such tautological banality it borders on the insulting. Art is about exploring the difficult and diffused, not about being self-congratulatory for merely confirming the obvious. David is also not about one white writer’s – mine – risky attempt (or, conversely, offensive effrontery) to occupy (or appropriate) a nineteenth century black man’s voice. David is African-American and was born in 1847 and I’m Caucasian and 119 years his junior, but I’ve never felt more kinship – both intellectual and psychological – with any other character I’ve created. David is about what all literature is about: human beings attempting to understand, attempting to accept, attempting to be happy.
But art – in my case, novels – doesn’t succeed by being didactic or even declarative. As Flannery O’Connor put it, “The meaning of a story has to be embodied in it, has to be made concrete in it. A story is a way to say something that can’t be said any other way, and it takes every word in the story to say what the meaning is. You tell a story because a statement would be inadequate.” Elsewhere, she goes even further: “A story isn’t any good unless it successfully resists paraphrase, unless it hangs on and expands in the mind.” The most satisfying reviews I’ve ever received have been from critics who obviously existed inside the book under evaluation, letting whatever meanings and charms the novel possesses become manifest in their own minds and, one hopes, lives.
But if the meaning of a work of art can’t be encapsulated in a simple statement, if you want a radio host to mention the title of your book of short stories or a salesperson to hand-sell your novel, you better have one handy anyway, and the shorter and snappier the better. It took two politely ignored novels for me to finally realize that sending a book, no matter how well-written, out into the cold, cold world of commerce without a well-knit catchphrase to keep it warm is authorially negligent. So, Moody Food, my third novel, was a “Sex, drugs, and rock-roll-suffused modern tragedy,” while my next, Gently Down the Stream, was a book about “Dogs, monogamy, and karaoke.”
Which is akin, of course, to introducing your new girlfriend to your parents by handing them a neatly-typed curriculum vitae and a life-size poster instead, but, fair or not, first impressions, no matter how succinctly shallow, count. And who knows? If all goes well, maybe next time they’ll actually sit down face to face and try to get to know each other. For real this time.
Well done, Ray.