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February 04, 2005
why read reviews at all?
filed under reviews
Pam brought up an excellent point.
Could this be a case of a reviewer trying to increase their readership? Be extreme and see who you net for readers? Isn't it a niche market, readers of reviews? I was asking some people at the office, whether or not they would do something based on, or in defiant of, a reviewer's comments. Some don't ever read reviews of movies or books. (Who am I kidding, read reviews of books!?!) But others do, for the entertainment and to see if the reviewer "matches" their opinion. It's a form of entertainment for some people. For you?Really the bigger question is whether critical opinion -- the blessing or the rejection of the literati -- matters at all. Certainly you can write a good story that finds a lot of readers and be ignored (or skewered) by the critics who write reviews. So why does it matter, to me particularly? A couple of things come to mind.
Maybe it's something as simple as needing approval of the authority figure. But of course that only works if I grant authority to reviewers. It was Eleanor Roosevelt who said "nobody can make you feel inferior without your consent." I love Eleanor Roosevelt.
Then there's the matter of pride. Reviewers have a big pulpit from which to make their opinions known. I think Pam's right that most people don't read reviews, but right now that's probably not a lot of comfort to Bret Lott. If a hundred people read the review of Before We Get Started, I'm guessing that smarts.
I'm trying to remember specific reactions I had to bad reviews. Two come to mind, in one case I laughed, in the other I was angry.
The first case was the PW review that used the phrase "color by number cartoon caricatures." That phrase struck me as so studied and so extreme that I wasn't offended at all; I just didn't take it seriously. I imagined some graduate student in an MFA program getting paid twenty bucks to write the review, and pouring all his or her venom and anger into it, but coming up with ridiculous, instead.
The other case was a two line review in a minor Oregon paper for Into the Wilderness. It was something like "The main character has the Mohawk name Between Two Lives. Kind of like a professor who writes bodice rippers."
That one made me angry, because (1) obviously the reviewer (a male) hadn't read the damn book; and (2) it was condescending. It was also a case of a reviewer going for the pithy line rather than providing any thoughtful criticism.
I think that's the answer: anybody who is published hopes for reviews that are good, of course. But really what you want, what you hope for, are thoughtful reviews that indicate the reviewer read the book carefully and thought about it and understood something of what you were trying to accomplish. It's praise from a colleague, in a way, because most reviewers are also writers. A reviewer should know what goes into writing a novel, and so it's particularly hard when they cut corners or are unnecessarily nasty.
Somewhere in this long post are the reasons I read reviews. When I started writing this I thought maybe I could make myself understand that reviews aren't important and can be ignored, but I didn't get there. Because now I remember this: a well written review will make me see things about a book I might otherwise have missed.
PS I'm coming back to the topic of Category Seven novels soon. Those of you who have emailed me or posted book titles, I'm thinking about them.
February 4, 2005 12:11 PM