Bad Reviews--keep 'em to yourselves please

[frostokovich]

Preface: I wrote this in respone to a post on another site from a woman who'd sent her client a copy of a bad review of their work with the (to me, misdirected) idea that somehow the writer would be able to use the comments to advantage, gain some insight from it. Someone else in the group felt this deserved further blogging...and so, it's your

Comments

[realthog]

"I've seen them vengefully put particularly noxious critics into their books as (not making this up) the parasitic creatures who live inside the anus of dragons, sucking off the dragon's shit."

Dang! You mean other writers do this too?

[kylecassidy]

He must be talking about Dante!

I do like to hear my bad crits -- well, I hope there aren't any, but I'm prepared for them when they arrive. Some I realize are unfounded, and those bounce away. Some are rooted in truth and hopefully they make me better in the future. But it's all a balancing act , weighing the potential value with the source.

[realthog]

"Some I realize are unfounded, and those bounce away."

Actually, the unfounded ones really piss me off, because there the reviewer's guilty (unless simply an incompetent) of an abuse of power: he/she is taking advantage of the fact that the author has effectively no right of reply.

Legitimate criticism is pretty pissing off too, obviously, but there the pissed-offedness is directed at oneself!

[kylecassidy]

A lot of the "reviews" I get will be from j-random person on the Interwebz. And I'll get something that says "the lighting in Kyle Cassidy's photographs blow" and I'll look at their portfolio and it's a bunch of photos of babies and dogs so I'll be like "okay, file that one under 'pay it no mind'."

I think a lot of people just have a need to have an opinion especially people who want to be, developmentally, somewhere they're not. They want to be a writer, but they've never been published, and they find the quickest way to think of themselves in that fraternity is by having critical comments about others. If I can realize it as just being someone trying to prop themselves up I, can forgive a baseless criticism.

The ones that suck are the ones you realize are true, but hopefully they make you better next time.

[realthog]

"They want to be a writer, but they've never been published, and they find the quickest way to think of themselves in that fraternity is by having critical comments about others."

I dunno. I think the real menaces are the ones who want to be reviewers, and think that reviewing is merely a matter of being wildly opinionated whether or not the "opinions" have any basis or make sense; usually the "opinions" are critical of the work in question because that's what these tyros think reviewing's all about.

The type of amateur reviewer you indicate does, however, commit the most wildly irritating faux-reviewing crime of all: that of reviewing not the book the author's written but the book the reviewer would have written, if only. "Gregory Frost falls far short of thigh-slapping hilarity in Shadowbridge . . ." That sort of thing.

[kylecassidy]

I was once upset by a baseless, uneducated and negative review of a gallery show I was in -- I pointed it out to the other photographer in the show, whose work I greatly admired, saying "How can he possibly say this? This jerk doesn't understand anything!" And instead of getting agitated, as I was, he shrugged and said simply "Darwin will take care of him." And it was like I popped through to a new level of understanding right there, like Siddartha at the stream. And sure enough, in the intervening years, Darwin has taken care of that reviewer.

[frostokovich]

Who says I fall short of thigh-slapping hilarity? Where d'ya get that stuff?

The worst "real" review I think I ever saw was a Philadelphia Inquirer review of Stations of the Tide by Michael Swanwick. Not only was the review ludicrously negative, biased--precisely as you describe the wannabe reviewers above-- but the reviewer actually got the sex of the main character wrong. This is no mean feat. Conclusion: He skim-read Michael's fine novel while polishing his knob or something else that sucked what little brain matter he began with out of his head. Numerous people wrote the Inquirer about this outrage, and we all hope that reviewer was never hired again and now works as a bridge support for Amtrak. But the damage of that egregious review was, effectively, already done. And now, thanks to the internet, we have thousands of such soi-disant critics publishing their...opinions. (Kind of like Sean Hannity pretending that he's providing you with any actual, you know, facts.)

[realthog]

"the damage of that egregious review was, effectively, already done"

That is exactly the problem: there's no effective right of reply to a ludicrously bad bit of reviewing because it always appears as if the author's just whingeing.

A further difficulty is that faux-reviewers' employers, even if they themselves have a clue as to what reviewing's actually about, will inevitably and automatically assume that any complaints are just whinges. It takes quite a lot before a reviews editor will start loking closely enough at any of his/her reviewers' work to realize there's an incompetent or a rogue at loose.

Rogue reviewers

[frostokovich]

Yes, indeed. At least in the case of SotT, the reviewer made it very easy for us to point out that he had not, in fact, bothered to pay the slightest attention to any of the book he was ostensibly reviewing. Most of the time, it's not so obvious.