TW Opinion by Martha Nichols
Hallelujah! People Care About a Book Review!
It's a feast for those of us who love literary spats. And when you mix in a male reviewer and a popular young fiction writer who happens to be female, you get the kind of hoopla sparked this week by William Giraldi.
In last Sunday's New York Times Book Review, he dismissed Alix Ohlin's novel Inside (Knopf, 2012) as having an "appalling lack of register" and "language that limps onto the page proudly indifferent to pitch or vigor."
Giraldi, the fiction editor of AGNI at Boston University, is the author of a novel of his own, Busy Monsters (Norton, 2011). TW editor David Cameron interviewed him this year for Talking Writing, where Giraldi named his personal literary favorites—including Homer, Cervantes, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and Thomas Hardy. Given his penchant for epics and storytelling ingenuity (the word "metatextually" also appears in his TW interview), it's no surprise that Giraldi wasn't taken with the "bland earnestness of realism" he finds in Ohlin's work. His conclusion:
There’s been much recent parley, in these pages and elsewhere, about 'women’s fiction' and the phallic shadow it has been condemned to live in. But there’s a better argument to be had. Ohlin’s fiction will be shelved with the pop lit and never with Mavis Gallant and Alice Munro, not because of her leaden obsession with pregnancy, dating and divorce, or any inherent bias in the publishing industry, but because her language is intellectually inert, emotionally untrue and lyrically asleep."
Not nice, as many have commented online. Here's just a sampling from the ensuing Twitter storm, as compiled by the Wall Street Journal:
Penned as protection during the niceness scare.... This is one of the meanest NYTBR reviews I've seen." "Dear William Giraldi, that's not a review, but a jealous tantrum. For shame." "Another problem w/William Giraldi’s NYTBR review, funny as parts are: All books fall short if compared to DON QUIXOTE."
Even J. Robert Lennon of Salon, who wonders if his own thrashing of a Paul Auster memoir has the same "artfully composed snark," thinks Giraldi went overboard. In his "How to Write a Bad Review," Lennon puts it this way:
"Even if you don't like the writer you're reviewing, not even a little bit, acknowledge, at least to yourself, that some people do, and that this fact is not meaningless."
Well, yes, and Lennon certainly believes in not being overly nice. But it's also true that any book selected for the New York Times Book Review matters to somebody. Here's the real question: Is Giraldi's insistence on lyricism and intellectual rigor unfair? More basic still: Why do bad reviews freak us out? For me, the Twitter frenzy over a negative book review—a book review, for crying out loud—is a cause for rejoicing. Lennon seems to assume that there are plenty of book reviewers toiling away, getting intellectually driven reviews like Giraldi's into mainstream print. But I see precious little of that these days. In Ohlin's case, thank God readers care enough about her books to tweet away. And as Giraldi told the Boston Globe this week:
There’s a rabid misconception out there that I attacked an author. I did not. I attacked a book. There’s a huge difference.”
Last year, Jennifer Egan found herself in a similar flap about "chick lit" writers when she made a comment about "banal" mass-market women's fiction in a Wall Street Journal interview. In a later interview with Talking Writing, Egan said she deeply regretted casting aspersions on any women writers.
"It was a thoughtless bit of easy judgmentalism," she admitted, "and people were offended by it, especially coming out of the mouth of a woman who had just won a major prize." But a single passing remark from an interview is not the reason Giraldi has outraged readers; his assessment of Ohlin's work is detailed and exact. It doesn’t matter that she is a woman or that she’s not a typical chick-lit writer. Bad reviews are always risky for the reviewer, but they're a lot of fun to read. Not because of the snark, although that is part of their appeal (see every negative review written by Anthony Lane), but because heated words capture our attention. Unless you assume scurrilous motives on the part of a reviewer (and I don't here), strong arguments leap beyond the usual careful, PR-oriented boundaries of book reviews. I've never read anything by Ohlin, and I'm not sure I'd agree with Giraldi's conclusions if I did. But he puts the emphasis on smart writing, which I like. And I can't help celebrating that an honest-to-God book review, one that takes issue with poor use of language and unrealistic characters—the stuff of writerly craft—is getting this much play. Or as Giraldi put it in his TW interview:
If you’re a novelist and you’re not offending someone, you’re not doing your job. I can’t emphasize that enough.”
TW Interviews with William Giraldi and Jennifer Egan
- "William Giraldi: 'I Let Myself Be Outrageous," TW interview by David Cameron, Talking Writing, May/June 2012.
- "Jennifer Egan: 'I Needed to Let Go of the Chronology,'" TW interview by Karen J. Ohlson, Talking Writing, Summer 2011.
Publishing Information:
- "Here If You Need Me" by William Giraldi, review of Inside and Signs of Wonder by Alix Ohlin, New York Times Book Review, August 17, 2012.
- "Harsh Book Review Sparks Strong Twitter Reactions" by Barbara Chai, Wall Street Journal ("Speakeasy"), August 18, 2012.
- "How to Write a Bad Review" by J. Robert Lennon, Salon, August 18, 2012.
- "BU Professor Defends Critique of Alix Ohlin Books" by Mark Shanahan and Meredith Goldstein, Boston Globe, August 22, 2012
- For an excerpt from Inside, see Alix Ohlin's website.
Martha Nichols is Editor in Chief of Talking Writing. She's also been an editor at the Women's Review of Books since the mid-1990s.
She thanks David Cameron for alerting her to the online fracas caused by William Giraldi's review.
"Years later, I can still picture the yellow-ochre building outside our apartment, the swifts flitting past, my toddler son’s joy at riding the black horse on the nearby merry-go-round. I don’t just have photographs or neatly organized descriptions; I have images sharpened by strong emotions."
—"My Search for Solitude in an Online World"
