Last week, via The Book Lady’s Blog, I heard about a bit of a blog dust-up over the whole business of bad reviews, the unfairness of bad reviews when the blogger has gotten a free book, authors complaining about bad reviews, etc. (Much of this discussion seems to have disappeared from the internets?) Then yesterday’s Booking Through Thursday question, which was probably inspired by the same events, was:
I receive a lot of review books, but I have never once told lies about the book just because I got a free copy of it. However, some authors seem to feel that if they send you a copy of their book for free, you should give it a positive review.
Do you think reviewers are obligated to put up a good review of a book, even if they don’t like it? Have we come to a point where reviewers *need* to put up disclaimers to (hopefully) save themselves from being harassed by unhappy authors who get negative reviews?
I decided to skip the meme because at that point I was fed up with the whole topic. The question is absurd. How can one be obligated to put up a positive review if doing so would in some cases necessitate lying, which would be totally unethical regardless? And especially when doing so only benefits the writer (and only in the short term) while hurting both the reviewer and the reader.
I had missed an essay by Joe Queenan on a related topic, appearing in the New York Times last week. Fortunately, some authors even appear to recognize when a gushing review is not quite justified. And Queenan doesn’t have much time for those who don’t.
Authors are always complaining that reviewers missed the whole point of “Few Mourn the Caballero,” or took the quote about the merry leper ballerinas out of context, or overlooked the allusions to Octave Mirbeau, or didn’t mention that the author once jilted the critic after he kept begging her to go out on a double date dressed as one of the Boleyn sisters. Authors are always complaining that reviewers maliciously cited the least incandescent, least Pushkinian passages in the book, or have a grudge against them because of something that happened the night the Khmer Rouge or Joy Division broke up, or only said mean things because the author went to Exeter while the reviewer had to settle for Andover.
What makes this bellyaching so unseemly is that the vast majority of book reviews are favorable, even though the vast majority of books deserve little praise. Authors know that even if one reviewer hates a book, the next 10 will roll over like pooches and insist it’s not only incandescent but luminous, too. Reviewers tend to err on the side of caution, fearing reprisals down the road. Also, because they generally receive but a pittance for their efforts, they tend to view these assignments as a chore and write reviews that read like term papers or reworded press releases churned out by auxiliary sales reps. This is particularly true in the mystery genre, where the last negative review was written in 1943.
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But such reviews are unfair to the reader, who may be hornswoggled into thinking that Philip Marlowe really would tip his hat at the author, or that the author has gone toe-to-toe with Joseph Conrad and given the ornery old cuss a thrashing. Books are described as being “compulsively readable,” when they are merely “O.K.”; “jaw-droppingly good,” when they are actually “not bad”; “impossible to put down,” when they are really “no worse than the last three.”
While the reasons Queenan notes may apply to some reviewers (though I neither receive a pittance and see reviewing as a chore nor worry about future negative reviews of my own book down the road), I have a different one. Most reviewers, I think, feel a need to give either a positive or negative recommendation. It is much more uncommon to find a wishy-washy, things were good things were bad, “this book is merely O.K.” review than to find either a nasty one or a nice one. And the thing is, most books are pretty much just O.K. But offering a take-home opinion is seen as more important than exploring the work’s successes and failures both.
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