Of all the condescending and unfairly snarky non-reviews of a good book I’ve seen in the New York Times, this morning’s haute hit-piece on Gods Behaving Badly takes the let-them-eat-cake gâteau.
..although Ms. Phillips fulfills her purely lighthearted ambitions for this story, she provides a cautionary example to budding novelists everywhere. Though her background includes stints as an independent bookseller and BBC researcher, she also has a blog full of her thoughts about the hot competition on a television dance-contest show. When writers lived on Mount Olympus, they didn’t talk about things like that.
A blogger? Dear me! And she blogs about TV dance contests? How dare such a low-life pen light-hearted novels about what-if worlds of deposed Greek gods stuck into modern-day London? You or I might imagine this concept is clever. The book’s craftmanship is so seamless you or I just may not notice the author’s “writing.”
You or I might even think those are virtues worth praising in someone’s first novel? Hmmph, sniffs Ms. Maslin, the novel is “flossy, high-concept.”
Author/blogger Marie Phillips mildly remarks that Maslin “could hardly squeeze another spoiler in and still stick to the word limit.” In fact, the plot spoilers are the best of Maslin’s obnoxious review, which falls apart even by its own limited logic when she tries to tell readers that these wildly inventive plot twists have been torn from a book that is (Maslin says) “sitcomlike” and “suggests the help of fiction-writing software.”
In case you can’t tell, I’m angry because I loved this book, first published in England and given show-placement in Uppsala’s English bookstore on the front table with Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman–whose fans will adore it. I don’t know Marie Phillips and I don’t want to know Janet Maslin, whose contrastingly reverent review of Dean Koontz’s glurge about his dead dog also makes me feel nauseous.
But then “real writers,” even when they stumble, all deserve real respect (“Nice clothes there, Emperor!”), quite unlike a mere blogger.
9 responses so far ↓
1 Marie // Dec 7, 2007 at 2:14 pm
Hi there Devine Ms Betsy
Thanks for the spirited defense! I think you’re right, at least all those plot details give a good sense of the book, though it’s a bit of a shame how much they spoil for those who haven’t read it. I didn’t mind the review that much, she seemed so irritated by how much she’d enjoyed the book, poor thing. “More fun than it has any right to be”. Bless. I love the idea that my book has no right to be fun…
2 Betsy Devine // Dec 7, 2007 at 3:51 pm
I remember how upset I was at my first NYT review, not just condescending but so dull! Along the lines of “This is the sort of book that people who like this sort of book will like.”
Er, that sounds like way more boasting than I’m entitled to do about having exactly one NYT review. Longing for the Harmonies (Frank was the first author and really the major author on that) got the zzz review described, though the NYT later decided to make it one of their Notable Books for that year. Absolute Zero Gravity, an almost-pre-Internet collection of science and academic humor, never hit the NYT radar at all.
Amazon has been much, much kinder and more colorful.
3 TA // Dec 8, 2007 at 11:22 am
Those who can write, those who can’t, review?
Just to show that even I can do it, “deposed Greek gods stuck into modern-day London” does seem like a nice concept, but it reminds me a lot of “The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul”, by Douglas Adams. Who in turn may well have been inspired by Simak’s classic “Out of their Minds”.
Now if only I could work up the necessary squirrelly sneering snarkyness, I might have a future as a critic! ;)
4 Betsy Devine // Dec 8, 2007 at 1:38 pm
You’re right of course. And deposed gods show up in lots of other places too, Neil Gaiman and Diana Wynne Jones just for example.
But thank all those deities, deposed or not, having a plot device written up well in one book doesn’t mean later writers can’t reinvent it in their own ways. Otherwise Charles Dickens and Leo Tolstoy between them would have put the kibosh on all further writing of novels!
5 TA // Dec 9, 2007 at 8:43 am
Sure, the emphasis here is very much on “even I can do it”. “It” being the job (?) which Ms. Maslin apparently made into a lifelong career. She would probably suffer a massive coronary were she to see the things I have been doing online since the web’s infancy. ;)
6 Betsy Devine // Dec 9, 2007 at 9:25 am
As long as you haven’t blogged them you may be safe, TA!
Yes, it’s shocking how few of my favorite writers had careers up to Ms. Maslin’s ultramontane standards. TS Eliot? (“A banker!”) Wallace Stevens? (“My dear, he was in insurance.”) Dylan Thomas? (“Spent too much time getting drunk.”)
By the way, I have a small campaign going to get more people to use “ultramontane,” a very unusual word that itself is precisely what it describes. (The word “noun” is another example.)
I wonder if there is a word for that kind of word? And if there were a word for “a word that is what it describes,” say maybe “sogol,” then that word would have an even stranger property.
That is, “sogol” would be a sogol if and only if … it were a sogol, a word describing itself. If sogol were not a sogol, then, of course, it would simply not be a sogol.
Maybe I should stop typing now, what do you think?
7 TA // Dec 9, 2007 at 10:12 am
I think you’re beginning to sound like a mathematician doing set theory. :)
I wouldn’t be overly surprised if John Baez (speaking of math and bloggers) turned out to be an expert on some obscure, self-taught 19th century Polish-Russian genius who invented sogol theory in a solitary Siberian datcha and mailed his seminal paper to the Academy of Sciences in Moscow only hours before being obliterated by the Tunguska event. Maybe you should ask him?
Now that you mention it, I have thought about taking up blogging now and then, but the only way I could afford the time would be by making it commercial site, so presumably ad-sponsored. That should beat even discussing TV dance contests as a contempt magnet.
By the way, aren’t you going to a big party tomorrow? Maybe it is time to do a final check of the gown and finalize the list of interesting topics to discuss at the table?
8 Montauk Rider // Dec 11, 2007 at 10:27 pm
My goodness, this has become sogolific. I’m tempted to peramafore, but I won’t, at least not tonight.
Happy Birthday Betsy The Devine!
9 Betsy Devine // Dec 12, 2007 at 5:08 am
Peramafore?
I’m not sure that’s really allowed by my comment policy.
Thanks for your birthday wishes, Montauk the Rider, and right back at you, because I know yours is also coming up soon.