“Critics are like Eunuchs at an Orgy.” – origins unknown
Writers don’t take kindly to criticism. After all why should they be different from any of us? For me there is something exquisite about reading author responses to reviews. The anger and the pettiness seem to inspire masterful wit and style (at best) or (even better) clownish buffoonery unworthy of figures of great cultural gravitas.
For those who are connoisseurs of the literary contretemps, I recommend reading the letters in The New York Review of Books. You will uncover a universe of expressions that will serve you well in your own modest efforts at literary feuding. Here are just a few treasures [along with my own deconstructions of their meaning]:
- “outrageously inaccurate” [a hair splitting difference of opinion on a subject that no one else understands or cares about]
- “rhetoric” [the writing style of the reviewer in question, usually as opposed to the reasoned arguments of the writer]
- “petrified academicism” [a favorite of mine, a characterization usually made by a petrified academic writer about a petrified academic reviewer]
- “crude” [the reviewer's method of analysis, as opposed to the "subtle dialectics" of the writer]
- “mendacity” [a pompous way of saying that the reviewer is a liar, but with the implication that the flaw is deeply imbedded in his character.]
- “clique” [friends of the reviewer who have publicly defended the review]
- “heartwarming to hear” [Sarcasm. Usually said when the writer takes out of context a short phrase by the reviewer to make the reviewer seem foolish]
- “the reviewer surely knows…” [said when the writer patronizingly points out a particularly egregious mistake of the reviewer indicating that the reviewer knows very little about what he is reviewing]
- “shocking” [a very common and overused characterization about things rarely shocking, that always calls to mind the Claude Raines character in Casablanca]
- “unholy alliance” [people who usually disagree about most things but are united in their revulsion of the author's writing]
I love this stuff! Here are a few more of my favorites:
“I have your review in front of me and soon it will be behind me” – George Bernard Shaw
Possibly the greatest put down ever of a reviewer (critical of Shaw’s play, no doubt). Magnificent double entendre. Unforgettable understatement.
“What you said hurt me very much. I cried all the way to the bank.” – Liberace
Another classic that has become a cliché. Probably more honest than Shaw about the mental state of the aggrieved artist.
Liberace was pretty blunt. But leave it to the inimitable Ayelet Waldman to bring out the universal humanity in a writer’s outrage at an unfair review of Michael Chabon’s [Ayelet's husband] book:
“To the fucking MORON Amazon reviewers giving Awesome Man 1 star [because] ‘It would be good for, like, a 2 year old’ – IT WAS WRITTEN FOR LITTLE KIDS”
Getting back to The New York Review of Books, I find it puzzling why writers would ever respond to these reviews, given the fact that the NYR always gives the reviewer the final word. And the reviewer almost always answers with a tone of bored world-weary superiority at the overwrought, and implied, unbecoming comments of the writer.
So I too will give the reviewer the final word:
”Your manuscript is both good and original, but the part that is good is not original, and the part that is original is not good. ” – Samuel Johnson
