[SPOILER ALERT: This post contains pretty big spoilers about This Bright River and Swamplandia, and lesser spoilers about The Sisters Brothers.]
A friend just pointed out Janet Maslin’s review of This Bright River, from yesterday’s NYT. Maslin and I actually agree on a lot about this book (my review here). All in all, I think she was perhaps a bit harsh, but fair.
Except for this line: “We meet Ben, a onetime rich kid and stoner, who sustains some kind of head injury in the novel’s prologue. That knock on the head accounts for some of the vague, so-what nature of Ben’s perceptions about himself and others.”
Uhhhhh, wrong. The prologue shows two unnamed men drinking at a bar. One offers some pot to the other, and when they go out to the parking lot, the pot-offerer says, “‘I’m sorry about this. I really am, dude. I’m actually going to kill you now.’ … Then the guy hits him over the head with whatever he’s got in his hand.” And he wakes up in a coffin.
That was not “some kind of head injury” and Ben was not there. At the end of the book, it’s revealed that the pot-offerer was Ben’s cousin, Wayne. Wayne thought Ben’s sister had been raped by the other guy at the bar, so he goes there, hits him over the head, and buries him alive.
The fact that Maslin completely misread this scene, to me, discredits her entire review, especially since her main argument is that This Bright River doesn’t hold together—no book will hold together if you don’t pay attention.
This happens too often in book reviews, although rarely as objectively and demonstrably as it happened here. Usually what you see could more charitably be called a misinterpretation, as opposed to Maslin’s blatant misreading.
For instance, when Swamplandia! came out last year, reviewers were fond of saying things like “the novel is a wild ride … [full of] high comedy” as Emma Donoghue did.
In fact, Swamplandia! follows a trio of effectively orphaned children who discover that the world is a brutal, unmerciful place. When the brother goes off to save the family alligator park, he doesn’t even come close, instead finding misery at a minimum-wage job and discovering that his absentee father is a sell-out and a drunk. When one sister thinks she falls in love with a ghost, she goes missing in a swamp and nearly dies, because there’s no such thing as ghosts (and, you might infer, no such thing as love). When the other daughter finds a traveling “bird-man” who scares vultures away, she likes him and hires him to help her find her lost sister—then he rapes her and leaves her for dead.
That’s a wild ride full of high comedy the way a crashing plane is. Maslin herself called Swamplandia! a “deeply haunted” book, which is better, but still doesn’t get the job done, considering there is a ghost in the book. (My review is here, for the sake of fairness.)
In the Guardian last year, Pulitzer prize-winning writer Jane Smiley eviscerated The Sisters Brothers, a Booker prize nominee, the winner of this year’s Tournament of Books, and my favorite book of 2011. She’s entitled to her opinion, but she alleges that the main character “Eli has never developed his sensibility beyond the mental age of about 13.” Wrong. His emotional intelligence is entirely caddywhompus because he kills people for a living and hates it, but he is not mentally challenged.
Smiley doesn’t bother to interpret or read into the book at all—she takes the words of an unreliable narrator as the whole truth and nothing but—and so she misses the nuance and depth that so many others have seen. (I might or might not be the irate commenter on Smiley’s review.)
You could draw a line between Maslin’s mistake and Donoghue’s/Smiley’s, but I would tend to group them all together. All three reviews contain errors that
go beyond a questionable interpretation of a book’s events—these reviewers have failed at their job.
These are mistakes, pure and simple, and the nature of book reviewing makes them hard to catch. I don’t imagine many book review editors fact check their reviews. The NYT obviously doesn’t.
What can we do about this? Probably nothing, except to bring it up and take reviewers to task when they do it. And we can downgrade Janet Maslin a couple of pegs in the ranks of the country’s best book reviewers.
Sounds like a pretty big difference between Maslin’s and Smiley’s. Maslin was just plain wrong on a factual level, on a piece of information that (I assume?) should be clear to even an average reader. Sounds like Smiley just didn’t take the time to read deeper.
The question is, which is worse?
That’s a poor use of “just” on my part. I’m not saying a failure to read below the surface is not a big deal for a reviewer. In fact, I’d say that’s the worse of the two sins.
I actually think Smiley’s is worse, because it’s harder to prove. With Maslin’s, you can just say “reread pp. 423-424″ and she’s objectively wrong, but Smiley can argue and hedge and basically be the most obnoxious student in the lit class, who hates a book because she doesn’t understand it.
Exactly. Perhaps Smiley gives equal importance to these three? (from her comment to your comments): “My job as a reviewer is to receive the book, read it in good faith, and give my honest opinion.”
She might want to put more focus on the “read it in good faith” part. And less on receiving the book.
“Tell me about your day.”
“Well, first I woke up …”
The NYT corrected the review sometime in the last 15 minutes. I don’t think it works in this case—the review is still broken because it used faulty evidence to form its conclusions, but this is the kind of thing that couldn’t happen in Smiley’s review.
I find it interesting that all of your examples feature female reviewers. Aren’t there any examples of misreadings or mistakes in male reviewers’ works?
I would also ask: did any of these reviewers perhaps have ulterior motives for their “misreadings”? The most catty and cruel reviews I’ve read typically came from writers who were jealous of the authors of the books they were assigned to review, in addition to having an undisclosed personal link to the author. This is known as a conflict of interest, and is supposed to be prevented by editors, but isn’t always effectively guarded against.
Knowing Mr. Vreeland as I do, I’m comfortable saying he disdains males and females equally.
But Laura, you publish book reviews at your mag. Do you fact check reviews at all, or do you just edit for style/grammar?
You know, I had never really thought about fact checking a book review before you asked that question, David. I mean, they *are* supposed to be opinion pieces… but if the reviewer is going to totally screw up on the reading part of it, thus skewing the opinions of others, that’s definitely problematic.
I guess the other question would be: do you only have to fact-check NEGATIVE reviews? Because what if a reviewer is recommending a book based on a positive misinterpretation, reading something into it that isn’t really there? For that matter, couldn’t a reviewer micro-focus so much on one part of a given book that he or she recommends or pans based on something that is minor? Amateur reviewers at Amazon do this all the time: if they are pissed off by the author’s constant misspellings or inability to differentiate between there/their/they’re, for instance, they will give the book a poor overall rating. But does that mean the plot sucks and the characters were undeveloped, or even that the book truly wasn’t worth reading?
I’m not sure fact-checking book reviews would be possible at all, except possibly if you sent it to the publisher, but that would lead to other problems.
Yeah, that’s a weird coincidence. Here’s a really terrible review by a male reviewer (at least I think it’s a male reviewer).
And I’m inclined to agree with you: authors make bad reviewers. Smiley and Donoghue are both authors, obviously, and I think that fact colors Donoghue’s review—she seems like she was trying to be nice to a young author, which I’ve found to be more of a problem than authors being catty. Smiley, I think, is a better writer than she is a reader.
Maslin just didn’t read this book very closely. In fairness, she appears pretty often in our Week’s Best Book Reviews feature, though mostly when Sean writes it. I prefer Carolyn Kellogg at the LA Times.
Just to play devil’s advocate, I wonder how many books Maslin reads every week? Unlike, say, Roger Ebert reviewing movies, it’s not as easy to tear through a book even once (much less re-reading it before writing your reivew) while also catching all of its finer points. A John Grisham novel, sure. But the literary books that the Times tackles require more careful study.
Maslin screwed up, for sure, and it’s interesting that other reviewers didn’t make the same mistake in their readings, but I would also question the system of book reviewing wherein reviewers must basically pump out reviews in order to keep up with the never-ending tide of new books. I guess that’s partially why papers used to have entire sections devoted to books: it allowed different writers to review books and rotate on a schedule so that they didn’t have to be constantly reading books for review, plus would have more time to ponder them when it was their turn. Sadly, that’s become a quaint notion from the past.
I’m sure she has a ton of books to read. I’m just as sure that there are tons of people ready and willing to take her job if she’s burned out (she stopped reviewing movies in the 90s because she got burned out).
Gina Frangello, in this piece at the Rumpus, tries to be very nice to Maslin, but also points out that a late scene in the book clarifies the prologue beyond any doubt, and that it’s likely Maslin simply didn’t finish the book.
Honestly, that wouldn’t even be a problem for me (I’ve reviewed books that I couldn’t finish), but it has to be disclosed in the review. The fact that she took the stand she did (arguing that the book doesn’t make sense) is irresponsible if she in fact didn’t finish it.
She also could’ve left out the mention of the prologue (and the snarky joke it set up), and it would not have compromised the review. All this is by way of saying, I don’t have a whole lot of sympathy for Maslin.
I think a lot of reviewers also didn’t finish Swamplandia, because it ends with an utterly devastating rape scene, and if you don’t read that scene, I could see calling it “a wild ride” instead of a depressing book about lost innocence.