Bad reviews. If you’re a creator of any description, at some point you’re probably going to receive a less than flattering review for the work you’ve spent a goodly amount of time agonising over. It happens to all of us and even the most popular authors will cop a mealy-mouthed assessment. It’s bad enough when it’s from an anonymous or faked name amateur reviewer on inclusive, user-friendly platforms like Goodreads, but it stings even more when it’s from a professional critic in a well-regarded publication.
No one is immune. Even famous, winsome, best-selling authors receive scathing reviews.
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Haruku Murakami
Speaking about Haruki Murakami’s book, Bryan Karetnyk wrote in The Times Literary Supplement, “At its best, First Person Singular is limp, insipid and apathetic; at worst, it seems to express outright contempt for its readers.”
Sally Rooney
Christian Lorentzen took issue with Sally Rooney’s bedroom descriptions in Beautiful World, Where Are You? in the London Review of Books: “Relayed in a cold third person, they lack the emotional point of view of the sex in Rooney’s earlier books, which are sparer and less porny. They sound not unlike moving furniture, and have something in common with a couple of scenes of Felix sorting packages at the warehouse.”
Mitch Albom
Meanwhile, Ron Charles was similarly unimpressed by a Mitch Albom book, harrumphing in The Washington Post, “Everything about The Stranger in the Lifeboat is sketched in cartoon colours – from its vacuous theology and maudlin tragedies to its class warfare theme. Instead of character development, TV news reports interrupt the story to provide potted biographies of the lost souls. And the Lord’s statements supply all the holy insight of a sympathy card from your insurance agent.”
Trent Dalton
Closer to home, Catriona Menzies-Pike skewered national darling Trent Dalton in the Sydney Review of Books. She did not hold back: “If Dalton’s prose style skims the surfaces of his characters’ lives, so does his thinking about the moral and political world. Dalton infantilises his audience by feeding them palatable maxims about history, society and human flourishing. The themes are repeated again and again in case the rowdy kids up the back aren’t paying attention. Good things happen to good people. You can’t control everything. Fortune favours the plucky. You get over stuff. Everyone has some good in them. All you need is love. Everything. Will. Be. OK.”
Ouch.
While writing and reading hatchet reviews can be fun, and a good venting exercise if you really didn’t warm to the book at hand, sometimes it’s easy to forget that these coruscating words can have a hurtful effect on the author. ArtsHub reached out to the books community to see who would be brave enough to share some of the bad reviews received for their books and asked them if the reception of such changed the way they wrote.
And more…
Of her most recent book, Double Happiness, Rochelle Siemienowicz says she had a review on Goodreads which said, “I prefer page-turners or books with literary merit.”
Goodreads isn’t a particularly good source for reliable opinion, being a catch-all for all comments and a depository for the general populace, some of whom may personally bear unresolved issues about the author. Imagine, however, having a review in a long-standing, respected publication that was less than respectful.
Of her sophomore novel, Laura McPhee-Browne faced one that began: “My first reading of Laura McPhee-Browne’s Little Plum was quick and I admit to returning to it reluctantly. I am not an anti-present tense crusader by any means, but here a deflated style adds nothing to a lean story.” The reviewer continues in an unfavourable manner in her capsule review. McPhee-Browne tells ArtsHub, “I tried not to let it change the way I wrote/write, but it did make me feel small and embarrassed for a while. And angry at the Australian lit industry.”
Poet Lisa Collyer also received a damning appraisal of her book from a reviewer who did a forensic dive into the meaning of certain poems, and took issue with her non-straightforward diction and a poetic language that ranged from “mildly odd” to “inventively lyrical”. When asked whether she’d changed the way she wrote after reading the assessment, Collyer says, “Definitely not. In fact I’m emboldened.”
Lucy Sussex was already suffering from gastric flu when she received a bad review of one of her short story collections. “While it possibly had some positive things to say – I honestly do not care or remember – it made me vomit. Literally,” she recalls. Like Collyer, she remains defiant: “A review would not make me change how I work unless it was really insightful. It would have to say why, convincingly, and reviewers seldom have that time and space.
“Otherwise, if I encounter a hostile reviewer, I am excruciatingly nice to them,” she adds.
It’s wise to not pay too much attention to anonymous reviews. Someone not willing to put their name to a piece of criticism is not worth worrying about. As Krissy Kneen points out, “An anonymous writer said I was clearly the main character and I was a narcissist because of it. It was fiction. I was not the main character.”
There are ethics involved with reviewing and if you’re going to critique a book it behooves you to inform the publication whether you’re close friends with, a former lover of or even someone who holds a grudge against the book’s writer. Unfortunately, this does not always happen, and the result can lead to spectacularly unfair and slanted readings. An author who received the worst review they’ve ever had tells ArtsHub that, unbeknown to the editor, the reviewer “was an unsuccessful fling…”
“But even if it was not a bitchy review there is the real issue of allowing someone to review a book without disclosing their relationship to the author!”
Don’t forget…
Just remember, it’s nigh on impossible to receive universal acclaim; your work will not appeal to everyone, so try not to take these critical comments too personally. Sure, bitch about it to your friends but resist the urge to lambast the reviewer for their ill opinions. After all, as ArtsHub wrote earlier in 5 ways to deal with a bad review, it’s just one personal assessment. Take heart too, that many successful authors have been on the receiving end of scathing attacks.
Read: Why ‘bad’ reviews are equally valuable and how to do them well
Here are a couple more that show how even books considered literary classics have faced a rude awakening: About J D Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye James Stern wrote in The New York Times (1951): “This Salinger, he’s a short story guy. And he knows how to write about kids. This book though, it’s too long. Gets kind of monotonous. And he should’ve cut out a lot about these jerks and all that crumby school. They depress me.”
If you think that’s harsh, consider this statement: “How a human being could have attempted such a book as the present without committing suicide before he had finished a dozen chapters, is a mystery,” said the Graham’s Magazine in 1848.
It was talking about Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights.
