User Submitted Blog Post: Fighting Words

You're a writer. You've just published a book---one you're proud of, worked hard on, and are happy to see out in the world. Then some critic shows up to smash it to bits. What do you do? One thing you're told not to do is respond. Not only does it make you look unseemly in the literary world (and it's a small one, remember), it's a losing battle---rare is the critic who publicly reverses his or her opinion, and rarer still is the critic who does so under pressure from an artist. Last month, Mark Sarvas' debut novel, Harry, Revised, was all but napalmed in the New York Times Book Review, but his response was acknowledgement with restraint. "There's plenty of literary news beyond the Times," he noted on his blog; the closest he got to public crankiness was telling the Los Angeles Times that "I do wish they'd assigned someone with some literary gravitas." (Just as an aside, I'm not sure what convinces Sarvas that he deserved it; he has a serious rep as a literary blogger, but his novel is fairly lightweight---the rom-com adaptation isn't hard to imagine.) (See what happens when you grouse in public about your review? Even if you do it politely?)

There are some signs that the critic-writer divide is cracking somewhat. Last year Tova Reich found a way to snap back at the Times reviewer of her novel My Holocaust. And today Harper's critic-blogger Wyatt Mason directs readers to a lengthy letter that Philip Roth wrote to the magazine, complaining about a critic's treatment of his 1969 novel, Portnoy's Complaint.

Roth didn't send the letter, which he later included in an essay collection; one of his stated reasons for not putting it in a mailbox was that, "It is unlikely that the critic is about to have his reading corrected by the novelist anyway." But Mason thinks that Roth should've sent it along. Serious engagements between writers and critics, where writers point out what their intentions are and clarifies what his or her intent is, only makes literary culture more transparent. "[M]y sense remains that not only can one dispute taste without sounding defensive but, when driven to it by what one deems critical stupidity, one must," Mason writes.

I appreciate Mason's advice, as far as it goes. And Roth points to a certain unfairness in the vow of silence in his intro to the unsent letter, noting that critics "generally finds himself in the comfortable position of a prosecution witness who, having given his testimony, need not face cross-examination by the defense." But it still begs the question of what posture a writer can take that wouldn't sound defensive. Is Roth's detailed discussion of rhetoric and the role of the novelist appropriate? Is Reich's more comic approach better? In both cases, it feels like wasted energy; a spirited discussion among critics is a healthy thing, but if I writer I'm interested is mad at how he or she is reviewed, I'd rather not see a public squabble. I'd just prefer to know that they're working on their next book.