The Author and the Critic
I was getting ready to leave for the grocery store. I checked Twitter because I check it as a compulsion. I had a direct message, but it was not from someone I followed, so it was in my message requests. Almost always, these are spam. This one was not spam. It was from an author—a famous, successful one—whose forthcoming book I had been tweeting about. I was not tweeting nice things, but I did not tag him. I rarely even tag authors when I tweet nice things about their books. He had to find my tweets by searching his name, which is embarrassing for him. But that’s not the point.
“Hey,” he wrote. “I see you are tweeting about me, which seems to happen now and again...I realize you need [my book] to be something you can get upset about” We messaged back and forth for a while. He (inaccurately) paraphrased things that I’d said back to me--my imaginary thesis that his book was reactionary--and while I apologized for tweeting some of them because I had breached professional courtesy by tweeting a photo of a paragraph from the advance copy, we mostly went in circles. I defended what I said in the most diplomatic way I could, but I tried to be honest about what I thought. He asked about my “abstract animosity toward the existence of this work” and I tried to explain that I didn’t have animosity, but did object to the vision of fiction enacted by the book. He told me that what I’d said did not answer his questions (I disagree) but that it made him “wonder about a lot of things, and particularly human nature.” Eventually I sent a message to which he never responded. I went to the grocery store.
I had been assigned a review of this book and I did what I thought was appropriate. I emailed my editor to let her know that this had happened, that, were my review to come out, it would be very negative, and the writer could, rightly, point out that he and I had a past, that we had argued before. Publications want to avoid even the implication of impropriety, and an accusation or assumption that I was using my essay to act out a personal vendetta would invalidate it with readers. My assessment of his book was what it was, but this cycle was predictable. I just wanted to be upfront. She thanked me for telling her and killed the review.
A few months later, around the time of the book’s release, the publication that killed my review ran a shallow, boring hybrid profile and review. It had elements that struck me as sycophantic and moments where it felt clear the writer was pulling punches. It was the type of safe, boring piece that works as part of a book’s promotional cycle. They are in a way good for most interested parties: the author’s work need not withstand real scrutiny, the writer can call it a profile which confers more prestige than a Q&A or review, and the publication gets clicks without upsetting anyone. Everybody wins, except for readers. I know nothing about how or when this piece was assigned, but it is certainly the type of piece that someone who had a prior confrontation with the author wouldn’t write.
Sometimes, I try to describe what happened here to myself. One way: I sent a tweet I shouldn’t have (never tweet) and it cost me professionally. Another way: a successful writer was upset about what I said about them, they instigated an argument, and then my review was rightly killed. A third way: when this publication’s critic was confronted by a writer, the publication chose to play it safe. They avoided potential conflict instead of standing behind their critic. In the process, they replaced a review that would have at least attempted to seriously consider the successes and failures of the work in question with something nicer, and with less substance. All of this is true. The only person who wasn’t acting in their best interest, I think, was me. I sent the tweets. My direct messages are open, and the writer was totally within his rights to fight with me about them. The ordeal was probably more trouble than it was worth for the publication. And that’s where we ended.
But in the months since, I’ve thought about the situation often. I am lucky that this is, to date, my only confrontation like this with someone I was going to write or had written about, which makes it exceptional to me, at least. At the risk of exploding my personal experience into something past reason, it nonetheless has struck me as indicative of a situation that could maybe be described as ‘no good, very bad.’The economic situation for critics is such that critics rarely are able to be critics full-time or build up the sort of strong relationships with publications that would protect them from the consequences of something like this. Additionally, being a critic part-time and for very little money can still raise the stakes of any off-handedly tweeted opinion to a professionally-offered one if it is in the interests of those reading to judge it as such. The author in question had no clue that I was reviewing his book when he messaged me.
There are things that I could do. I could not tweet about books I am writing about, probably a fine enough compromise. But, if the risk there is high enough, then I would be probably best off refraining from offering a negative opinion on any writer whose book I might consider writing about in the future. This rational line of thought inevitably leads to a cheery, positive online conversation that is great for authors but is not great for anyone hoping to take art seriously, to treat it like something that matters. Critics should oppose a situation where only praise is fairly flourished, where anybody looking in sees that books are mostly praised or don’t exist and interested readers could reasonably struggle to see what it is about the good books that works and what is about the bad books that makes them disappear. Saying this seems sort of self-righteous or dumb because what I am talking about is Twitter. But I’m saying it nonetheless.
Another option, of course, would be for authors not to privately message people who dislike their work which allows them to maintain their public perception as the type of person who wouldn’t be bothered by a tweet, an important perception for some, they can nonetheless put others in an uncomfortable enough position to manipulate the outcome in their favor. Another option would be for publications to be more supportive of critics.These things are out of my control. And the authors and publications are not going to do this. There are no consequences for authors who do things like this, so they have no reason to stop. Publications, similarly, have no real incentive to side with the less powerful of two parties in a conflict. And so here we are. Something is wrong. What is to be done about it?
Talking about it is a start. Or maybe this is navel-gazing or facile. I don’t know. There is a lot to be done. There are a lot of people whose changed behavior would improve the situation, and they should. Authors shouldn’t message people who criticize their work (or at least make it worth people’s time by saying something genuinely spicy when they do.) Publications should stand by their writers. Those demands are productive to make, even if they are ignored, because if nothing else they put the focus in the right place. Critics can come together and make their own publications that reject these notions and that is an absolute good which does not make broader scale changes less necessary. Over the intervening months, when reaching the same impasse I’ve reached here, all I can think of is the conversation at the end of The Coen Brothers 2008 movie Burn After Reading, where J.K. Simmons’s CIA Superior and David Rasche’s CIA Officer Palmer DeBakey Smith attempt to unpack what just happened together:
“’What did we learn, Palmer?’
‘I don’t know, sir.’
‘I don’t fuckin’ know either…I guess we learned not to do it again.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘I’m fucked if I know what we did.’
‘Yes, sir, it’s hard to say.’
‘Jesus fucking Christ.’”
Bradley Babendir is a critic and fiction writer living in Cambridge, MA. He has written for NPR. The A.V. Club, Jewish Currents, and elsewhere.
