Turning the Tables

Posted 9 April, 2008 in Book Reviewing |

Nathan Whitlock, review editor for Quill & Quire magazine, and newly minted first novelist, contemplates what happens when the reviewer becomes the reviewee:

As hard as I listen, I can’t make out the sound of axes being gleefully sharpened in anticipation of my book’s pub date. For one thing, I have a hard time believing there is anyone who cares enough about what I do or write—aside from my immediate family, at least—to bother plotting anything. I always assume anyone stung by something I wrote spends a few minutes cursing my name, and then promptly forgets it. (This is partly confirmed by the fact that I have worked for and even befriended a writer who once claimed to have shed tears over a single harsh sentence I wrote in a review years earlier.) I just figured most people would assume, correctly, that I am a non-entity and not worth the bother.

Although I don’t have a novel under my belt (yet … yet …), I have occasionally conjured visions of awkward encounters at book launches or other social gatherings when I would be forced to interact with an author to whom I’ve given a negative review. In practice, my experience has been in accordance with Nathan’s: authors don’t tend to hold grudges, so long as the review was thoughtful and fair. As Nathan points out in his piece: “I’ve never really seen a division between positive and negative reviews, only between well-written ones and poorly written ones.”

On a side note, Nathan’s novel, A Week of This, is one I’m highly anticipating, but you will not see a review of it here. That’s because, as review editor at Q&Q, Nathan is my boss, and his publicist is the woman who shares a residence with your humble correspondent, so the levels of conflict-of-interest are just too mind-boggling to even contemplate.

Still, there’s nothing stopping me from encouraging you to pick up a copy and, if you’re in Toronto on April 16, you can come out to the launch at the Gladstone Hotel, as part of Pages Books’ This Is Not a Reading Series. Details are as follows:

Gladstone Hotel Ballroom, 1214 Queen St W, Toronto
Wed, Apr 16, 2008; 7:30pm (doors 7pm) free

10 comments to “Turning the Tables”

August, April 9th, 2008 at 2:26 pm:

• I swear to God that it must be illegal in Toronto to have a literary event that’s not on a weekday evening. I say this because I’ve lived here almost two years and have not yet been able to attend a single one, because my ‘day job’ is actually a weekday evenings job. Otherwise I would so be there.

Nathan, April 9th, 2008 at 3:45 pm:

• Can I review it?

  (Thanks for the plug, Steven.)

Alex, April 9th, 2008 at 5:29 pm:

• I’m curious how the review got assigned at Quill & Quire. And do you still get to edit that review, Nathan? Seems like a bit of a tricky situation.

  I’d go to the launch but I’d lose my official rural recluse status. Who’s going to be posting pics?

Zachariah Wells, April 9th, 2008 at 6:13 pm:

• My experience jibes with this, too. Retaliation, if and when it occurs, tends to be more of the passive-aggressive variety, which is impossible to measure. Maybe a book doesn’t get reviewed because its author is persona non grata with someone on the magazine’s masthead, e.g., or maybe someone’s grant application gets turned down in a given year. I’ve received the odd barbed email, snide insult and second-hand slander, but on the whole, there has been nothing that I can see as repercussions or revenge for reviews I’ve written. None of my reviews have been overwhelmingly negative and my last four grant applications have been successful. That said, I’ve noted that some reviews of work by Carmine Starnino and other prolific critics, have explicitly measured the poetry/fiction against the reviews. Which is stupid, but probably inevitable.

Steven W. Beattie, April 9th, 2008 at 8:41 pm:

• Alex: I don’t want to speak for Quill, but my suspicion is that they won’t review Nathan’s novel, for precisely the reason that you and I have mentioned.

Claire, April 10th, 2008 at 9:28 am:

• With full disclosure, it would still be interesting to hear your take on the book.

Nathan, April 10th, 2008 at 11:20 am:

• Quill’s not reviewing it. I have enough of an unfair advantage occupying the chair I do without using up space in my own section for a self-promo.

  And I’m not about to publish a slam of my own book, either, I should add. I don’t have that much integrity.

  It’d be a lose-lose situation. Which is what writing literary fiction is all about, but nonetheless…

Claire, April 13th, 2008 at 2:24 pm:

• Who was it that wrote this?

  “To me, this doesn’t make a lot of sense. A reviewer whose opinion of a book could be swayed by a casual meeting with the book’s author at a party is probably not someone you want reviewing books to begin with. Such a person is clearly too fickle, too hot-headed, too eager to rush to judgement, and therefore unable engage in the kind of long view and sober second thought that book reviewing requires.”

  It’s only your job and your girl at stake — surely your dedication to the arts surmounts?

Steven W. Beattie, April 13th, 2008 at 2:37 pm:

• The same person who wrote this:

  “Clearly, you don’t want book reviewers to be reviewing their spouses’ novels … or novels by their best friends or their bosses. However, there’s a world of difference between meeting someone casually over cocktails and having an ongoing relationship with that person.”

  I knew my own words would come back to bite me on the ass at some point.

Claire, April 13th, 2008 at 9:22 pm:

• Alright:

  Claire = 0
  Steven = 1

  But, I still contend that a personal relationship needn’t get in the way of insightful commentary. It can result in something more.

  A wise reviewer once said, “Let us not forget that Rebecca West’s classic 1914 essay, “The Duty of Harsh Criticism,” was in part a negative assessment of The Passionate Friends by H.G. Wells, with whom West was romantically involved. Good thing West wasn’t around to read that anonymous reviewer at Writer Beware. She might never have written her essay, which would have made the canon of literary criticism that much poorer.”

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