On Bad Reviews

I am contemplating a bad review.

Perhaps I should explain.

I don't mean either someone else's review that already exists, or a review that's done badly -- I mean that I have been thinking, this afternoon and evening, about committing a bad review, about taking arms against a disappointing book. (Though I'm not so arrogant as to think I could end it.) I finished reading a new novel on my train ride home, and I have to say that it didn't come all together in the end -- instead, to my mind, it flew apart at great velocity and left a big mess. And, since I'm "reviewing" everything I read these days, when I finish something, I start to think about what I'd say about it. (The percolation process from reading to reviewing is running about ten days to two weeks right now, which is a healthy span of time -- judgments should be considered, not shouted out immediately.)

But, since the human mind loves nothing so much as itself, after a little while -- after thinking up some disconnected phrases, a few factual attacks and stylistic flaws, after thinking up the bones of that bad review -- I turned to thinking about bad reviews in general. Are they useful, or not?

My early years in the field were in the heyday of SF Eye, a criticalzine that I loved, uncritically, in those days. SF Eye's claim to fame, at least to me, was that it would give negative reviews. Looking back, they were probably snottier and nastier than I remember, and revelled in tearing down what they saw as the idols of the field. But, given that the main review outlets in SFF avoided saying anything negative -- it's long been rumored, and often denied, that Locus has a specific policy against running any reviews with any serious criticism -- SF Eye was necessary. Someone had to point at the shit and say, bluntly, "this is shit."

We're all Young Turks when we start, ready to tear down whatever is in most need being torn down and very ready to point out the Emperor's lack of clothes. But then time goes on. We meet some of those writers -- people whose work we like, whose work we don't much like, whose work we try not to admit that we haven't even read -- and find that we like and dislike them in ways entirely separate from their books. And, mostly, they're nice people who we want to be nice to.

So when Nice Writer X's new book is a bit disappointing, do we say so? How about if it's lousy? Or what if it's actively stupid? I spent about a decade writing promotional copy for SFF books, but I had the great advantage of always being able to pick the ones I wrote about -- there was always something that I liked, so I could write about that honestly. But if I'm saying something about every book I read, some of them are going to be dogs.

On the one side, a reviewer always wants to be honest. If I liked a book, I want to say that -- more, I want to explain what I liked about it, and, as best I can, how I liked it. And I want to avoid soft pedaling a book I didn't like.

But I've also gotten to a point in my life when I like to think of myself as an adult. And adults don't cause offense inadvertently (as someone once said about gentlemen).

I'll still probably say some critical things about the book in question -- look for the review in ten days or so -- but, if I can manage it, none of it will be gratuitous (unlike SF Eye), and all of it will be for a purpose.

So that's the point: I complain because I love. Really.