Rules for reviewing and being reviewed
Twelve rules for writing a book review:
The subject of the review should be the book and its ideas, not you or your ideas. If you are inclined to write a piece you could have written had you never read the book in question, beg off immediately.
Any reader of your review should know, after reading it, who the author is and in particular what the book is about.
A review should give the reader some taste of the prose, some sense of the voice of the author and not only the author as mediated by your voice.
The object of your review is the book as written, not the book as you would have written it.
If the review is under 1,000 words, then you do not have space to formulate either a wholesale critique of the book or an alternative argument. You have space, instead, for a few small criticisms or one main criticism.
Most books are bad, but few books are all bad. Find something positive to say about the book under almost any circumstances. (As Roger Ebert liked to say, don’t be parsimonious in your joy.)
It is all too easy to write a “take down.” Don’t do that. A book must be unremittingly wicked or dangerously foolish to merit the critical shotgun blast. And if you’re eager to pull the trigger, that’s a sign that you shouldn’t.
Be charitable: imagine why someone might think this book worth writing, exactly in the way it was written.
Be disinterested: if you have personal animus against the author or some reason to wish him or her ill, do not write the review. A reviewer is an arbiter, of merit and of preference, and the reader should be able to trust that the reviewer is a fair judge in the matter. Don’t be a hack.
Be critical, but not cheap. Hold the book to a high standard, but don’t go looking for flaws, and don’t view your review as an occasion to parade each of those flaws before the mocking eyes of a mob. If you expect the book to be substantive, hold yourself to the same standard; don’t suckerpunch an author under any conditions, but certainly not by means of a double standard.
If the form is a review essay, then your voice and views and arguments rightly enter the field of play. But it remains a review essay, not an essay simpliciter. Your many tangents, comments, and reflections ought to circle or spiral around the subject and substance of the book, intersecting at crucial moments. All of the above still applies; in fact, it applies more stringently. The review essay is a longer leash, but a tighter one.
In sum: Review unto others as you would have them review unto you.
Twelve rules for being reviewed:
To be read, by anyone, for any reason at all, is an honor and a privilege. Most authors go their whole lives without an audience to speak of. Be grateful.
To be reviewed is therefore a double honor. Not just an individual reader but multiple people—with busy lives, deadlines, finite attention, not to mention editorial demands, publication schedules, and a readership of some sort—decided that your book was worthy of public attention. Get down on your knees and thank God!
A review is not a personal comment on the quality of your character. It is not an expression of like or dislike. It is not an act of friendship or unfriendship. It is an intellectual (possibly scholarly) assessment of the quality of your writing: its style, its substance, its contribution to the world of letters and ideas. Receive it as such.
Do not write, give up the writing life altogether, if you fear or resent or otherwise cannot handle being reviewed. It is a vulnerable and often nasty experience. Being an author is not for you if you are, shall we say, a touchy person. Defensiveness is never a good look, but for authors—whose entire job description is assessing others (and their ideas) and being assessed (for the same)—it is a sorry state indeed.
A bad review is not the end of the world. It is to be expected. It is the ordinary run of things. It may hurt. But for a writer, getting a bad review is just another Tuesday. Likely as not, the review won’t matter. Sometimes, bad press is good press. Sometimes, even, the reviewer might be onto something.
A largely positive review that includes modest criticism is not a bad review. Every author wants adulation and affirmation. But even the best reviews place some question mark here or there next to the book’s claims. Charles Taylor and Wendell Berry, Marilynne Robinson and Cormac McCarthy, Barbara Ehrenreich and Mary Karr are allowed to expect “Good Reviews.” (Though, to be clear, all of them have gotten bad reviews!) You and I are not.
Because you are not a perfect writer and no one has ever written a perfect book, you should not only be unsurprised by criticisms of your work, you should expect and even welcome them. Go into a review presupposing the reviewer to be a good-faith interlocutor. What might they have to teach you, including about your own work? Probably not nothing. Learn!
Credentials will not save you. Do not use them as a crutch or as a lifeline. It doesn’t matter what letters run after your name or how many degrees hang on your wall. “Experts” write bad books all the time. No one is disregarding your training by suggesting your work needs improvement. (Don’t you agree that it does?)
Do not go reading in between the lines. Do not impute to the reviewer something that he or she has not put down in black and white. Do not suggest ulterior motives; do not conjure unstated beliefs; do not make accusations of malice. Do not go on the hunt for reasons to justify yourself in the court of public opinion. Most important, do not take the review as a personal slight, as though the reviewer has done you an injustice. That is a category mistake. Reviewers may be—they are allowed to be and sometimes encouraged to be—mean, caustic, brutal, uncouth, biting, sarcastic, disparaging, dismissive. Are you surprised? Welcome to the world of writers!—just about the most insecure, miserable, miserly, skeptical, and suspicious crew around. They are not easily pleased. You are unlikely to prove an exception.
If you receive a genuinely, objectively disingenuous review, a vicious piece of spite animated by everything but an unbiased evaluation of your work—then kindly ignore it. If you have the will power, don’t read it; if you do read it, don’t give it a second’s thought, don’t share it with others, don’t write about it, don’t reply to it, don’t respond in kind. Pretend that it doesn’t exist, that it was never written. Any such review wants your blood up as a result: that’s why it was written in the first place. Don’t give them the satisfaction. Like the sound of a tree falling in an empty forest, does an unfair, ugly review exist if the author doesn’t promote it and the world doesn’t read it? Answer: No. So don’t feed the trolls.
Where do trolls live and move and have their being? On Twitter, and social media generally. The most important thing you can do, then, is to delete every one of your social media accounts, Twitter above all. I repeat: Get. Off. Twitter. Twitter is poison, but it’s an addictive poison for writers. In truth, it’s nothing but an endless diet of empty calories for attention-starved, affirmation-seeking scribblers. But it never leaves you full. It just makes you hungrier and looking the worse for wear. For not only is it a giant waste of time. Not only does it steal your focus and rob your capacity for sustained, thoughtful attention. Not only does it warp your sense of the world. It’s bad for your writing. Without exception, every writer who spends time on Twitter is worse for it. So the very best thing you can do, hands down, is log off entirely, and for good.
But since there will, alas, continue to be writers either who suppose Twitter is good for them (I’ve never met one of these in the wild, but I’m told they exist) or (more likely) who know it’s bad but see certain benefits as personally or professionally indispensable, here’s how to navigate being reviewed on Twitter:
Follow rules 1-11 above; they still apply in full.
Always and only express gratitude for being reviewed at all.
Share links indiscriminately, and don’t prejudice readers with passive aggressive framing.
No matter what, do not make Twitter a therapist’s couch for your wounded ego. It is impossible to overstate how sad and pitiable this is. Come feel sorry for me—a review of my work was mildly critical! It even used a mean tone and a loud voice! Unfair, am I right? Get over yourself. The very fact that your instinct is to run to Twitter or Instagram to fish for compliments and bask in your followers’ pity party is prima facie evidence that the review in question was on to something. You are earning no one’s respect, and only confirming priors you’d rather not confirm. Avoid this at all costs.
Do not use any review as an opportunity to hold an online referendum on the character, integrity, or credentials of the reviewer or of the venue in which the review appeared. Remember, apart from the merits of such a question or of the quality of a particular review or of your feelings in response to it: your followers constitute an echo chamber. There is no reason to listen to anything they have to say—even more than you, they are likely to perceive written criticism as a personal affront rather than what it is: business as usual. The temptation is great, certainly if you have a bona fide following or sizable readership. But don’t give in. Resistance is not futile.
The sad fact is that (a) popular authors have modeled this habit for up-and-coming writers as an unquestioned norm rather than as a cautionary tale; (b) this trend is itself the leading symptom of the poor health that besets the current writing–reviewing(–academic–journalist–publication) ecosystem; (c) following the trend, rather than avoiding it, perpetuates the very dysfunction everyone is suffering from and seeking relief from. It’s certainly true that an individual writer opting out makes only a minor difference, maybe no difference at all in the grand scheme of things. But there’s no reason to be part of the problem, once you know it’s a problem. And opting out will absolutely make a difference to you: your writing, your mental and emotional health, and much else besides. So get out while you can, if you can. You won’t regret it.
