7 Reasons I Panned Your Book
It’s a dirty job but someone’s got to do it.
I don’t like writing negative reviews, and I don’t do it often. I’m usually pretty good at sussing out titles that I’m not going to care for and make an effort to look for things I will—I’d much rather help elevate a great book than pick apart a bad one and, frankly, I don’t want to have to spend a lot of time wading though something I hate. But it happens. Especially when I’m asked to review a book by an editor rather than pitching it myself.
When it comes to a pan, I try to be as clear as possible about what I didn’t like—and to express to the best of my ability that this is a personal opinion. That way, someone can read it and decide, well, maybe they don’t care about that. Maybe they’re fine with it. Even though this book isn’t for me, it might be for them. That’s what makes for a successful review, to me. I’m not looking to make you agree with me, necessarily. My hope is that you find it useful. One way or another.
And I try to find at least a little something to call out for praise. Sometimes this backfires—a blurb from one of my negative reviews ended up on the paperback edition of the book, presented as an endorsement. And I’ve noticed that BookMarks tends to overestimate how positive my reviews are. Oh, well.
I’m thinking about this because I just wrote a negative review for a book that comes out next week, and was mulling over the qualities and characteristics that tend to appear in books that tend to rub me the wrong way. Looking back over my previous negative reviews, I was surprised to find so few. (In fact, you’ll see that some of the books I call out below, I actually liked overall).
But a few themes emerged.
So here are seven reasons why I might have panned your book.1 Seven things I think writers should really try to avoid (for my sake, at least). Seven things I myself am on guard against as I work on my own stories. These things aren’t all necessarily bad on their own. You might be able to get away with a few. It’s more that they are indicative of larger, broader problems with the text.
1. Running away from your premise
For the last couple of years, I feel like I’ve been reading a fair number of books that introduce an interesting premise and then spend almost the entire book trying to avoid dealing with it at all.
Gabriel Bump’s The New Naturals intrigued me because it was ostensibly about a Black couple’s attempt to build a utopian separatist community in an effort to withdraw from an increasingly hostile world. As a premise, it’s timely and compelling and rife with possibility—How would they achieve this? What challenges might they face? What conflicts will arise between the community and the outside world, or among the separatists themselves?
All good questions, all good ideas to explore within the narrative. Except the book isn’t really interested in any of them. As soon as the couple starts to bring their project to fruition, Bump abandons them in favor of other characters, other stories of struggle. And so at the end of every chapter, you’re like—when do we go back to the bunker?
Spoiler alert: We don’t rejoin the separatists until the last few pages, skipping over all the interesting bits. Instead, we spend about 80% of the book with the other stories. They’re nice stories, and interesting characters. But it’s not what was promised, exactly. It feels like a bait and switch; like the interesting speculative premise was just a fig leaf for a collection of literary character studies. In the end, it does everyone—including these very literary stories (which deserve to be regarded on their own merit, not as a disappointing substitute for the advertised speculative premise)—a disservice.
2. Flaunting your influences
Interestingly, both my examples here are books that refer to Lolita.
Steve Almond’s All the Secrets of the World features an older man who grooms his daughter’s vulnerable underage friend. Her name is Lorena. OK, so we’re getting dangerously close to an explicit reference to Lolita, but it’s still at least somewhat subtle. At least he didn’t name her Dolores. (More on Dolores later.)
But when the man begins to close in on Lorena he suddenly, out of nowhere, begins referring to her as “Lo.” Just in case you didn’t get it, I guess. Nobody else ever calls her this. It’s not her nickname. It’s Dolores Haze’s nickname—Lolita’s nickname. It’s just there to drive the point home—hey, this is kinda like Lolita. But the point it really drives home is that another writer did this better—and maybe you should read that book instead.
Amity Gaige’s Schroder isn’t quite so overt—I didn’t actually pan this novel. Her protagonist is based on the real-life imposter Clark Rockefeller. But his bearing and demeanor (as well as his self-serving, untrustworthy narration) are clearly rooted in Humbert Humbert. The wandering journey through upstate New York he takes with his daughter, who he has kidnapped, hews fairly close to Nabokov’s novel, as well. I liked Schroder, but I don’t know why any contemporary author would want people to draw comparisons between their work and a classic like Lolita. You’re not going to get the better end of that comparison, no matter how good you are.
(Amity Gaige has a new book coming out in April, Heartwood.)
There’s nothing wrong with an homage. A subtle little reference here and there can be fun. But it’s a fine line. Tread carefully.
3. Shielding your protagonist from conflict
I haven’t read The Devil Wears Prada, but I’ve seen the movie too many times and one thing I’ve noticed is that the story keeps presenting Anne Hathaway’s character with ethical dilemmas—should I betray Emily Blunt and go to Paris? (yes); Should I cheat on Entourage with The Mentalist (yes)—and then resolves them before she has to make a hard choice. Emily Blunt gets hit by a car and Entourage breaks up with her just in time for The Mentalist to swoop in. In this context, it’s not a big deal—it’s a fun movie and this keeps things from getting bogged down too much. We’re all just here for the outfits, right? But the intent is to keep Anne Hathaway’s character’s hand’s clean and it’s definitely a cop out.
I thought of this when reviewing Julia Argy’s The One, a novel about a lost young woman, Emily, who signs up for a “Bachelor”-style reality show and ends up falling for one of her female competitors. That’s a great premise! And the book seems to be driving toward an inevitable conflict—will Emily choose the man, the money, and the fame over true love with a woman she really connects with? But the conflict never arrives—circumstances conspire to free Emily from having to choose. It’s a devastating anticlimax, one the book never really recovers from. And it’s especially surprising given the setting—it’s a reality dating show; it demands drama and messiness. Give the people what they came for.
4. Unusual talents, conveniently employed
In retrospect, I should not have reviewed Elisabeth Elo’s North of Boston. It’s not my genre, and I suspect that the issues I had with it simply come with the territory. But her protagonist was simply too much for me. A perfume-company CEO who moonlights on a lobster boat, who has a preternatural sense of smell, who has some kind of physiological abnormality that makes her immune to hypothermia, who can out shoot a crew of trained assassins despite never having used a gun before. Is it any wonder that the keys to solving the mystery at the heart of the book require distinguishing between unusual scents and swimming in ice-cold water?
At no point did it seem like this woman was in any danger. And I was certain that had any real danger presented itself, she would’ve revealed some other hidden talent that would’ve rendered it moot.
5. Framing stories
OK, so I’m cheating a little again here. The examples in this section are both books I liked—at least, I liked one of the two stories contained in each of these books.
That’s because these books both used framing stories, wrapping their core narratives inside a wrapper meant to contain and comment on what’s happening in the main thread.
Going back to Meryl Streep movies for a second: Julie and Julia. A biopic about one of the most interesting and accomplished women in culinary arts, told through the lens of an irritating, burned-out blogger reading a cookbook. No! No! This isn’t necessary! I don’t need a character in the story to relate the actual story to me—just tell me the story you want to tell. The one that’s actually interesting.
I do not like this strategy. I’ll caveat this, I guess—I liked it in House of Leaves. But even there, the problem remains: The framing story is always the less interesting of the two. American Pastoral technically does this, but I don’t think it counts. Zuckerman basically fades into the background after the opening pages, allowing you to simply exist in the main narrative.
Steve Stern’s The Pinch is a beautiful tale of Jewish magical realism, burdened by a framing story featuring the most annoying guy you can imagine. Even the book itself calls his presence a “needless contrivance.” I wish Stern had had the confidence to just let the main story exist on its own. But perhaps there wasn’t a market for pure, uncut Jewish magical realism. There should be. It was so good, I loved this book in spite of its flaws. You should buy it, really.
And I liked Sara Sligar’s Take Me Apart, even though I think it falls into the same trap as Julie and Julia. We follow a rather banal, messy woman as she creates a biographical archive for a stunning, brilliant female artist. Just give me more of the latter, please.
(Sligar’s latest novel, Vantage Point, came out this January.)
6. Nominative determinism
When I was in college, a writing professor accused me of naming a character “Angela” in order to convey that she was a selfless, giving person—an angel. Wrong! I named her Angela because I was watching reruns of Who’s The Boss? when I was writing the story in my dorm room. But I was still embarrassed that he thought I’d be so cute about naming a character, trying to insert some crass nominative determinism into the narrative. If a character’s given name somehow describes their actions or personality, something has gone wrong.
Honestly, this can happen even when you don’t intend it. Subconsciously, you can bring a bias to character naming, and you need to actively work to prevent it. Unless you’re trying to be funny:
So when I reviewed Anthony Giardina’s Norumbega Park for The Boston Globe back in 2012, I was disappointed to find that he’d named a character Angel—a kind young man who tempts a nun away from her vows. What better way to convey the revelatory nature of this man’s presence in her life while also reminding you of the internal spiritual conflict she feels over giving up her vocation? (Maybe through the action of the story? I don’t know, I’m just spitballing here.)
Similarly, in Lori Ostlund’s After the Parade, she has a long-suffering character named Dolores. “Pains,” the character emphasizes. “Dolores means pains. Isn’t that amazing?”
Not really.
(Both Giardina and Ostlund have new books out this year.)
7. This book has everything
You can take a book in a lot of directions, but it’s best to pick a lane and stick to it. You can’t do everything, satisfy everyone. And if you try, you might end up with a big mess on your hands. Novuyo Rosa Tshuma’s novel, Digging Stars, made me feel like I was reading the opening chapters of a half-dozen different books, none of which ever really developed or resolved in the end.
“Digging Stars” can appear to be many things depending on how you look at it: a campus novel about a culturally diverse group of nerds struggling to understand one another; a thriller about a government conspiracy and the too-cozy relationship between academia and the defense industry; a satire about the greedy pipe dreams of billionaires looking to conquer space; a fish-out-of-water story about an immigrant coping with a strange, new environment; a trauma novel about a young woman’s struggle to overcome her feelings of abandonment. It tries to be all of these things at various times, which gives the book the illusion of depth. But it struggles to commit to any of them, and as such, the story has a herky-jerky feel. Many promising threads are, perplexingly, left unexplored.
I could say this about All the Secrets of the World, too. In fact, I did:
Almond cycles through a dizzying array of storylines — a police procedural, a deep dive into the American criminal justice system, a primer on forensic science, a parable about race, class and immigration. There are desert pilgrimages, politically motivated conspiracies, and a completely inessential subplot concerning an ominous Romney-related religious cult.
Kill your darlings is a cliche, but it’s a cliche for a reason.
So what do you think?
OK. I explained my reasoning here. Did you read any of this and think, “Hey, I don’t see what the big deal is. That sounds alright to me. This guy’s way off.”
If so, great. Go buy that book. And in the future, you can use me as an inverse barometer of taste.
And buy Steve Stern’s The Pinch. That book is marvelous, even if the framing story is kind of a drag.
There’s a secret eighth reason: The writing and ideas in the book are dumb and bad. But that’s too depressing to elaborate on.
An excellent summary. I agree with most of it after having been the book editor of the Plain Dealer (and reviewed, as you have, for the Globe and WaPo. I'd add:
1) The screening of books at the Globe and WaPo tends to be more rigorous than at smaller publications. That fact may explain why I see some of the problems you mention as higher-order flaws. You'd see lower-order issues more often at, say, Kirkus, for which I've reviewed a lot, just because Kirkus has to review more books, no matter how glaring their flaws: e.g. an author of multiple novels has run out of gas or a memoirist gives conflicting details about his or her background in successive volumes of a life story.
2) A smaller but extremely annoying issue in both fiction and nonfiction is what you might call James Patterson-itis: very short paragraphs or chapters, whether or not they serve the story well. John Updike summed up one problem with the attenuated paragraphs in a review of one of Bruce Chatwin's books: He said Chatwin's paragraphs were so short, he seemed always to be interrupting himself.
Of your 7 objections, I agree most with nos. 1 and 3. That's because they're the ones most likely to cause disappointment for the reader and make them feel cheated.
2 I don't care about very much one way or the other. 4 should be fine if you're writing a thriller, or some kind of satire or wacky comedy. 6 I actually like - Dickens did it all the time; so did all kinds of other famous authors.
5 is OK if used right, i.e. if there's a good storytelling reason - you're trying to distance yourself from the narrative, cover up implausibility, give a different character perspective. BTW I thought "American Pastoral" had an interesting story and characters, but it was hideously overwritten in parts. Most of the book is supposed to be Zuckerman's imagining of the hero's story, so the approach is probably meant to tell us something about Z's personality; but I found it often exasperating to read ("Hey Phil, please stop hitting me over the head with this endless series of numbered 'conversations about New York' that all say basically the same thing").
7 is like 5, you can make it work if you know how. Mostly, this means a huge all-embracing novel ("Ulysses," "Gravity's Rainbow"), or if you don't want to write at that length, do something jokey and fragmented ("At Swim-Two-Birds").