February 15th, 2019

Big dumb books

When I was first becoming a published writer, I did a bit of reviewing. I was bad at it–in that I found it hard and painful to produce any kind of thoughtful and coherent book reviews–but I did it because I thought it was important. Still, present day, once in a while I still write a review or some other form of critical article or essay (stay tuned!), despite having improved very little in the past decade and a half. The kids these days are calling my efforts “literary citizenship”–work for the good of the literary community, giving back.

But I’ve largely given up reviewing–it’s too miserable for me, and with every bit of fiction I publish, more miserable. I like to think I contribute to the literary community in other ways–the community can be the judge of that–but I can very rarely muster the stomach to review. As a writer who deeply over-invests in reviews of my own work, I struggle to say anything critical about most books when I can see how much effort, strain, and love has gone into them, even when I truly think those efforts have failed. To bring up and immediately dismiss a very tired argument, it’s not that I don’t think honest criticism has a place in book-reviewing–it’s just that I don’t think I’m the best one to deliver it. When I sit down to articulate how a writer went wrong with published work that can no longer be reworked or improved, I think of the frantic and fragile hours alone with the words, the bus-stop dreaming that never transfers onto the page exactly the way it seemed in my head, the sheer love that it takes to write a whole damn book, and I’m right there with the writer of the book I’m trying to review, on their side, cheering for them, even if I think the book is very very bad.

They say one shouldn’t do a thing if one’s heart isn’t in it–but one probably also shouldn’t do it if the heart is too much in it.

There are occasional exceptions to this fear of mine, and that is what I call Big Dumb Books. These are Big not in size but in stature–they loom in the mind of even non-readers as Very Good Books. Their authors are big deals with lots of money and fame and clout or they are dead or both, and knowing all this frees something up in my brain when combined with Dumb, which is just that I think the book is dumb. Because of the Big, I can articulate the Dumb freely, at length, and without fear or heartache, because I know that the author doesn’t care what I think, isn’t worried about reviews or wondering whether the next Goodreads post will be a poison arrow to their heart (especially if they are dead). That really calms me down.

Such was the special pleasure of Call Me By Your Name by Andre Aciman, a book with close to 100 000 ratings on GoodReads and a 4.28/5 star average rating. Almost everyone who reads this book loves it and a lot of people, many of them who otherwise wouldn’t be drawn to a novel, have read it. The fact that I hated this novel–and I did–can’t hurt Mr. Aciman, make him feel bad or damage sales or piss him off. He’s not going go Google himself and read this and click the “contact” button to write me a sad angry email explaining how I got it all wrong–something that has happened to me even my extremely limited experience of reviewing. Knowing this won’t happen is very freeing.

I have been snarking about this book all week, along with Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis, a novelist who is both globally venerated and dead. It’s been great–no one cares what I think. Kingsley is definitely not going to google himself from beyond the grave, and I don’t think he cared what women or people of my class or Canadians thought, which is part of the problem with his novel but also sort of lets me off the hook.

If you are curious, what is wrong with Aciman’s book is that it’s a novel about a 17-year-old boy’s first love affair, which is with a 24-year-old man, and it’s written from the perspective of that boy all grown up and longing for a lost past as if that experience was great and sexy and not sort of predatory. Already in that sentence you can tell what my problem is–and the great thing about not being a real reviewer is I don’t need to discuss the age of consent in Italy in the 80s (when/where the book is set) or how the teenager is the instigator of the affair and whether that makes it fine or anything else. I just get to say “I am not ok with this,” and leave it. Hooray!

Also the first-person narration dreamy and largely written in retrospective monologue–few scenes or dialogue. It’s often impossible to place the narrator in time or place, or even order the events of That Summer in chronology because they are such a jumble of Wistful Sexy memory. I don’t think that’s a terrible way to write a novel, but I found CMBYN extremely hard to follow (although much better than the film by the same name, which is entirely incoherent–although, also something no one else thinks but me!). There’s all kinds of weird logistical stuff going wrong, from how anyone could get to be a post-doc at 24 to why the young man has to give up his bedroom to a houseguest when the villa where they live has a guest-house??? Some of the sexual logistics seemed unlikely too, and there’s a lot of weight placed on the sexy bits.

It’s not a terrible book but it’s not great and it creeped me out, especially SPOILER when you get to the end and you realize the 17-year-old NEVER GETS OVER the allegedly very healthy and normal relationship he had with an adult man while he was himself still in high school. 15 years later he’s still sad and longing and isolated and obsessing and that’s not damage that’s romance???? Okkkkkkk….

Ew.

As for Lucky Jim, it is fairly funny in spots, and its criticism of precarious academic employment is terrifyingly spot-on SEVENTY YEARS LATER so basically everything is terrible forever. But there’s just so much griping about how poor Jim is forced to deal with an unattractive woman and unattractive women are just doomed to be neurotic and crazy and horrible and at one point “nasty.” There is ENDLESS explanation and really defensiveness about how no one should have to be nice to an unattractive woman ever because it just doesn’t “do any good” so most of the humour of the book is really lost after a while and I wound up hating it, although as I say, it had good bits. I shall try to remember those good bits when I discuss this book in book club as it was my pick. Sorry, friends.

You know what? Hating these books has been fun–it’s something I do quite rarely. I didn’t empathize with Aciman or Amis in the slightest and thus didn’t feel bad about my hate. It’s of course because they are old and famous and rich (and dead, in one case) and just very hard for me to relate to, and also because I’m so sure they don’t care what I think.

I fear in Canada there is a bit of a scarcity model when it comes to reviews or even opinions–there are so many books and often so few readers, sometimes a book will be published to deafening silence. If your book is only going to get a handful of Goodreads reviews, and maybe only 1-2 media ones, it is CRUSHING if they are negative. Whereas if there were lots, the negative ones would be diluted a bit. So the less known a book is, the more hesitant I am to say anything harsh about it, as that comment will have such undue weight for want of anything else being said.

I think my hesitation is well-founded–I don’t at all think I need to get over myself and start writing my true very mean feelings about tiny little small press books that I don’t like and no one else is even talking about. What on earth purpose would that serve? As I say above, I don’t have a great gift for creating insightful criticism, so if I just snark in a couple of sentences about how your novel didn’t do it for me, what are you going to get out of that other than sadness? What is anyone going to get out of it?

I also want to say here that this post, taken in isolation, makes it sound like I hate a lot of books, big and small–I don’t, actually. Most books, like most things, are personal choices, and I choose carefully to find the ones are the mixture best suited to my temperament–thus, I am mainly reading books I enjoy and am delighted to inarticulately but joyfully chat about, with occasional missteps. The fact that I made two missteps in a row with Call Me and Lucky Jim, and the additional fact that I didn’t feel bad about either of them, is the usual aspect of this situation that seemed worthy of comment, and a blog post.