Book reviews and book reviewers don’t require any appearances or performances from the author (unless, like Norman Mailer, you show up at newspaper offices to pick a fight with the book review editor—how many of those are left now?). But reviews definitely contribute to an author’s public image. Sometimes even a well-intended review will corral a writer into a cramped enclosure she chafes to kick down. For example, “While X’s characters will cut you up and eat you, Godwin’s characters will bring you casseroles.” I get which qualities the reviewer is trying to convey to her readers, I like those qualities, but please, spare me the casserole corral.
Toward the end of his life, John Updike said that he had come to believe his bad reviews and be suspicious of his good ones. That has resonated with me. I won’t go so far as to say criticism makes me feel more comfortable than praise, but criticism has often made me stronger. Harvey Ginsberg, my editor for A Southern Family and Father Melancholy’s Daughter, told me his rule for authors had always been “If a review makes you wish you had done something differently, file it away. If not, toss it.”
At cocktail hour, Robert [Godwin’s partner, a musician] and I sometimes competed against each other in our Waves of Boredom game, which involved dredging up memorized quotes from our very worst reviews. The game’s title derived from the lead of Robert’s awful review, early in his career, in the Boston Globe: “Waves of boredom swept over the audience when the opening notes of Robert Starer’s Concerto …” …
Robert and I found Waves of Boredom so much fun, I think, because it reversed the stakes. … In Buddhist practice, negative and aggravating people and events count as your important life teachers. Some of my lowest hours, review-wise, have become my teachers.
London, 1982: Robert and I are staying in the Primrose Hill house of my English publisher, Tom Rosenthal, who has planned a full day to celebrate the publication of A Mother and Two Daughters. We are to be driven to Cambridge for a booksellers’ luncheon and then a special tour has been laid on to show us parts of the university not everybody gets to see. But when I come downstairs to breakfast, Tom reluctantly hands over the reviews in London’s morning papers.
The four of us drive in silence to Cambridge. Editor Jane Turnbull at the wheel, Tom in the passenger seat, Robert and I in the back. Daffodils. Greening fields and hedgerows. Silence. Robert looks so sad. Tasty lunch with booksellers, one or two of whom make light remarks about the “silly” reviews. Robert and I are taken away by a lovely giant of a man in tweeds to look at Pepys’s handwritten diaries.
End of English spring day.
A Mother and Two Daughters became a bestseller in England and Ireland. The devastating phrase applied to it on that lost Cambridge day, comparing the book to an American apple, big and shiny with no taste, never won a single Waves of Boredom competition.
Transcribed by me from pages 173–75 of Publishing: A Writer’s Memoir, © 2015, Bloomsbury.
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