Still Life with Book Maven

The Runner Stumbles: How Not to Respond to a Negative Review

Several years ago I saw a video of a 1979 movie called "The Runner Stumbles." It's based on a real-life story that playwright Milan Stitt dramatized and then wrote the screenplay for, starring Dick van Dyke as a Roman Catholic priest with a very dark secret. It's an amazing movie; go out and rent it! 

But I digress. Long after the movie's plot itself had faded a bit from my mind, I remained obsessed with its elegant and meaningful title, which derives from The Book of Isaiah, 40:31: "But they that wait upon the Lord shall renew [their] strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they will run and not be weary, they will walk and not be faint." 

Never fear, readers; you've come to the right blog! I'm not about to indulge in heavy Biblical exegesis here at Still Life with Book Maven. It's enough to say that no matter what we place our faith in (one God, many, none, Haagen-Dasz, the Flying Spaghetti Monster, deadlines, etc.), sometimes we who run stumble even when we're not weary.

Such was the case today with famous novelist Alice Hoffman, whose latest book, The Story Sisters, received a negative review from well-credentialed critic and novelist Roberta Silman in The Boston Globe Books section. You can read more about the kerfuffle here at Ed Champion's blog, but let me go back in time a week or so and let you know why it came to my attention in the first place.

In my ongoing and determined quest to maintain a career in books in the current economy and state of the publishing industry, I wear many hats. One of those is as the moderator of BN.com's Center Stage book club. Last week Alice Hoffman was our guest. I wrote a message she disagreed with, she responded and missed all of my points, then told her Twitter followers she was having a "tiff" with me. 

I tell you all this, as I said, to put what Hoffman did today in context. She published Roberta Silman's private phone number and email address and told her "readers" (you'll understand the quotation marks once you've read through Ed Champion's post) that "If you want to tell Roberta Silman off," to contact her at phone or email and "Tell her what u think of snarky critics." 

No matter how bad Silman's review was or wasn't (see Champion's post; the review really wasn't all that bad), and no matter how "public" the records of Silman's contact information are, to encourage one's reading public to tell a respected colleague "off" is simply poor form. 

Perhaps Hoffman is having a rough time on different levels: professional, personal, psychic -- or not. But she does seem to have forgotten that the book media is rarely in the business of attacking any author personally. I care about books and authors; so does Silman (and I'm not putting words into another journalist's mouth; if she didn't care about books and authors, she wouldn't be writing reviews; simple as that). I'm sorry that Alice Hoffman has stumbled, or thinks we stumbled -- but the truth is that the road ahead is quite long, and we have to get up and not be weary if novels are to continue to be written, published, and reviewed. 

Obviously, many people will disagree with me on any number of points here. What I wish I could write instead has already been written for me (not to mention tweeted, by author Julie Klam) by Virginia Woolf, an artist, novelist, critic, and essayist greater than anybody else around these parts:

"Criticism, whether praise or blame, should be accepted in silence as the legitimate comment which the act of publication invites."

 

Fable of My Deconstruction: A Response (of a sort) to Sonya Chung at The Millions

Warning: This is Really Long. If you read the whole thing and actually leave a comment, I may have to send you some flowers.

This post at The Millions by Sonya Chung inspired a flurry of comments online and in the Twitterverse. There are few readers, it seems, who do not have an opinion of some sort about what can and can’t be called genre fiction and what can and can’t be called literary fiction.

Chung approaches the “controversy,” if it can be dignified with the name (that’s not a diss on Chung, but on the state of reading), from the high-brow side of the fence. Chung, a freelance writer and fiction teacher whose debut novel will be published next year, writes: “In my fiction classes, I always ask students to fill out a brief survey on the first day of class so I can get a feel for their reading interests; invariably, a number of students list Dean Koontz or Dan Brown or Nora Roberts (most recently and markedly) Stephenie Meyer as their touchstones. When I see these writers' names or hear them mentioned in class, something goes thud in my stomach and a low-grade dread begins to buzz in my head.”

Chung goes on to say that if on reading that you think she’s a snob, “…we may be at an impasse.” Her entry (which goes on much longer, and contains many smart, thoughtful arguments about the need for smart, thoughtful fiction writing) focuses on the fact that much genre lit (and she does point out that she knows not all genre lit falls into this rut) merely entertains and does not enlighten.

But you’ll have to forgive me for not responding to the entire post, for Chung had me at “students,” and it’s about those students I’d like to hold forth for a few hundred words. (I’ll let the blog and Twitter commenters continue the rest of the debate for now, which is a very interesting one; I’ll take it up later this week).

Please bear with me; this story may be a tad discursive, but I promise I have a point. For nearly four years in my growing-ever-more-distant past, I taught nighttime community-college English composition and literature. My students , many of whom were soldiers, worked all day and then came to up to four hours of class each sweltering Texas evening. Some were working on associate degrees, others fulfilling credits towards bachelor’s degrees, but let’s put it this way: Not one of them was there based on love of literature.

(NB: Chung’s students presumably are taking writing classes because they do love literature and/or they want to “be writers.” Chung and I and most of the rest of you know that the two things are not congruent, nor is the urge to Have Been Published the same as living a writing life, but those are problems to be taken up at another time.)

Like Chung’s students today, when asked to list their favorite authors on the first-day-of-class index cards I handed out, nearly all of my students named genre writers: James Patterson. Dean Koontz. Tom Clancy. Robert Ludlum. Nora Roberts. Danielle Steele. The occasional Jeffrey Deaver or Thomas Hamilton or Jan Karon. Those, of course, came from the students who actually had a favorite author, or even a favorite book (if there was no “Favorite Author” on the index card, usually “Favorite Book” would be “The Bible”).

When I began teaching these classes, I was just months finished with living inside The Academy as we refer to that place of heuristic action for intellectuals. (Side note: If “The Academy” were a video game, black-leather-jacketed theoryhead thugs would roam tree-lined paths at will, seeking muddleheaded students like me to beat up with stinging phrases like “Derridean dogma” and “You probably like reader-response criticism,” but I digress.) This will tell you all you need to know in case you’ve never considered pursuing a PhD in literature: During my years in graduate school, I never once picked up a book for sheer pleasure. I can remember the day I finally did to the very hour. I saved “Possession” by A.S. Byatt to read after I’d passed my master’s orals. I passed, left the building, walked across Grounds and bought a pair of earrings I’d been coveting, and then went straight home and began reading.

That was pretty much the hour I knew I’d never go on to earn a doctorate. I know that others are able to do what I could not: Continue to love reading while plowing through volumes and manuscripts of academic writing. I needed to return to enjoying books and not deconstructing them. (Of course, maybe I was just tired. But sometimes battle fatigue determines a life’s course.)

However, despite my experience with “Possession,” I was still so much a product of the ivory tower that I didn’t at that time connect my devouring of Byatt’s big fat piece of high-brow genre lit with anyone else’s genre lit. When I’d get those index cards back from my students, my snobby little heart would sink.

I’d spent years deconstructing poems, novels, and plays, but (sob) I’d never been to me.  Go ahead, laugh. I certainly did when I realized how single- and simple-minded I was being in judging these reading choices.

For here, at last, is my point (I told you I had one!). When I finally clued in to just how different my own recent experience was from that of my students (I was married, but child-free during grad school, with no financial worries and no job save schoolwork), I realized that they could not possibly find the same way in to literature that I had. Books, stories, and movies are full of tales in which a struggling blue-collar person’s life is Changed Forever by reading Kerouac or Balzac – but in real life, my hard-working students were more apt to find their lives changed by Norman Schwarzkopf’s autobiography than Shakespeare.

But I was not only charged with teaching them Shakespeare; I wanted them to learn to read and appreciate Shakespeare. What I had to do – and what I did do, with mixed success – was to figure out what it was that drew them to genre fiction in the first place. I was probably the best lab rat ever for this experience, since I’d never read any of it. My mother was hugely controlling in (mostly) the best way, reading real literature to me from her own college textbooks when I was very, very young: My favorite bedtime story during elementary school (I kid you not) was “The Masque of the Red Death” by Edgar Allen Poe. My sixth-grade teacher gave me “If Beale Street Could Talk” by James Baldwin. I flirted with Victoria Holt during junior high, but returned to Henry James during high school.  But anyway…many of you reading this could recount similar histories. I was as dissimilar from my students as possible.

So I started reading some genre fiction. In those pre-Internet days, I had to either drive nearly two hours to Austin and BookPeople if I wanted to find something good to read, or or pick up whatever I could find at the local mall’s WaldenBooks. Since I had a toddler at home, WaldenBooks usually won out – and its selection of genre fiction was just dandy. I bought mysteries. I bought thrillers. I bought spy stories and detective novels and romances and fantasy. After I’d finished grading (mostly miserable) papers and placing Post-It Notes on new spots in my increasingly ragged Norton Anthologies, I read the books that my students read – on weekends, on vacations, on work breaks.

Any time they wanted to escape.

Sonya Chung, again:

“But enjoy your genre books, I say. Life is tough, we all seek ways to effectively distract and soothe ourselves. Consume your genre series with gusto and pleasure, like a drippy, juicy bacon burger; kick back and let them carry you away weightlessly, like an after-midnight Wii session. But do not imagine or attempt to argue that they play a vital role in augmenting the human experience. They allow for, are designed for, reader passivity and thus do not do what Joe Meno described eloquently in Edan Lepucki’s profile this week:

‘Books have a different place in our society than other media. Books are different from television or film because they ask you to finish the project. You have to be actively engaged to read a book. It's more like a blueprint. What it really is, is an opportunity... A book is a place where you're forced to use your imagination.’”

Here is where I differ from Chung, although I do not entirely disagree: The books my students read, while not as nutritious as more serious fiction, were just as vital in their human experience. When you don’t know that blueberries are full of antioxidants or hell, you just loathe their taste because you didn’t eat them while you were growing up, you may turn to junk food for your fruit. If you grow up in a home where there are no books, where no one reads anything deeper than the phone book, well, then, your “way in” to literature may be James Patterson. Or Jeffrey Deaver. Or Nora Roberts. And so on.

 This is an extremely long response to Chung’s post. Let me summarize my rambling thesis: In my first post-graduate-work job teaching, I learned that not every student came to literature with the same reading experience, and I came to understand and even at times enjoy some of the genre fiction that my students did.  

Next: What I Learned from Canned Lit