The Aggressively Negative Review

This past weekend, William Giraldi pretty much crapped all over Alix Ohlin’s novel Inside in the New York Times.

Meet the four principal, cliché-­strangled Canadians whom Ohlin flies around like kites in a waning zephyr: Grace, a therapist who is of course wackier than her patients, every one of them marched in from central casting; Annie, Grace’s teenage patient, who of course abhors her parents and yearns to vamoose to New York to become an actress, but soon finds herself in Los Angeles, whereupon you are molested by every conceivable movie biz bromide; Tug — his name is Tug — a suicidal and laconic man-­beauty who of course compels Grace to don her Florence Nightingale knickers before droning on about his mankind-saving mission in Rwanda; and Mitch, Grace’s soul-of-gold ex-husband, an inadequate therapist who flees to the Arctic to mind-rescue Inuit, and who of course never wavers in his pursuit of masochistic servitude. When self-pity colludes with self-loathing and solipsism backfires into idealism, the only outcome is insufferable schmaltz.

Her first book, a collection of short stories previously praised by the New York Times in 2006, seems to escape without flagellation, but Giraldi does manage to find time to be irritated by Signs and Wonders, her other recent work, as well. Setting aside Giraldi’s piece for a moment (though it would be remiss not to remind everyone that you should never begin a work of critcism with “There are two species of novelist…”), let’s talk about the aggressively negative review as a concept (we’ve briefly touched on this issue in Canadian poetry, and in Olympic poems that weren’t as good as mine).

James Wood, who can certainly dish it out, once said that he refuses to review a book if he’s met the author socially, unless he can do so positively. (Word to the wise: if you’ve written a crummy novel, corner that nice man at a party before he dices you up in The New Yorker!) There are books which are too important not to review negatively, if you believe them to be bad. If you’re a Real Reviewer, and you think that the new Franzen is crap, you’re not going to just say “oh, well, let’s just talk about this book about ponies instead.” That’s what fake reviewers do (fans self.) Nor is it always necessary to disguise your negative review with faint praise. You’re not fooling anyone.

There must be a point, though, whether or not you think Giraldi has reached it, when it seems an act of self-indulgence to eviscerate a relatively unimportant book by a reasonably unimportant novelist in order to draw attention to yourself. Which, after all, is what a very funny and vicious review does. How nasty should a reviewer get? When should a reviewer decide to just move on to a better book? And when, like Flannery O’Connor, do you opt to trash it in a letter to a friend, instead?

“I hope you don’t have friends who recommend Ayn Rand to you. The fiction of Ayn Rand is as low as you can get re fiction. I hope you picked it up off the floor of the subway and threw it in the nearest garbage pail. She makes Mickey Spillane look like Dostoevsky.”