What is it with these writers? All of a sudden there’s a vat of vitriol spilled in the public square, and a load of otherwise quite successful people thrashing around in it when they get a review they don’t like.
Is it the heat?
Alain de Botton may be Mr Brainy, Mr Optimism, our chirpiest Philosopher of Now, but there’s one element of Life Today that he seems fatally to have failed to grasp (aside from the fact that vitriol is a corrosive acid), and that’s the internet.
“I will hate you until the day I die.” This is what he wrote to a reviewer who had said mean things about his book, The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, in the New York Times. I admit I haven’t read the book, but Caleb Crain’s review mainly addresses the questions I was asking myself after I read an extract in the paper. They related to the seemliness of a guy who has only ever really done what he wants to do, the scion of a Swiss banking family, talking to ordinary people about finding meaning in their jobs.
Most of the piece is about Crain’s perceptions of de Botton’s attitudes towards the people he writes about. Giving him credit, Crain never even mentions de Botton’s background – though it might seem relevant to the subject of the book. He identifies an inherent contradiction in de Botton’s idea that people should find interest and meaning in their work, and – faced with how stupendously random and banal that work actually is – his alarm when he finds that they already have. Crain seems to think it’s not really fair for someone who has never had to do it to sneer at other people for getting interested in something boring, and there are a couple of rather telling quotes about class consciousness. One in particular disparages a career counsellor’s home office for having a smell of cabbage in it. For all the world as if de Botton were Patrick Hamilton.*
But the thing is, without compromising their human dignity, people are quite capable of getting very interested indeed in very inconsequential – and even mind-numbingly boring – things, because that behaviour is what will get them a place to live, something to eat, maybe a holiday, maybe a better life for their kids.
Unlike Alain de Botton, if they get a negative appraisal for their pains they can’t have a complete public hissy fit, unless they also want to be without the next month’s mortgage money. Most of us just have to suck it up and deal with it professionally.
So de Botton has written this spiteful, nasty thing to this reviewer, and he is now embarrassed – not because he wrote it, but because we know about it! He told the Telegraph: “It was a private communication to his website, to him as a blogger. It’s appalling that it seems that I’m telling the world.”
By the way, he wrote it in the comments thread.
In other news, you have to wonder if he’s read either Polly Toynbee or Barbara Ehrenreich. Or Studs Terkel. Terkel would never have remarked on the smell of someone’s dinner.
Oh, and I have now read the deliciousness that is Caleb Crain’s blog thread, so I can tell you more of what de Botton said. It’s as if he’d been hanging around with Giles Coren:
“I will hate you till the day I die and wish you nothing but ill will in every career move you make. I will be watching with interest and schadenfreude.”
Eh!! Now, another commenter on that thread asks: “It’s interesting, however, how christian the blogosphere basically is about bad reviews: people like randall (see above) basically feel that authors should turn the other cheek and not reply. I wonder why that should be, in an interactive age?”
The answer would appear to be self-evident.
Schadenfreude? I won’t say a thing. It’s just not cricket.
*Okay, that is my own editorialising. It’s such an English trope, though, for all he’s Swiss: the isn’t-it-sordid sniff.
Infinitely funnier than Alice Hoffman….
He came and visited my blog when I wrote about him too. It was all a bit bizarre.
And now I’m going on holiday.
x
Upset about negative reviews of her recent novel, Alice Hoffman twittered the following:
• “Roberta Silman in the Boston Globe is a moron. How do some people get to review books? And give the plot away.”
• “Now any idiot can be a critic. Writers used to review writers. My second novel was reviewed by Ann Tyler. So who is Roberta Silman?”
• “Girls are taught to be gracious and keep their mouths shut. We don’t have to.”
• “My single bad review in my hometown. This is a town where a barking dog is the second top story on the news.”
• “No wonder there is no book section in the Globe anymore – they don’t care about their readers, why should we care about them.”
Hoffman later apologized. I don’t mind her having shot her mouth off.
Miriam I linked to that in the first paragraph. Well, Roberta Silman turns out to have been writing and publishing for the past 36 years, and is rather distinguished it seems – so I’m not sure Hoffman did herself many favours there! I just think you publish something, you have sent it into the world for people to make of what they will. You can’t control people. Though it is invaluable when people reveal themselves like this, I have to say…
A few years ago, a friend of mine who shall be nameless put out a kind of contract on an anonymous reviewer who had panned his first book – he offered the $2000 advance on his next book to anyone who could get him the reviewer’s name (the review was published in a journal that never gives reviewer bylines). What he was going to do with that info, we never knew – but it got so embarrassing his publisher told him to knock it off or else; the reviewer remained incognito; and my friend has yet to produce his second book.