Richard Dansky

The last time I wrote about reviews, one of the discussions that felt out of it (both here and elsewhere) was the easy confusion between negative reviews and bad ones. There’s a reason for that; most negative reviews are also bad reviews, in the sense that a “bad” review is one that doesn’t do a very good job of being a review. Bad reviews generally fill one of two functions. If they’re positive, they reinforce the reviewer’s fannish appreciation of the book in question; if they’re negative, they’re about the reviewer being clever. In neither case are they actually about the merits or lack thereof of the book in question, and thus as such they fail as reviews. At best, they’re opinions, but since they don’t touch on the material in a real, interesting, or serious way, they’re not really reviews.

Of the two, bad negative reviews are more common and more interesting to talk about. In part, this is because it’s a lot harder to write a negative review well than it is a positive one. After all, if a book is good, then there’s lots of evidence for the thesis of the review stating that – good characterization, elegant language, really racy sex scenes, whatever. It’s not easy, but it’s certainly achievable to do a credible job of writing a positive, useful review simply by putting together the evidence and capping it off with “this is why it’s good. Now go read it.”

A well-written negative review, however, is tougher. It’s fun and easy to go kamikaze and show off – something I freely confess to having been guilty of on occasion, when I was young and foolish and untrammeled by pangs of conscience – as detailed in the last piece in this occasional series. What’s hard to do is to lay out, as a reviewer, a well-reasoned, informative argument as to why a book deserves a negative rating in such a way that the reading audience is served.

After all, that is the purpose of a review, to educate the audience as to whether a particular book is worthy of purchase. It’s not to make up their minds for them. It is, however, to provide them with a solid framework to base a key decision on: to read or not to read, to buy or not to buy. That means that even a negative review – indeed, especially a negative review – has to provide that framework, that context that allows the reader of the review to decide whether or not they want to become the reader of the book.

The framework in question consists of three parts: judgment, evidence, and counterarguments. This is not to say that every negative review needs to be or should be structured in a cookie-cutter fashion, hitting those three in turn. It just means that’s what I’ve come to consider the important stuff, the things I try to get into pretty much every negative review I write so as to ensure it is fair, useful, and in-depth.

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There are lots of terrible things you can do with books, should you be so inclined.

You can maltreat them. Spill coffee on them, bend the spines back, read ‘em in the bathtub and drop ‘em in the lavender-scented suds. Then you can try to fob them off on the local used bookstore, claiming they’re perfectly readable, and get all shirty when the clerk points out that the spine has a waveform like radio emissions off the poles of Jupiter.

You can burn them. This is a long-time favorite of various flavors of fascistic and theocratic ignoramuses, though it must be noted that while burning books may give you more shelf space, it also adds to your carbon footprint, and that’s bad. All that soot goes somewhere, you know.

(True story: Whilst I was employed at a publisher who shall not be named, we supposedly got a phone call from a group looking to stock up in anticipation of a book burning. And, since our material was so obviously satanic, they thought they’d give us a call to see if they could get the kindling wholesale, instead of retail. We cleared more slow-moving material out of the warehouse that day than…but I digress.)

You can ignore them, stack them up unread and leave them in a corner. Let the dust gather and the spines warp under the weight of all of the other “gonna get to” titles you’ve got lined up, lose them and leave them unread, only to be discovered when it’s moving time and there’s only so much box space for books to go around.

Worst of all, though, is what I do. I review them.

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Why do book reviews? After all, I could be writing my own stuff, instead of commenting on someone else’s. And why on earth would I, a writer trying to establish myself, run the risk of horking off the people whose books I review? I’ve asked them myself a time or two, but I find that there are good reasons for me to take up my pen in the service of reviewing, and to devote words that might otherwise have gone elsewhere to the noble craft of saying “Hey, that one’s pretty good.”

Let’s start with the practical reasons for me to write reviews, not the least of which is that I spend a lot of time on planes and in hotel rooms. If I’m going to have that time, I’d rather spend it reading than playing my DS, hearing my fellow passengers discuss their symptoms of gastro-intestinal distress, or watching the endless episodes of “Two and a Half Men” that seem to have replaced the in-flight movie as airborne entertainment of choice. Furthermore, since airplane seats are not designed for anyone who isn’t shaped like Bernini’s Aeneas to work on their laptops in-flight, writing on a plane is right out for me.

I might as well read, then. And if I’m going to read, I might as well take advantage of the opportunity to try something different, material I wouldn’t necessarily have picked out on my own but which my editor feels I can comment on cogently. In other words, when that reviewing packet comes in from the fine folks at Green Man Review, I generally have absolutely no idea what the hell is in there, and look forward to the discovery with horribly jejeune child-at-Christmas glee. After all, there’s new books in that there box, just waiting for me. Whee!

As a result, my reviewing then becomes a way to discover new authors. Susan Palwick’s short story collection, The Fate of Mice, gobsmacked me as I sat in an uncomfortable airport chair, waiting to board an endlessly delayed puddlejumper. I confess now that I never would have picked it up on my own. Howard Waldrop had always been in my “I need to read him someday” pile until Things Will Never Be the Same dropped in my lap. Now I’m a stone fan. John Gordon. Storytellers’ own Elizabeth Bear. The list goes on. For that alone I’d say I’ve gotten more than my money’s worth out of reviewing.

Then, beyond that, is the challenge. As far as I’m concerned, there are two things a book review should do, two questions that it should answer for the reader.

1) Is the book worth a reader’s time and/or money?

2) If so, why? If not, why not[1]?

The first seems straightforward, and it can be. Is the book good? Is it worth reading? It’s not quite a yes-or-no system, but it’s close. And if that’s all a review does, providing a good, honest, and consistent answer to that question, then it’s done enough of its job to be considered a keeper. After all, that’s why most folks read reviews – to get advice on whether something’s worth their attention. A definitive “no” from a reviewer you trust is more than a short read; it’s a rescue from the waste of time, money, and good humor that comes from being trapped on an airplane with only the adventures of Glognorf the Axe-Hewer amidst the Lizard-Kings of Sknarf to read (which you picked up because the cover art looked intriguing in the airport bookshop and you didn’t know any better, doncha know).

If you find a reader whom you can map your tastes against with reasonable accuracy, that’s valuable. Even if it’s not someone you agree with, that works – if the matters of disagreement are consistent, then you’ve got a working referral metric in place that ought to do you just fine. A reviewer who hates everything you like and likes everything you hate is 100% accurate. You just have to learn how to read them, and once you do, you’re set.

The second question, though, is the more interesting one for me, and the part that makes reviews interesting for me to write. I can generally figure out my gut reaction to a book fairly quickly, but understanding why I have that reaction is what requires thinking. Doping that out and then trying to distill that understanding for the reader then becomes the challenge that makes the whole thing interesting, and useful to the reader.

It’s not enough for me to say that I liked the graphic novel 21 Down but had some reservations. Laying out what those reservations were gives the reader a better look at both the content and the approach of the material, and lets them make a more educated decision. It also lets them decide whether my objections are ones they might share, and therefore whether they should heed or ignore what I’m pointing out. As for me, I get the challenge of framing those concerns while making them readable, instead of just listing off a Recitation of the Kvetch. If I don’t figure out why I liked or disliked something, then I feel I’ve failed as a reader, and I haven’t taken everything away from the book that I could. If I do dope it out, however, and can express it, then I’ve taken more away than I might have if I were just reading for myself.

It is, dare I say it, fun writing to do. So long as there’s something in the reviewed material to think about – good or bad – then digging deeper and presenting that unearthed material to the reader can be a lot of fun to do.

Buried in all of that is the other reason for me to do reviews, one that relates to my own writing. As noted above, reviewing gives me the chance to read a great many different authors. Doing good[2] reviews forces me to read closely, and to analyze what all of those diverse authors are doing. In other words, it’s a crash course in modern fiction, one where there’s no final exam but my own work and the syllabus is ever-changing. Not everything I’ve reviewed, I’ve enjoyed. Not everything has offered something more than a pleasant read (or an unpleasant one). The sum and total, however, has been a mandatory thinking about writing, complete with often superb examples, and curriculum that always provides something new.

Occasionally, I’m even paying attention.

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[1] And don’t even think about emailing me with “that’s three questions”. It’s a Boolean condition. You get one or the other. Two total. So nyah.

[2] At least, I hope they’re good.