Level One: One-Star Reviews

As an editor, you occasionally receive kind notes from “real” readers outside of the publishing world about the books and writers you’ve worked with. These notes really do make an editor’s week—they’re real evidence that readers have been moved. Although sales (i.e. lots of readers) are a boon to an editor’s spirit, one of the most important metrics (for me, at least) is passionate readers. Readers who don’t just read a book, but love it enough to tell or even write someone about it.

Even rarer than praise is the mean note, like one I received last week. A direct message telling me not only how much they hated a book that I worked on but that I could’ve done a better job editing it. There is something about art in general, but about books in particular that brings this type of emotional reaction in people. I remember how fired up with loathing I got about the second half of Dracula. I even gave a presentation about it in a college English class, where the assignment was to talk about a book you didn’t like. (For the record, my frustration with Dracula is that the first 100 pages are incredible and then the storytelling falls off a cliff once the Count leaves the page—IMHO of course. My teacher at the time completely dismissed this argument by saying that television had affected my/our ability to appreciate the slow, boring passages in Dracula [she was British and a snob for classic literature]).

It is much rarer for editors to face criticism, as we are mostly behind the scenes, while published writers are no stranger to this type of ire. The one-star Goodreads review is something of a parody of itself, closer to a Twitter comment section than a public forum for criticism. Browser beware. But any author who is tempted to feel bad about their novel just needs to go to the Goodreads page of a stone-cold classic to find solace. Here are some choice words from one-star reviews of Steinbeck’s East of Eden:

“I hate this book. Hate. Ponderous, pretentious, melodramatic, self-satisfied, patronizing to its readers, with ultimately nothing to say. Can be summarized thus: a bunch of people with no formal education whatsoever sit around discussing the time they read the Old Testament in Hebrew. “

“This is a long, long sermon masquerading as a novel. Its aim seems clear- to be the great American novel.”

“The problem with declaring something your magnum opus is admitting how much you have riding on it. It is clear from the effort and names that this was indeed intended to be his greatest work, but I suppose I'm a bit naive and a bit foolish for thinking that an author should endeavor for that more often than once.”

“I think Steinbeck is the reason so many people don’t develop a passion for reading. Started reading East of Eden which is apparently his best work....all I have to say is WOOF.”

Okay, you need more of a stone-cold classic novel than East of Eden, how about Anna Karenina:

“There are two problems with reading anything by Leo Tolstoy. 1) That guy seriously needed an editor with a forceful personality, as his most famous books are far too long.”

“Each and every Tolstoy's story, on top of making me annoyed and exasperated, bores me to tears. When I come across critics and reviewers singing praise to him, my eyes start to roll involuntarily.”

“I really don’t understand. I just don’t get it. THIS is one of the great novels???? I am just baffled. Was it because I listened to the audiobook instead of reading it? Or maybe it was the translation of the version that I had? Anna Karenina is extremely long, extremely slow, and just when it would start to pick up, the author would go off on tangents of crops and farming, religion, politics or something completely uninteresting or unimportant to the overall story.”

Even the most universally agreed upon, widely beloved, great works of fiction have their haters. My advice to writers out there reading their one-star reviews: don’t. It is rare that someone who rates a book one-star has anything constructive to say. And if someone makes sure you do, like the kind person who sent me a note this week, just ignore it.

Level Two: The Mean Review

There’s a genuine pressure to be positive if you work in book publishing. Books are such a small part of the larger pop culture ecosystem, that naysaying one writer or novel can often feel like you’re hurting the whole endeavor— why give the already hesitant book-buying person more pause by saying all contemporary novels are dreck or some such? But this toxic positivity also is at cross purposes with having a culture where books are taken seriously. Paradoxically, this agreed upon niceness armistice in book publishing doesn’t foster a healthy reading culture. In a healthy reading culture, you can read something you don’t like and not feel like it was a waste of time or that one book is indicative of the whole enterprise of contemporary literature. This positivity also sets books up to fail in the minds of readers: if everything is a five-star masterpiece, we’re violating the age-old wisdom of setting expectations low and exceeding them. In this environment the bad reviews are solely reserved for the uber successful or even the contextually successful. Basically, anyone who the reviewer feels like they’ve had enough success that they should be able to take the heat.

A memorable mean review was Parul Sehgal in 2019 for The New York Times reviewing a very popular book of that year, Three Women by Lisa Taddeo. Three Women was a somewhat salacious work of nonfiction in which the author follows three women, hence the title, intimately, to track their taboo sex lives (an affair; a minor and her teacher and a voyeur; respectively). The opening lines of Sehgal’s review are subtlety harsh:

Each of us possesses three lives, Gabriel García Márquez told his biographer Gerald Martin: a public life, a private life and a secret life.

Imagine a biography that only charted the secret life.

The implication being that Three Women has only one of these three dimension (“three lives”, “three women”, nicely done). I won’t quote the whole piece here, although it’s worth reading in full: ‘Three Women’ Takes a Long, Close Look at Sex Lives. Here is the devastatingly mean part, that I will admit, despite the publishing oath of do no harm, did make me laugh:

Her intentions partly feel wobbly because the language of the book is so inconsistent, full of odd homilies — an assembly line of truly terrible metaphors. I was awe-struck by their number, dottiness, incomprehensibility. How does a big oven resemble, as Taddeo writes, “a new marriage”? How can wine taste like “cool sneezes”? What, in fact, are “cool sneezes”? Have you ever met a man who “exudes the pale sweetness of a cashew”? Or found, that when he turns friendly, he resembles “a gleaming, avuncular oyster”? These are not the worst offenders. They are, in the interest of space, the shortest ones. The most grievous is a paragraph-long comparison of a certain kind of narrative of passion to riding a bicycle backward into another dimension (a dimension to which I would have occasionally liked to consign this book).

These are not merely cosmetic flaws, or matters of taste. To see language treated so shabbily shakes the reader’s confidence; if a writer can’t work her way around a sentence or land a metaphor, what assurance have we that she can parse her subjects’ traumas, their complex, sometimes inchoate yearnings?

This mean review may have stopped me personally from reading Three Women, but it did not stop others. But as usual with bad reviews, the publisher got the last laugh. A pan in The New York Times often, as is the case here, means the book was a #1 New York Times bestseller (causation vs. correlation unclear)—there was a highly competitive film deal and Three Women was also made into a tv show.

Level Three: The Critical Review

The pinnacle of a bad review is a critical one. If done well, and on a book that is deserving of real prodding and analysis, a critical review isn’t necessarily trying to scare you off a book like a one-star reviewer or a mean review is. Among my favorite (non-book) reviews is Pete Wells on the famous New York steak house Peter Luger entitled “Peter Luger Used to Sizzle. Now It Sputters.” From the very title this is the type of tonal shift that separates a critical review from a mean one. In the piece Wells is essentially saying that a place he used to love has lost its ability to deliver the way it once did. The review is a bit wistful, biting at times (especially the final line: “The list goes on, and gets harder to swallow, until you start to wonder who really needs to go to Peter Luger, and start to think the answer is nobody.”) but overall, there’s a precision to the harshness of someone who really respects their subject and doesn’t want to be bashing it but has to.

One of the best critical book reviews I’ve ever read is “A Striptease Among Pals” by Daniel Mendelsohn for The New York Review of Books (which consistently has some of the best book reviews). It is critical of a wildly popular and critically successful novel, A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara. It is paywalled so we can’t quote too much here, but the crux of the criticism is the way in which Yanagihara tends to torture her characters in a way that manipulates the reader (it works, and is partly why this prize-winning novel is so big on TikTok) and does not do justice to the full dimensionality of life as a result. There is no meanness in Mendelsohn’s review, the effort he put into unpacking this 700+ page novel almost prohibits mean-spirited barbs.

While these reviews may have delayed me reading A Little Life and going to Peter Lugers, the true test of a great critical review is that it makes you want to try out the subjects yourself, if only to confirm or refute the experience. A great review even if it’s negative makes you want to know what the subject is all about. A one-star review you should ignore, a mean review you should heed, and a critical one you should savor.

But What Compels People to be Mean?

This still does not quite answer what compels one-star reviews and other harsh takedowns, but here are a few educated guesses:

1. Expertise is Too Close

It’s like doctors watching medical dramas— too much knowledge in a certain area often ruins the entertainment to be found in that arena. If there’s economics (what I majored in) in a book I’m certainly many multiples of times more likely to question it as an editor. Any person will have these aversions—it’s why a novelist should be careful about setting something in New York, there are so many readers ready to pounce at a wrong depiction of a street, subway line, or deli. As a reader, perhaps avoid the subject if you can’t turn a blind eye to the technical flaws or at least remember to not take them so seriously— a novelist is a storyteller not a scholar.

2. Frustrated Creatives

There is energy in finding opposition to something you read or see or hear. Plenty of great art has been created out of the impulse that a viewer feels they can do better than what is on offer, either technically or thematically. But the other side of this coin, why negativity can be a dangerous energy to play with as a writer, is that it turns into mean complaining. Editors aren’t immune to this either, asking ourselves “why is that a giant bestseller when it’s so bad?”. The time spent complaining about how quality is disconnected to the commercial enterprise of selling art is time not spent writing or editing the next great book.

3. Hate the Fans

This is more relevant than ever as people’s fandoms have become more intertwined in the 21^st century with people’s sense of self and personalities. But whether you just can’t stand Marvel guys, Swifties, or Romantasy girlies (these are examples, not aspersions), it’s important not to fall prey to entangling the art and its fans, both of which are usually due different kinds of criticism.

4. Waste of Time

Most obviously people feel aggrieved when they spend time (like the hours it takes to read a book) or money (a fine dining restaurant) on something they do not like. Sometimes it is just as simple as that. But then why spend the extra time to make it everyone else’s problem?

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