On reviewing and being reviewed

Books need your kindness more than ever.

Scrolling through my Substack notes the other morning, I came across the intro to an excoriating and lengthy putdown of a novel published this year - to general acclaim, as far as I can tell. I started to read the piece, and then I thought, I wasn’t even thinking of reading this book, so why am I interested in someone’s negative opinion of it? And then that thought was obliterated by another: Hang on…Isn’t the author of this novel on Substack? And I was right. The author is indeed here. Later on, I went to look for the piece, but it was gone - taken down, presumably because the excoriator had had second thoughts. Or maybe there was a word of warning or advice from shared subscribers or mutual friends, or from on high? Whatever. I’m glad it’s gone.

Even so, its initial appearance saddened me. Substack seems so warm and collegiate a lot of the time that I didn’t like the thought of it going that way, the way of all media. I didn’t want the author of the book to stumble across this review and have their day or weekend or week ruined. Shortly afterwards, I came across another poisonous piece on Substack about another new book. When I looked this book up on Amazon, I saw that it had not been reviewed by anyone, readers or critics. I don’t know whether the reviewer feels as though they are speaking truth to power, but there is clearly no power here, and the writer in question hardly needs taking down a peg or two. It looked personal to me.

I avoid reading reviews of my work, and have done for a very long time, but I have often walked into something unpleasant, an ad hominem attack, in the least likely places. The closest I have ever come to taking legal action against a publication (lawyers’ letters exchanged, an apology printed) was when someone alerted me to a profile in a Sunday newspaper. The profile was not even of me, but of an elderly and beloved BBC radio personality. It didn’t seem like the obvious space to give me a kicking, but there I was, and the piece contained something libellous. What the fuck was I doing in there? I still have no idea, although over the decades, the journalist who wrote the profile revealed themselves to be something of a loose cannon, and a frequent visitor to the law courts.