A Jury of One's Peers
Life is Hard comes out next week. It’s a nervy experience. How does a vulnerable author prepare for critical reviews?
A time-honoured tactic is to dig up dismal notices of works now recognized as world-changing. On Emily Dickinson:
“An eccentric, dreamy, half-educated recluse in an out-of-the-way new England village—or anywhere else—cannot with impunity set at defiance the laws of gravity and grammar … Oblivion lingers in the immediate neighborhood.” (Atlantic Monthly)
On Melville’s Moby-Dick:
“an ill-compounded mixture of romance and matter of fact … Mr. Melville has only himself to thank if his errors and his heroics are flung aside by the general reader as so much trash belonging to the worst school of Bedlam literature—since he seems not so much unable to learn as disdainful of learning the craft of an artist.” (Atheneaum)
And on Virginia Woolf:
“Her work is poetry, it must be judged as poetry, and all the weaknesses of poetry are inherent in it.” (New York Evening Post)
All three quotes appear in Rotten Reviews Redux, a collection edited by Bill Henderson that ought to be on every writer’s bookshelf. It offers comfort, to a point. But since there is virtually no chance that one’s book will change the world, a better tactic is to rediscover mean reviews of one’s own writing—reviews one has demonstrably survived.
In my memory, the first review of Midlife was critical. It appeared in the Literary Review, which was exciting; but it was largely given to the sexual adventures of its author and the fact that my book is comparatively prim. Rereading now, I take the author’s point: if your problem in midlife is sexual frustration, it would take a rather unusual fetish to be satisfied by reading my book. And on balance, the review is quite funny—though it's a bit obtuse about the humour in Midlife, citing a quip about my resemblance to Eckhart Tolle, “Oprey Winfrey’s spiritual guru,” as if it were a sales pitch, not a joke.
The most brutal review, by far, was co-authored—I will preserve anonymity here—and is well represented by a sentence from its opening paragraph and a sentence from the last:
More often than not, Setiya remains at the level of storytelling—or, may we suggest, greeting card clichés.
As one finishes reading the book one gets disturbingly close to its hollow centre. In conclusion, this is the kind of book that gives philosophy a bad name.
By the time these words were published, I had enough good reviews to be indifferent to them. And the argument was unconvincing, anyway, with fragmentary quotes, an irrelevant digression on free will, and no clear account of the content of my book or what was wrong with it.
Other reviews were more compellingly critical. One of the best was by Maya Krishnan, who found my approach to the trials of midlife too divorced from politics and insufficiently radical. What about the structural causes of midlife malaise, often in forms more deleterious than mine? What of the need for systemic change?
Fair questions. Midlife shares with the self-help books it gently parodies a focus on the individual struggling to accept their own life and its limits. Reader, that was me. The irony is that writing Midlife changed my life in ways that I did not expect. I had thought it would be the only book I’d write for a non-academic audience. As of next week, it is not.
In Midlife, I hid behind a mask of irony, writing partly tongue-in-cheek. The midlife crisis has become a joke; how to approach one’s own but with self-mockery? There is irony in Life is Hard, and I hope some jokes, but its authorial voice is more sincere. It’s a less conservative book in every way—more personal and more political—and much less guarded. It begins with a frank account of my experience with chronic pain.
Which takes us back to nerves. Towards the end of Life is Hard, I quote two sentences I love by the poet Richard Hugo, from his collection of essays, The Triggering Town. I won’t repeat them here—you have to buy the book!—but I will quote two more:
Some of us hope that before we [die] we have been honest enough to scream back at the fates. Or if we never did it ourselves, that someone, derelict or poet, did it for us once in some euphonic way our inadequate capacity for love did not deny our hearing.
Life is Hard screams back at the fates. And while I know that my capacity for love may not be adequate—I hope it screams for you.