actual middle name: "Galaga"

Anatomy of a Review

Posted by SGJ Posted on October 17, 2006

Just thinking about what I said in that last post, about how I don’t do reviews because I’m pretty sure I’d set my standards impossibly high, just so I could shoot down every book in my path. That may be a little too broad a statement, though — I don’t mean to suggest that all reviews that burn a book are similarly motivated. Granted, some reviewers just have bad attitudes (Tobias Wolff, of course, in “Bullet to the Brain,” shoots one of them in the head, while John Updike, in “Bech Noir,” chooses to just push them in front of trains, serial fashion), but, too, it is the critics’ job to take those literary bullets meant for us, yeah? Kakutani and them, they’re the bodyguards, I mean. Maybe overzealous sometimes, sure, but always articulate anyway. And, I mean, if you’re Anne Rice, you can always just log in, fight the reviews.

Seriously though, if the whole fiction process works like I think it does, then there’s two bottlenecks, pretty much: at one end you’ve got the editors, selecting the top one or two percent, discarding the rest, and at the other end — no alimentary canal stuff suggested here, as I don’t like what that would turn books into — you’ve got the critics, badtalking all but the very best, thus saving us the slog through eight thousand titles just to get to that one good book. It’s an imperfect process, of course, with lots of brilliant books going unpublished for reasons not related to the quality of the work at all, lots of strong work getting getting chewed up on what would seem to be a whim, but all in all, it works. To say it cleaner, I guess, it’s developed the way it has for a reason: because it allows more good books to get to the people than not.

And of course the real trick as a consumer is like with movie reviews: find a critic you think you trust, or who seems to share your tastes, then stray from his or her recommendations every chance you get, until you get burned enough to know better. But always keep that secret little seed of disloyalty; I don’t think the critics want to be solely responsible for your reading experiences any more than you want to be dependent on them for those experiences. I mean, you need balance, else you become that critic’s mouthpiece, just parroting his or her reviews, not engaging the work yourself, but through their filter, etc. None of which is that helpful for fiction, I don’t think.

But this is starting to sound like some bastard version of “Chicken Soup for the Clueless Reader” or something, I know. “How to State the Obvious in Five Paragraphs or Less.”

Apologies.

All I really meant to do was say, man, did Charles Frazier get burned in this review, or what? I mean quartered, drawn, and split into pieces. The funny thing is, too, a review that scathing, sometimes it’ll kind of have the opposite effect on me: I wasn’t much interested in THIRTEEN MOONS before this review, despite the fact that COLD MOUNTAIN was pretty decent, but now, man — I can see an 8.25 million dollar train wreck of literature? Kind of hard not to rubberneck, really.

At the same time too, though, as a writer, I tend to prefer a review (of my own stuff) that either reads the book just as I would read it for the first time, if I could, or just absolutely piths the book. I mean, that way at least you’ve earned a polarized reaction. Loved or hated but never ignored, all that.

I don’t mean to suggest that I haven’t got chewed just as bad if not worse than Frazier, though. And, not that I’m pretending we’re at the same level or anything, but it’s only fair, if I’m linking his skeletons, to paste one of mine in as well, that manages to trash pretty much everything I’ve written and everything I might:

If The Bird Is Gone: A Manifesto is a novel, it is Jones’s third. His first, The Fast Red Road (2000), was apparently written in allegiance to the thesis of Gerald Vizenor that the most appropriate mode for American Indian fiction is comic. His story, more or less, had to do with an Indian porno star on a journey to recover his father’s corpse, which someone, for some reason, had stolen from its grave. The idea of an Indian porno star, whose masterpiece deals with history from 1492 to the now discredited “termination” scheme of 1953, is funny in itself; but in apparent homage to the dubious ideal of one of the great stereotypes of our time, the “postmodern” novel, Jones revealed a defiant unconcern for the difficulty that any reader would find in following the sudden and unmapped lurches in setting, time, and character that made reading the novel, even for sympathetic readers, a tedious exercise. Whatever the alleged inadequacies of traditionally understood narrative, it at least accorded the reader enough respect to present narrative shifts with a measure of clarity, but The Fast Red Road seemed to have been written to prove that maddening incoherence is a virtue. 
Jones’s second novel, All the Beautiful Sinners (2003), both was and was not a different piece of goods. A thriller that clearly revealed its author’s understanding of the conventions of that genre, it dealt with the hunt for a psychopathic killer who, for reasons unclear, killed children and killed adults who could be mutilated to appear to be children and then reburied them in graves in various American communities, which, for some reason, were all named for biblical places. Generally a suspenseful read, the novel unfortunately led its readers down many blind alleys, and these exasperating misdirections spanned altogether too many pages for the story to get where it was going, particularly when the events of the plot were drenched in an almost sadistic quantity of blood. 
Whether The Bird Is Gone: A Manifesto can be called a novel is probably an unanswerable question. Given the short pieces that seem to have been thrown in because they were thought too good to leave out, it may be more accurate to call this work a long story interrupted by short stories, if that’s what they are. The long story derives its premise from a funny future event, which, we are told, originated in a legislative accident. Jones combines the traditional concern of reservation residents for their land with what has come to be called “the Popper thesis,” the idea of Frank and Deborah Popper that because the settlement of the Great Plains for agriculture was a colossal environmental miscalculation, the region’s most appropriate destiny is a return to what nature intended it to be, a largely uninhabited “buffalo commons.” Fourteen years earlier, therefore, Congress, weary of environmentalist lobbying, enacted a law requiring the restoration of all indigenous flora and fauna to the Great Plains, only to discover that the reintroduced grass needed buffalo and the reintroduced buffalo for some reason needed Indians. As a consequence of all this the white inhabitants of the Plains have been obliged to move “back to America,” and the whole area from the Texas Panhandle to the Canadian border has become “the Indian territories.” Millions of Indians have rushed to live there, creating a certain amount of topsy-turviness and a number of odd problems. ” [The traditionalists clung] to their microwaves and satellite dishes, while the progressives were out in the grassland with their travois and dogs and their Old Ones, refusing even the horses that followed them around” 
(32). 
Meanwhile, immigration into the Territories by non-Indian interlopers requires some test to determine who really is an Indian, so immigrants are admitted according to whether they suffer from a new strain of “pink eye” (conjunctivitis), which has been developed precisely because it can only afflict Indians. “Pink eye,” we are told in the book’s epigraph and in the first sentence in each of five sections, “was all the rage.” 
Clearly this situation is rich in comic possibilities, and the first section, “Ten Little Indians,” is a collection of sketches about ten of the book’s characters, most of whom are in one way or another funny cases indeed. We are told later in the book that this partial list of dramatis personae was written by one LP Deal, who took his name from a sign on a record store and now works as a janitor at a bowling alley called Fool’s Hip, cleaning up after hours and clearing the lanes of debris, including on one occasion a prosthetic arm. A sentence in the first paragraph gives us the section’s flavor: “Fool’s Hip gives mercy strikes if your arm falls off mid-bowl, but the limit is three per game; some of the veterans were taking advantage” (13). 
LP Deal is writing a book, but “Ten Little Indians” is apparently all of this work that survives; at any rate, except for this section the manuscript finally is seen burning in a trash can. His “manifesto,” we are told, is written on the back of the surviving pages, but we are not given its text, and the subtitle of The Bird Is Gone, which suggests that the whole book is a manifesto, can only make the reader wonder. 
Others among the “ten little Indians” are Courtney Peltdown, a young woman whose incredible beauty does not stand out among the five million equally beautiful Indian women in the Territories; Nickel Eye, an apparent serial killer who allegedly has killed thirty-nine “Anglo” 
tourists and either does or does not kill a couple more in the course of the story; the transvestite Back Iron, once a pretty good basketball player but now only a fashion plate; and Owen 82, Back Iron’s basketball coach, who gets his name from his team’s 0-82 win-loss record. 
Unfortunately, once we get past these sketches, it is not easy to see where the story is going. Part of this problem has to do with an investigation by federal authorities of the disappearance of the victims of Nickel Eye, the alleged serial killer. The happy ending of his story is in the discovery that all of them are still alive (apparently, that is, but who can tell?). At least two of the sections are by a female government agent named Chassis Jones, blonde but able to enter the Territories because her contact lenses fake pink eye, but the unfortunate truth is that there is no real explanation for many of the book’s sections. Some of them are printed in variant typographies to suggest, we must assume, other narrators than those actually identifiable, but no explanation is given for their inclusion, except that they are often funny. In “Make Him Dance,” for example, we encounter Tonto, the Lone Ranger, and a young woman who, in her flight from a stagecoach holdup, comes into their camp and learns that the Lone Ranger is in fact an android. 
The zany stuff in The Bird Is Gone is probably the best thing about it, and we can only wish that the book were better than it is because its evidence suggests that Jones is a gifted stylist with much more than his share of wit and an extraordinary sense of the ridiculous. But the plain truth of the matter is that in all three of his books he has had trouble with point of view, the old-fashioned notion that any narrative that actually can be followed must be told from an angle of vision that can be identified. Any reader who accepts this notion and therefore expects a story, any story at all, will have to wonder what is going on and probably will conclude that what is going on is just about everything–and thus, alas, not very much. 
ADDED MATERIAL 
Robert L. Berner 
University of Wisconsin, Oshkosh, Emeritus

And, before I get skewered for copyright stuff, the citation:

TITLE: [The Bird Is Gone]
SOURCE: American Indian Culture and Research Journal 28 no2 142-4 2004

Though, I mean, getting nailed for reproducing your own bad press, I don’t know. That’s not even irony, I don’t think. Just mean. (and yes, if you know how to make that html disappear from that textarea up there, please, let me know)

Anyway, no, I’m not just posting that to pick it apart, and I won’t pretend that it doesn’t cut right to the heart of me and make me sad that there’s maybe all these people out there who’ll now never know LP Deal and Back Iron and Cat Stand like I do. But I don’t think that guy was just trashing BIRD for no reason, either. I mean, his reasons are pretty much listed, right?

And, granted, while you can’t write to satisfy every reviewer, you can, I think, use the whole review pool as sort of a workshop, if you want. I mean, in workshop, you may not like that guy or girl who spits on your story each class, but you listen to them, yeah? And secretly want to win them over? That’s how the bad reviews tend to work for me. I mean after all the heartbreak and talking to suicide hotline operators and looking through the help wanted ads for another job. What I do, or try to do, is listen to the points they make, take away what’s valid, what can work as critique rather than criticism, then do better next time.

To end on a high note here, a link to one final review, of Stephen King’s LISEY’S STORY, which, judging by this review, yes, I’m very, very excited about. And, while I could dissect his review, I suspect, break it down rhetorically, into the parts where he earns my trust, the parts where he asks me to identify with him, the parts where he mixes proper parts skepticism and hopefulness, all that, but, really, I mean, as much as I like the review, I’d really rather take this reviewer’s recommendation, and spend my time in LISEY’S STORY.

Author: SGJ

Design by ThemesDNA.com

Anatomy of a Review

search

resizer

Categories

podcasts, vid

stories

not stories

interviews

Archives

Upcoming Events

Upcoming Events