SOMEONE once said that there are only two sorts of critics: those who want to be loved, and those who want to be hated. If Michiko Kakutani, chief literary critic of The New York Times, is of the latter inclination, she’s hit the jackpot. Norman Mailer, no less, has launched an astonishing attack on her, calling her a “one-woman kamikaze” who “disdains white male writers” and is unsackable because she is an “Asiatic feminist”.
Mailer’s ire, if not his misogynistic racism, is understandable. Buttressed by a newspaper notorious for its godlike self-righteousness, Kakutani seems to have put the boot into Mailer’s recent books with more than average venom.
So the 82-year-old author has now clearly decided to get his retaliation in first, before Kakutani is let loose on what may well be his final novel. That’s unusual. In nearly 30 years as a music critic, I’ve dished out a fair number of harsh words. But I can count on the fingers of one hand the times that a composer or performer has bitten back — in public at least. One of the performing arts world’s more dignified conventions is that those on the receiving end of a bad review either pretend that they haven’t seen it, or treat it as “unworthy of comment”.
But then, opera, ballet, music or theatre critics generally aren’t also moonlighting as singers, dancers, actors, violinists or playwrights. Nor do we hobnob socially with the likes of Placido Domingo or Harold Pinter. We try to maintain a healthy distance. That way, there are no ties of friendship, or favours to be returned.
Can the literary world claim the same objectivity? When one sees Novelist A reviewing Novelist B, his old Oxford tutor, who is himself reviewing Novelist C, who happens to be A’s lover ... well, to an outsider it all seems jolly cosy if not downright corrupt.
So when a literary critic dares to savage someone in the same mutual back-slapping club, the effect is akin to dropping a large boulder into a small pond. We saw that a few years back when the Observer’s Nicci Gerrard wrote a scathing critique of Jeanette Winterson — only to open her front door one night to find the indignant novelist and her partner demanding an explanation of this betrayal.
Kakutani’s “crime” is much the same. She dared to write what she thought. Now she faces the wrath of a legend. She can doubtless deal with that. What may be harder for her to swallow is unwittingly giving her bête noire his biggest publicity coup in several decades.
DAVID SINCLAIR
Pop critic
I have certainly had a few occasions when things have come back to haunt me. I remember when I reviewed Roy Harper — it was a show he was doing in Croydon in the mid-Eighties. It wasn’t a good show, and I gave it a quite a harsh review. The next morning his wife rang and harangued me for about 10 or 15 minutes in a TV studio office where I was working. Then Harper followed that up with a 12-page letter basically condemning everything I ’d ever done. It finished with: “So Sinclair, you worm . . . ”
BEN MACINTYRE
Author and journalist
The pain of my first, really nasty review still smarts. It wasn’t just any old review, but the lead review in the books section of The Sunday Times. It wasn’t just any old reviewer either, but John Carey, the distinguished Merton Professor of English at Oxford. And it wasn’t just nasty, but long, sneering and strangely ad hominem from someone I had never met. Worst of all, it was partly right. My butterfly was broken on a vast wheel.
Naturally, I immediately began plotting complicated ways of murdering Professor Carey. My clever mother, who happens to live around the corner from the professor in Oxford, suggested that we sneak into his house and insert a pair of frilly women’s knickers into his laundry and wait for his wife to find them.
The pain was assuaged slightly when an old and generous friend sent me clippings of a similarly savage attack by Carey on one of his own books, and several critical assaults on Carey himself. “You are not alone,” he wrote. Whenever we spot a disobliging review of one of Carey’s books, we immediately send it to one another. This is true literary brotherhood: “The book of mine enemy has been remaindered,” goes the Clive James poem. “And I am glad.”
That was ten years and three books ago, but the experience was a salutary one: ever since, whenever I have been tempted towards scorn when reviewing a book, I have remembered my own early mauling, and paused. This self-restraint will not last for ever because one day, if there is a God in Heaven, I will be asked to review a book by John Carey. Until then, I am sticking with John Steinbeck’s advice on reviewers: “Unless the bastards have the courage to give you unqualified praise, I say ignore them.”
JOHN BANVILLE
Novelist and reviewer
I remember Auberon Waugh used to review in the Seventies. He would review books on the basis of the author’s photograph on the back cover.
He gave one of my books a fairly sound kicking. He said that I had some small talent, which I should take comfort in: but he couldn’t see why I looked like a postgraduate student who had been passed up for minor professorship. To be honest, I thought his review was wonderful — and he showed great judgment. I don’t read my reviews at all now. In fact, you tend to find that your friends bring them up — but even then only the bad ones. I agree with Mailer. I know the person he is talking about and, to a certain extent, I sympathise.
A. N. WILSON
Author and reviewer
I remember reviewing a book by Richard Adams, who wrote Watership Down. He then went on to write a book about humans called The Girl in a Swing. I thought it was possibly the worst thing I had ever read. I met him seven years later and he proceeded to quote the whole review. He then asked me: “Would you consider that to be a fair review?” He then went on and on about it and eventually sent me around 20 letters on the subject. He even invited me to dinner where he quoted my review again. Then he said that we should put the matter behind us, which I thought was odd since it was Adams who had brought the matter up in the first place. The thing to remember is that it is very rare to have a critic say exactly what they think these days. Most critics will not tell you that the vast majority of books published are crap.
JOHN MORTIMER
Author
My first novel got a wonderful review by Peter Quinnell, and a woman novelist whose name escapes me, but there was also one by Val Gielgud (John’s brother) who at that point was working at the BBC. He said: “This writer indulges in the sort of piddling around the skirts of sex which passes for sophistication in suburban minds.” I’ve never forgotten that sentence, and it’s 60 years since he wrote it.
On the whole, though, I’ve got no complaints. I think generally the feeling when you read a review is relief at not having been savaged, at managing to escape disaster.
BERYL BAINBRIDGE
Author
I can’t imagine what Mailer’s up to. It can’t be about the money. If someone said my book was rubbish it wouldn’t bother me — I would take on board what they said. In any case, a review only lasts for the 20 seconds it takes to read it and most people don’t take it in anyway. It’s only writers who really notice what reviewers say.
In England you very rarely get a review like this against an established writer. A critic might say it’s not up to the usual standard, but because most reviewers write novels themselves, they’re unlikely to savage people.
WILLIAM DALRYMPLE
Author
When I wrote From The Holy Mountain, about a slowly dying civilisation in the Byzantine world, the New York Times mountaineering critic wrote a puzzled review about the lack of crampons. I am a reviewer as well as an author, and although there is no “I’ll scratch your back if you scratch mine” mentality, there is a certain unspoken etiquette. If the author is someone I know I will look at the book to see if I like it before offering to review it: I am not prepared to give good reviews to bad books for anyone.
JOHN JULIUS NORWICH
Historian
When people review me I have one fear: that they are going to be academics. I write history books but I am not a scholar. So when a literary editor once handed my book on Byzantium to one of the world’s handful of experts on the subject, his review left me in a pink rash, splattered all over the ceiling. Apart from that, I have never had a real stinker, but I believe you should never talk back. I have become progressively less worried about what people think of my work these days; I don’t even keep reviews of my work any more.
ALAIN DE BOTTON
Philosopher
In some quarters, to have received “good reviews” forms an essential part of an author and a publisher’s self-esteem. The good verdicts are quoted on back jackets, and the bad ones are the source of wounds that endure for decades. But in other quarters, people will insist that critics are fools, that they are lazy and jealous — and that there’s no better way to know one has written a great book than to be told repeatedly by critics that it’s appalling. It might be worth bringing the subject down to earth by considering book reviews as just another kind of product evaluation, like the reviewing of cars or washing machines. A survey of washing machines in Which? will tell you in flat, unimaginative prose what every model does, whom it’s designed for and how well it carries out its chosen brief. The reader is not looking to be entertained or amused, he just wants to know what to buy and why.
BENEDICT NIGHTINGALE
Theatre critic
I wouldn’t say I was friends with playwrights, but I know a lot of them, and I don’t feel it disqualifies me from writing about them. I gave Harold Pinter’s The Betrayal a good review, and he invited me to his house. That would never be allowed at The New York Times. Once, I was standing on the King’s Road looking helpless and Tom Courtenay pulled up and offered me a lift. In New York I would have hesitated.
Critics here will be given drinks when they’re at the theatre. I really don’t think a glass of wine corrupts me. It’s all just more casual and easygoing here. On the other hand, I would also say that British readers pay less heed to the critics — we’re just temperamentally inclined to be less reverential. The New York Times theatre critic probably has more impact than all 12 of the major London critics put together.
ERICA WAGNER
Times Literary Editor
There’s a difference between criticism and ad hominem attacks. Michiko Kakutani is a remarkable critic and she always gives a careful justification for her opinions. Tibor Fischer’s famous critique of Martin Amis was simply an attack. I don’t think that helps anyone, including readers. Reviewing is subjective and not all critics will see a book in the same way — if they did it would be like living in a totalitarian state.
I don’t have much time for people who take criticism badly, and I say that as someone who writes books as well as reviews them. I’ve had some bad reviews, and I’ve written some negative ones. It really shouldn’t be taken that seriously because in 200 years’ time we’ll all be reading things that we didn’t think we’d be reading at all.
Of course, not everyone sees it that way, and I’m sure there are embarrassing moments at literary parties. In New York, writers and critics probably wouldn’t be at the same events nearly so much — I’ve heard that Kakutani never goes to book parties. But it’s just different here: it seems to be a much smaller world.
WHAT KAKUTANI SAID ABOUT...
The Spooky Art
by Norman Mailer
The effect of reading the book straight through is like going on a very long bus ride over a bumpy road, sitting next to a garrulous raconteur who never takes a nap and never pauses for breath and who seems to have no internal editor or censor in his head.
Magic Seeds
by V. S. Naipaul
Mr Naipaul's contempt for all the people he has created in this novel makes for a mean, stingy book — a book full of judgmental pronouncements and free-floating rage, and sadly bereft of insight, compassion or wisdom.
I Am Charlotte Simmons
by Tom Wolfe
Though Mr Wolfe tries to gussy things up with his hyperventilated prose and a noisy arsenal of narrative bells and whistles, most of his observations will be familiar to anyone who has been to college, sent children to college or gone to the movies.
My Life
by Bill Clinton
The book, which weighs in at more than 950 pages, is sloppy, self-indulgent and often eye-crossingly dull — the sound of one man prattling away, not for the reader, but for himself and some distant recording angel of history.
Now Is The Time To Open Your Heart
by Alice Walker
If this novel did not boast the name of Alice Walker, who won acclaim some two decades ago with The Color Purple, it’s hard to imagine how it could have been published. It is a remarkably awful compendium of inanities.
