Circle jerks: in praise of negativity
On Goodreads bandits, literary log-rolling, and Alain de Botton's rage
The Dark Avenger of Goodreads
Heard the one about the debut author who got cancelled for review-bombing rivals on Goodreads? If you haven’t, spare me the hassle and interiorise yourself with all the details here. I try not to make firewood from a fallen tree, so I won’t delve into the particulars of this case. But when I heard about these antics I experienced déjá vu. Indulge me while I relate an anecdote.
A few years ago a writer friend who moonlights as an editor published a short story collection. He should have known better, but he made the common mistake of heading to Goodreads soon after the book’s release, to see how it was faring on the site. Some people had already added it to their “want to read” lists; others were already reading it — normal, nice. Alas, there was also a succinct but scathing one-star review. My friend was unsurprisingly upset, because the anonymous reviewer didn’t sound like he’d read the book, so he screenshot it and shared it in a Whatsapp group that I'm part of, along with other writers and editors. And that’s how I learned about the Dark Avenger of Goodreads.
Now, if there’s a thing I enjoy more than a mystery that’s a mystery involving malice. So I quickly found the offending profile on Goodreads, had a cursory look, and what I saw threw me back: the poison pen assassin was familiar with a lot of people I know. And not only that: he1 seemed to hate their work with a passion, dropping single stars bombs all over their books. But the profile looked real: there were dozens of other reviews, mainly of horror books, most of them self-published, all of them four or five stars affairs. The Dark Avenger of Goodreads only had a beef with so-called indie so-called literary fiction writers, and this smelled fishy to me. It’s true that a reader might prefer a type of literature to others, but the pattern of aversion was too neat to be fortuitous. I kept inspecting the evidence before me, until eventually I had my eureka moment and I could have bet a few hundred pounds on it, so certain was I about the Dark Avenger’s identity.
I called my friend and asked him, “Do you happen to know this guy X, editor of Shitty Indie Online Mag2?” “Yes, I do. Why?” my friend answered. “He’s the Dark Avenger of Goodreads, that’s why,” I replied. “Oh my god! You are right!” my friend said, having his own eureka moment. It turns out that X, who’s also a writer, had recently sent a manuscript for consideration to the publisher my friend was involved with at the time; and yes, you’ve guessed right, the manuscript had been rejected. Now, this looks like circumstantial evidence, and it wouldn’t stand in a court of justice, but soon I contacted another victim, another friend. This one, a creative writing academic, had around that time declined to blurb a different book by X, deploying the very scholarly “lack of time” excuse3. Two isn't a lot, you are right, but soon — after the Whatsapp team got involved and more messages were sent around — the modus operandi was too clear to be a matter of coincidence: most of the Dark Avenger’s one-star jobs were of books published by indie presses that had rejected X’s manuscripts, plus some authors who had snubbed him in some minor way.
What had prompted my eureka moment, you might ask: the Dark Avenger of Goodreads had also left flashing, long and elaborate, reviews of X’s books; on the other hand, the rest of his write-ups, whether positive or negative, were just a handful of sentences long. Self-praise had got the best of him, as is often the case with authors. To be absolutely sure that we had caught the right person, one in the Whatsapp group messaged X through a sock puppet Twitter account, saying “Stop your one-star campaign. It’s embarrassing.”
An hour later all the reviews and the Goodreads profile were gone.
Roll, roll, roll your log, gently down the stream…
The case of the hapless debut writer who was canceled for a toxic Goodreads review-bomb campaign is far from a novelty. I’ve heard variations of the same story many times and you must have heard them too. And similar things will happen again and again. Because in a literary culture in which negativity is almost taboo, folk will find other ways of telling you what they really think about their peers and their work.
It is suitable that I’m writing about this topic as we near the end the year and certain lists start doing the rounds. I refer of course to “books of the year” lists — those short promotional snippets writers are often asked to compile come December. It’s a non-spoken truth that such lists are one of the places where writers engage in log-rolling4. Like a magician revealing a trick I am breaking etiquette here, but I have no problem with saying that the few times I’ve been asked to provide titles for year-end list, my first concern was with bumping friends who were in need of promotion. Then I might have paid back a favour or two. And only then, I might added one or two books I had actually read and liked5.
Selling books entails promotion, so it’s not the lists that are the problem. The problem is that these lists are one side of a coin with only one side, if you allow me a paradox. In 2023 it’s very hard to write a properly negative review about a book by a peer, without being accused of bullying or worse. I dislike a considerable number of the books I read and I wish I could come out and say it openly. I mean, I’ve just said it, say it all the time here. But I wish I could write “BOOK Y, by Z, is formulaic and poor”, then provide the reasons why I think this is the case. And I don’t mean, writing a hit piece about some celeb’s ghostwritten novel, or the latest Jonathan Franzen, or a memoir by a second rate royal — punching up is far from forbidden. I mean I wish I could write an actual negative review of the work of those playing in my same league, if a negative review is what is needed, for this is the literature I’m interested in. And I wish that my peers could do the same with my books. And I wish that we could sit in a panel one day, and have a proper loud disagreement, passionately tear apart one another’s work in front of an audience, instead of politely agreeing on a number of points we don’t really care that much about. And then we could go and have a drink together and perhaps make up and agree about something else. Or not — we could also remain rivals for life. I wish all of that could happen. Because my impression is that right now writers, critics, editors, and so on, are doing the job of book marketers, instead of helping shape a stimulating literary discourse.
So along come the Dark Avengers of Goodreads — the toxic unconscious of a literary milieu that as a rule represses negativity.
“I will hate you till the day I die”
In April 2014 pop philosopher Alain de Botton blocked me on Twitter.
Around this time, de Botton had taken part in an intervention with art historian John Armstrong, at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, where they appended labels to artworks, along with thematic displays. In the words of Adrian Searle, writing for the Guardian, de Botton had “filled the Rijksmuseum with giant yellow Post-it notes that spell out his smarmy and banal ideas of self-improvement”. Ever the art history undergraduate, exasperated by this matthaighesque idea of art, I tweeted several blank Post-it notes at de Botton, asking him to “invest them with meaning” for me. Instead of doing this he blocked me.
I was vexed by de Botton’s patronising Post-it jamboree but tagging him and mocking him on social media was puerile. I quickly regretted my joke, and not because I could have been unpleasant. I regretted it mainly because by blocking me he denied me his attention, and efficiently put me in my place. I felt small; I felt helpless, irrelevant, not being important enough for his rage, which is what I was trying to summon with my joke.
To understand what I mean we need to travel back in time a bit more…
In 2009, when de Botton released his The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, New York Times critic Caleb Crain gave it a very negative review. As I haven’t read The Pleasures…, I can’t comment on the accuracy of Crain’s piece, but I don’t feel it is necessarily ad hominem. Crain seems to have read the book and has actual (strong) criticism to level against it. In any case, whether fair or not, this review would have long been forgotten, were it not for de Botton’s rage, expressed as a comment on Crain’s blog:
Alain de Botton says:
29 June 2009 at 1:52 pm
Caleb, you make it sound on your blog that your review is somehow a sane and fair assessment. In my eyes, and all those who have read it with anything like impartiality, it is a review driven by an almost manic desire to bad-mouth and perversely depreciate anything of value. The accusations you level at me are simply extraordinary. I genuinely hope that you will find yourself on the receiving end of such a daft review some time very soon – so that you can grow up and start to take some responsibility for your work as a reviewer. You have now killed my book in the United States, nothing short of that. So that's two years of work down the drain in one miserable 900 word review. You present yourself as 'nice' in this blog (so much talk about your boyfriend, the dog etc). It's only fair for your readers (nice people like Joe Linker and trusting souls like PAB) to get a whiff that the truth may be more complex. I will hate you till the day I die and wish you nothing but ill will in every career move you make. I will be watching with interest and schadenfreude.
What beautiful words! I will hate you till the day I die. These are the words one reserves for a lover who’s broken one’s heart. And yet, here de Botton is venting them at a book reviewer. Even if de Botton oddly expects Crain to care about the pecuniary aspects of his publishing career, and this comes across as entitled to me, these virulent but sincere words make me want to read him. Responding to negative reviews is often advised against but in a healthy literary culture this should be the standard response. We need more hatchet jobs and confrontational authorial rage. We need a culture that encourages fair and open negativity. We need to create the spaces for this culture to breed.
Then, anonymous attacks on Goodreads would either stop existing or become meaningless.
The case for fair and open negativity
OK, as usual I might have resorted to hyperbole in order to hook your attention a bit longer: maybe responding to negative reviews shouldn’t be the standard response of disgruntled authors. As writers we have a right to be emotionally-invested in our work, but this is our issue, not something that should concern our critics or readers. Since they’ve spent money and time on whatever it is we put on a page, they have a right to react whichever way they see fit to our work: they have a right to dislike our writing and tell us all about it; they have a right to demolish our work too, even to the detriment of its commercial success. I say “they have a right to demolish our work”, not the person behind it — these things aren’t synonym, no matter how much some might insist they are, either out of real (confused) conviction or cynicism.
But as toxic positivity continues to stifle literary discourse, as we continue to push the ridiculous notion that every book is a priori good just because it’s a book, as we pull back lateral critical punches lest we offend peers who might one day pay us back, as we accept the imperative to reduce criticism to inane commodity-peddling, while all of this keeps happening we are inviting the Dark Avengers of Goodreads to channel literary negativity in toxic and cowardly ways.
And this is everyone’s loss.
I suspected the malefactor was a he. Can’t say why. But I was right, as you’ll soon learn.
Not the mag’s real name.
The book had been self-published and my friend was a snob, so I guess he deserved to be punished.
Acknowledgment pages and cover quotes, being others.
I have so little problem with confessing to all of this that once I run a sincere list, one in which people were asked to name books they thought it was good to pretend to have read that year.
All I was thinking, the entire time I was reading, especially the hyperlink to the bad behavior-tantrum&cancelling du jour is who has the time?! Either everyone writing has a trust fund or what they are writing must be so straightforward and easy that they can literally do it in their sleep because seriously who has the time?!
As for reviews, it’s the entire review industry that needs to burn. Because no one can be honest and no one can take the honesty.
I bought some costume jewelry on Etsy for my niece a month and a half ago. Nothing too pricey since she is at an age when things may break easily etc. Lo and behold, two weeks later, the chain snapped. No biggie. She kept the pendant.
I wasn’t that impressed with the faux gold plating anyway. The item looked cheap. Not a craft or artisan made-at-home, but made-in-China with a U.S. address situation. Didn’t have time for writing a review.
But I got very sick of Etsy sending me reminders to write a review. I couldn’t “dismiss” these. Finally, I just gave it 3 stars (generous) and said quality was not as expected.
The person decided to engage in a back and forth with me and eventually even said they will reimburse me fully if I could change the review! That it will hurt their business!
I stopped engaging. But what if someone did what their 20 quid back?
Replace $20 with feelings and that’s our criticism and reviews industry right now.
I finally read a critical analysis, which was received as a “bad” review, of a novel everyone thought was the second coming of Christ (2018) and many had silenced themselves to say nothing bad about it.
I HATED the writing. I was angry that anyone could even publish it. Even a teenagers’s blog posts are better! But nope! Our savior has arrived were the reviews, while the what’s app chats had memes.
You know what that review holding that book and writer to account did? It made me re-read the book with different things to dislike which led to appreciating why someone may even like it.
About the unbearable Alain de Botton, I can't forget Charlie Brooker's column about him:
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2005/jan/01/tvandradio.screenburn