Wrong, wrong, wrong

In my comments about Pushcart's Complete Rotten Reviews & Rejections a few days ago, I didn't offer many examples of those rotten reviews and rejections. Let me do that now.

Here is what reviewers said about works now recognized as classics.

Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte: "... the only consolation which we have in reflecting upon it is that it will never be generally read."

Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll: "We fancy that any real child might be more puzzled than enchanted by this stiff, overwrought story."

'Oblivion lingers'

The poetry of Emily Dickinson: "Oblivion lingers in the immediate neighborhood."

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald: "... a book of the season only."

Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert: "Monsieur Flaubert is not a writer."

Moby Dick by Herman Melville: "... an ill-compounded mixture of romance and matter of fact ..."

Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoi: "Sentimental rubbish ... Show me one page that contains an idea."

Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman: "Of course, to call it poetry, in any sense, would be mere abuse of language."

And here are a few comments made by publishers in their rejection letters:

The Good Earth by Pearl Buck: "Regret the American public is not interested in anything on China."

A Study in Scarlet by Arthur Conan Doyle: "Neither long enough for a serial nor short enough for a single story."

Sanctuary by William Faulkner: "Good God, I can't publish this. We'd both be in jail."

The Diary of Anne Frank: "The girl doesn't, it seems to me, have a special perception or feeling which would lift that book above the 'curiosity' level."

"Unpublishable."

The Last of the Plainsmen by Zane Grey: "I do not see anything in this to convince me you can write either narrative or fiction."

Catch-22 by Joseph Heller: "I haven't the foggiest idea about what the man is trying to say."

The Blessing Way by Tony Hillman: "If you insist on rewriting this, get rid of all that Indian stuff."

A Separate Peace by John Knowles: "I feel rather hopeless about his having a future.:"

The Late George Apley by John P. Marquand: "Unpublishable."

The Time Machine by H.G. Wells: "It is not interesting enough for the general reader and not thorough enough for the scientific reader."

Oh, well. We all make mistakes.

The cost of misjudging books

It is a much bigger problem when book editors and publishers misjudge a book than when book critics do. This thought came to me after reading Pushcart's Complete Rotten Reviews & Rejections, edited by Bill Henderson and Andre Bernard, published 20 years ago. The book compiles negative comments made about books that later did very well and authors who later won fame.

A publisher once said of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold by John le Carre, "You're welcome to le Carre -- he hasn't got any future." A book reviewer for the Springfield Republican said of Ulysses by James Joyce, "That the book possess literary importance, except as a tour de force, is hard to believe." Of course The Spy Who Came in from the Cold went on to become a bestseller and John le Carre became perhaps the most important author of espionage fiction in history. Ulysses has often been ranked as the best novel in English ever written, which sounds like literary importance to me.

Yet the Springfield Republican reviewer was only expressing an opinion, an opinion that even today might be concurred with by 99 percent of those who read books. Joyce's novel is highly regarded by the literary elite, but the rest of us find it undecipherable and impossible to read.

That publisher (for some reason this book's editors identify the source of negative reviews but not the names of publishing companies) also expressed an opinion, but his opinion translated into dollars and cents. His inability to see the potential in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold cost his company money. Big money. The Springfield Republican lost no money because of the Ulysses review. The reviewer didn't lose any sleep.

I was particularly amazed to see how many publishers used as their excuse for rejecting someone's manuscript that this was not the sort of book that was selling now. For example, a publisher told Dr. Seuss that And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street was "too different from other juveniles on the market to warrant its selling." But books by Dr. Seuss later sold countless copies because they were different from other children's books. Being different, which is another way of saying being original, is what makes certain books, when well done, stand out from the others. Too many publishers only want books that are just like other books that have become bestsellers, but because they are less original they rarely sell as well.

Hardy in miniature

Susan Hill's Black Sheep reads like a Thomas Hardy novel in miniature. It is that much of a downer, beautifully written but still depressing.

She takes us to a British coal-mining town called Mount of Zeal at an unspecified time in the past. The Howker family, like most of the families in Mount of Zeal, is dependent on the mine. Boys grow up to become miners. Girls grow up to become the wives of miners. Most of the men work in the heat and filth deep below ground. The privileged few manage the work from above.

Except for a young daughter named Rose and a boy named Ted, Evie Howker has a house full of miners. Fortunately they work different shifts, so there is room for all in that small house and those few beds, but there is always somebody who needs a meal and so her work never ends. One son runs away without a word, never to be heard from again.

Years pass, and both Rose and Ted, like the brother who ran away, dream of a better life. Rose sees her chance in marriage to the son of one of those privileged families. Ted climbs over the hill and begs for a job tending sheep for a farmer. It pays less than mining coal, but the work is above ground. Hopes are dashed, however, in Hill as in Hardy. Rose's husband turns out to be a brute, and she begins to have eyes for another man. A mine disaster kills the Howker men. (I'm not sure how this happens if they are working different shifts.) Ted decides that to support his widowed mother, he must leave sheepherding and go down into the mine. Then things only get worse.

Hill covers many years in her powerful 135-page novel. Her title refers to Rose and Ted, the black sheep of the Howker family, who dare to defy convention and expectations by trying to live their own lives their own way. Yet as in Hardy, as well as in the Bible, the rain falls on both the just and the unjust.

Why some books endure

My first book did OK; meanwhile, books that I reviewed and loved in 1991 and 1992, books every bit as good or better than mine, are out of print, simply because they never found a readership then.

Nick Hornby, The Polysyllabic Spree

Nick Hornby ponders a question that I have pondered myself from time to time in this blog: Why do some books endure, or at least endure longer, than other books? Here are five factors that may help explain it:

1. Literary quality

Hornby is correct that some books endure (I believe his first book that he refers to was Fever Pitch), while others equally good, if not better, fall away. Yet as I pointed out on June 1 ("Not a horse race"), literary quality is mostly a matter of opinion. One person's idea of the great American novel will not necessarily be another's. There's no scale or measuring stick to measure which book is best. Still virtually everyone can agree that some books are better than some others. Most authors don't pretend to be writing great literature. They are just trying to sell a few books and make a living. In the book world, the cream doesn't always rise to the top, but often it does.

2. Timeliness

To endure, a book must speak to the times in which it first appears, but also to later times. It also helps if a book comes to represent a particular point in history, as All Quiet on the Western Front has come to represent World War I and The Sun Also Rises the post-war generation. I have commented in the past that a big reason for the success of Slaughterhouse-Five is that it appeared in 1969 when its style and anti-war message found an audience, especially among younger readers.

Yet to endure, books must also speak to generations to come. Writers like Oliver Wendell Holmes and William Dean Howells were once considered among the greatest American writers. Today few people read them.

3. Critics

Favorable book reviews, especially in publications like the New York Times, do make a difference. Critical praise excerpted on paperback covers help sell books. Authors often disparage critics, especially when they are critical, but even a negative review gains attention for a book. And a positive review from a respected critic can put an author on the literary map.

4. Teachers and professors

For many people, the only really good books they will read in their lifetimes will be those assigned in high school and college classes. I think To Kill a Mockingbird would have endured anyway, but it has certainly helped that the novel has been taught in so many classrooms. When we read a book for a class, we tend to regard it as great literature, even if we didn't particularly like the book. This probably explains why so many books considered great happen to be considered suitable reading for teens. Consider 1984, Lord of the Flies, Of Mice and Men and so on. Somehow Lolita made the cut, but that has sometimes been assigned in college. That's where I first read it.

5. Popularity

This is the factor mentioned by Hornby, and he is right. Books sales translate into subsequent editions and then to keeping a book in print. Nowadays most books are being digitized, but previously a book had to be in print to be found by anyone who doesn't haunt used bookstores. Instructors couldn't assign books that were no longer in print. And publishers had no incentive to republish a book if there was no known market for it.

There are other factors involved in deciding which books endure and which don't. Movies based on books help keep those books around longer. Successful movies based on About a Boy and High Fidelity, among others, help explain Hornby's success. It also helps if the author is still alive and writing. When I was in Barnes & Noble after reading The Waterworks, I looked for other novels by E.L. Doctorow. I couldn't find any. He died in 2015, and already his books have apparently disappeared from bookstores. Books about authors, such as Tim Page's biography of Dawn Powell a few years ago, can renew interest in that writer's books.

Short novels or long novels?

Anyone and everyone taking a writing class knows that the secret of good writing is to cut it back, pare it down, winnow, chop, hack, prune and trim, remove every superfluous word,  compress, compress, compress.

Nick Hornby, The Polysyllabic Spree

Nick Hornby

Having liberally paraphrased the advice given by writing instructors everywhere, Nick Hornby goes on to rip it apart. He does this in his May 2004 column for Believer. That month the only book he writes about is David Copperfield by Charles Dickens because that is the only book he had time to read that month. Dickens could write short, as he did with A Christmas Carol, but mostly he wrote long, usually very long. Most of his novels were written under contract with periodicals that demanded so many words per issue for so many months. Thus the author, like others of his day, had to invent numerous characters and plotlines to keep his story going for the required length. Did he worry about chopping, hacking, pruning and compressing? Hardly. Was he a successful writer? You bet. People like Hornby are still reading him with pleasure.

I happen to be in the midst of a different Dickens novel, Our Mutual Friend, nearly 800 pages long with enough characters to populate a village. I'm loving it. Several years ago I listened to an abridgment of Great Expectations and felt something missing. It was the same story I remembered, but it didn't seem like Dickens. The characters were there, at least most of them, but they seemed stripped of their personalities. We can be glad Dickens never had a writing coach.

I also happen to be reading Susan Hill's Black Sheep, just 135 pages long. The story covers a period of several years, much longer than Our Mutual Friend. Certainly much is left out of Hill's narrative that other writers would have put in, yet her book works, just as those by Dickens do.

Hornby observes that short novels are usually humorless because jokes are the easiest things to cut out. Certainly Dickens mixes a great deal of humor into his novels, humor that can be neatly excised in abridgments, but I doubt that Hill ever cut any jokes out of Black Sheep. It just isn't the kind of novel to have had any to begin with.

The proper length of a novel, it seems to me, depends on three factors:

The author

Some writers, such as Thomas Wolfe, are just long-winded. An editor once complained of Marcel Proust, "I can't see why a chap should need thirty pages to describe how he turns over in bed before going to sleep." Other writers have a gift for saying much with few words. You might put Susan Hill in that camp.

The story

Lonesome Dove and Gone with the Wind were stories that took many pages to tell. The Old Man and the Sea not nearly as many. We can often sense when a novel seems padded because the publisher or author wanted more pages than the story demanded.

The reader

There may be two kinds of readers. One takes pride in the number of books read and so values shorter books, or at least longer books that can be read quickly. The other is more concerned with thrift. Why take two thin books to the beach when one fat book will do the job? Long books usually give a reader more pages for the buck. Hornby writes, "Go on, young writers -- treat yourself to a joke, or an adverb! Spoil yourself! Readers won't mind! Have you ever looked at the size of books in an airport bookstall? The truth is that people like superfluidity."

That is, we readers like superfluidity when the writer is good and when the story is good.

Reading literary criticism for amusement

The best reason to buy Believer magazine has long been Nick Hornby's column. Each month he lists the books he has bought and the books he has read  (a good exercise for all of us who tend to buy more books than we can possibly read) and then writes about those read.

To most people literary criticism is not a comic art form, but it is to this British novelist, who dissects books of all kinds briefly with both wit and insight. The first fourteen columns he wrote for Believer, dating from September 2003 to November 2004, were collected in the slim book The Polysyllabic Spree, printed by the magazine.

The challenge for those of us who write about books is to write about them in such a way that people who might never have an interest in a book will nevertheless read and enjoy a review of that book. That has always been my goal in this blog. Hornby actually accomplishes it, at least most of the time. An example is the column in which he writes about On and Off the Field, a book about cricket by Ed Smith. Hornby acknowledges that most readers of his column are Americans who care nothing about cricket, but since he loves the game and the book, he writes about it first one month saying, "you have to wade through the cricket to get to the Chekhov and the Roddy Doyle." You still may not have an urge to either read Smith's book or sit through a cricket match, but you will love what Hornby has to say about both.

Hornby has diverse reading tastes, as his inclusion of both a book about cricket and Anton Chekhov's A Life in Letters might suggest. He reads older books by the likes of Charles Dickens, Leo Tolstoy, Wilkie Collins and John Buchan, as well as contemporary ones. Sometimes he goes on a binge, such as a month devoted to J.D. Salinger or another to Dennis Lehane. Mostly he seems to just pick up books at random, some recent purchases and some he has had on his shelves for awhile.

What confuses me is that as a writer of a popular book review column, publishers must send him loads of books they would like for him to comment on, yet there is little mention of this. Each month he just lists those books he has purchased. sometimes even explaining where and how he purchased them. So what happens to all those unsolicited books that come in the mail?

Forward and back on the Camino

Two Steps Forward may be the title of a recently published novel by Graeme Simsion and Anne Buist, but the novel itself completes the phrase, "Two steps forward, one step back."

Simsion and Buist's two main characters and co-narrators, Martin and Zoe, are both middle-aged and newly single, he because of a nasty divorce and she because of the death of her husband. They meet while walking the Camino de Santiago, the ancient route taken by pilgrims that stretches from France across northern Spain. The way does not go smoothly, and we are not talking about the Camino. Like confused magnets, they repel, then attract, repel, then attract. They all but become lovers, then one or the other takes off alone down trail without explanation. Soon enough they meet again, only to repeat the process.

These sorts of things happen in romantic novels, but still it quickly gets old here. Fortunately the authors provide welcome diversions in the form of subplots. Martin, an engineer from Great Britain, devises a cart to carry his gear and uses his pilgrimage as a marketing tool, hoping to sell his idea to a manufacturer. He also has a teenage daughter back home entangled in an affair with a married man. The American Zoe, meanwhile, learns her husband's fatal accident may have actually been a suicide. Plus there's news she will soon become a grandmother. An international cast of supporting characters also helps keep things somewhat interesting.

Then Simsion and Buist give us an ending that helps us all but forget the on-again-off-again romantic silliness of the previous 300 pages.