Each week in Bookends, two writers take on questions about the world of books. This week, Francine Prose and Zoë Heller discuss whether bad books should be written about or ignored.
By Francine Prose
I found myself again writing negative reviews — as if I’d suddenly resumed smoking, or something else I’d forsworn.
The publishing industry, we hear, is in trouble. So why would a sensible writer tell people not to buy a book? If the novel, as we also hear, is moribund or dead, why drive another nail into its sad little coffin? And lately there seems to be a cultural moratorium on saying something “bad” about anyone or anything, unless you’re a politician, in which case that’s your job.
I used to confess that there was a time when I wrote negative reviews. Don’t blame me — I was young! I admit that it provided a wicked sort of fun, especially when I was writing for an editor-friend who delighted in sending me books that weren’t exactly “serious” but got under my skin. Sadly, it’s easier to be witty when one is being unkind. Friends would say, “Oh, I just adored your hilarious essay on that celebrity’s memoir about her fabulous million-dollar face-lift.” And what would they say when I praised a book? Nothing.
Even so, I stopped. I began returning books I didn’t like to editors. I thought, Life is short, I’d rather spend my time urging people to read things I love. And writing a bad book didn’t seem like a crime deserving the sort of punitive public humiliation (witch-dunking, pillorying) that our Puritan forefathers so spiritedly administered.
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