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The Pleasure and Sorrow of Being a Writer

July 2, 2009

What are we to make of Alain de Botton’s outraged response to a critic’s less than favourable review of his latest work, Pleasures and Sorrows of Work? Alex Wade provides an up close and personal guide to what’s in a writer’s mind.

‘Never read your reviews’ is an exhortation often sent a writer’s way by those in the know – editors, literary agents, copy-editors et al. They’re used to dealing with the peculiar blend of sensitivity and ego which goes to make a writer, and know, from bitter experience, how fragile the concoction can be. So they counsel not so much caution as a lofty disdain for the words of that inferior breed, the literary critic. What, they suggest, can a critic possibly have to say of relevance to the nobility of the writer’s calling?

Needless to say, writers habitually ignore this advice and compulsively read everything written about them. They are driven to do so both because ego perennially outweighs sensitivity and because of another fundamental drive in their make-up – curiosity. Writers are, by definition, incorrigibly curious about the world around them, about its people and, especially, the words they use. There is thus as much sense in telling a writer not to read his or her reviews as there is in tapping the keys of a calculator and hoping that a novel will emerge.

A good friend of mine, herself an editor, urged me to spurn reviews of my first book, Wrecking Machine. As is the way of things, I ignored her advice and eagerly sought the first published review of the book, in Metro. To appropriate Caleb Crain on de Botton’s Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, I’m afraid the reviewer wasn’t crazy about it. If memory serves – and I suspect it does – he began his evisceration of Wrecking Machine with the words: “The first rule of Fight Club is that you don’t talk about Fight Club. If only Alex Wade had remembered this advice.” My book was a mixed genre affair, part reportage of the world of white collar boxing under the auspices of an organisation called The Real Fight Club, part memoir of how I’d come to find myself in this strange subterranean world. The reviewer – whose name, in all honesty, now escapes me – did not empathise.

“Wade’s journey into boxing was motivated by the desire to deal with his demons,” he wrote (roughly). “Given that his demons seem to consist of being a sexist womaniser who likes a drink or six, the only attraction in reading this book is in waiting to see him get a good kicking.” Ouch. But there was worse, a savage uppercut to my sagging jaw: “And even this is poor compensation for having to wade through this drivel.”

Woe was me. My first review – one my publishers cannily avoided telling me about – and my book was condemned as mere drivel. I felt sick, as if I had, literally, been punched. And then I felt angry. Who was this bile-filled individual? Maybe I knew him, perhaps he had an axe to grind. It was even possible that during the carnage of the Wrecking Machine years, I’d offended him by some boorish behaviour in a bar. God knows, there’d been a lot of it back then. I felt depressed and fearful, too – if Metro was for starters, what on earth would the heavyweights in the national press have to say?

Naturally, I read their reviews too. Thankfully, they were positive. I began to feel confident about the book again. Fantasies of meeting the Metro man and delivering a straight right to his nose receded. In time, I forgot his name, and now I see the funny side. I realised, also, that a bad review is a rite of passage. Everyone has them, just as every writer can list a series of rejections before getting a publishing deal.

But should a writer indulge what seems only fair – a right of reply in the face of a negative review? De Botton, confronted by Crain’s qualms about Pleasures and Sorrows, posted a highly querulous comment on Crain’s blog which concluded by saying: “I will hate you till the day I die and wish you nothing but ill will in every career move you make.” He further stated that he would “be watching with interest and schadenfreude.”

If de Botton is indeed the author of this comment – and in the blogosphere, such things are not always certain – this is regrettable. Far better to have fantasised about visiting violence on Crain, or, better still, go to the boxing gym and spar harder than ever. This served me well, post-Metro review. Instead, de Botton’s words read as the tantrum of the child who thought he’d submitted an essay worth a sparkling Grade A, only to receive a B+. For de Botton, and other writers in a similar position, silence is golden, not least because, as Roberto Bolano tells us in By Night in Chile, silences are always heard, even by God. That, or you don’t read your reviews in the first place.

Pictured: Alain de Botton’s Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, and, below, Alex Wade thinking about the man from Metro.