We’ve all read them: novels so bad you want to heave them
across the room, or you just can’t finish because the story becomes convoluted,
repetitive, and or the genre changes halfway through. But is a one star rating
fair? Mostly not.*
As a writer I cringe when I read one star reviews of author’s
books because writing a novel is hard. Even a bad one. (I’ve written my share
of terrible drafts, and am currently revising a horrible manuscript to elevate
its status to merely awful.) But reading
a novel is also Herculean, especially one weighing in at 600 or more pages. It takes
weeks, sometimes months of commitment. None of us has to read fiction,
unless we are editors, high school or college students, in which case we are
prisoners to the assigned tome. Students can pay erudite friends to read it, use
Spark Notes, or buy literary analyses papers online. Because I love to read, I
never cheated myself from the experience of finishing an assigned novel. But I was
young then, and my future slow-walked toward infinity. Time is finite, so before
I commit to a novel, I often read the customer reviews, and I begin with one
star ratings.
Many one star reviews are crass, and often cryptic, and
sometimes customers give one star because amazon sent the wrong book or the
item was mangled in shipping. Is that the author’s fault? (Note, independent
book stores pack and ship items carefully. You’ll pay more for shipping, but
you will get what you ordered.) I ignore the idiots, and read ratings where someone
has actually read the book. Reviews say as much about the reader as the work
itself.
I was curious how Beautiful Ruins, by Jess Walter, fared
in the ratings. I loved it, and recently recommended it to a friend. I had not read
any reviews before purchasing it. I was in the bookstore and the opening scene
grabbed me. The novel begins in Italy during
filming of Cleopatra, starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, and alternately
shifts to present day Hollywood. I loved the fictional and real life characters,
and like all good fiction, found the story believable. But that’s just my
opinion, because J Lee has “been astonished at all the great reviews for this
book” and found it “tedious, offensive and downright ugly.” Redgirl writes it
was “torture to finish but did so as a model to my grandchildren that we MUST
finish our homework” and Snickers88 is “angry at myself for wasting time with
it.”
Another of my favorites, The Goldfinch, winner of the
Pulitzer prize, received mainly good reviews,
but garnered a few one stars from many ‘anonymous’ people who found it boring. George
H Hedges has “never wanted to burn a book… until now” and a reader called Californica,
mentioning he/she loved The story of Edgar Sawtelle, (a book I found too
boring to finish,) called The Goldfinch “incredibly depressing without
any creativity and beauty,” and “a total waste of my precious reading time.”
Perhaps if I had consulted the one and two star reviews of
Murakmai’s 1Q84 I may have saved myself a huge chunk of time. But I had
loved Kafka on the Shore and The Wild Sheep Chase. Chris Fiorillo
compares 1Q84 to ruining your favorite cocktail by mixing it with “clam
juice, Tabasco sauce, maple syrup, nutmeg, and vanilla.” Emmett R. Furrow, expresses how the novel “put me in a coma by the
beginning of book 3 and I found myself talking back to the book as it
progressed to its pointless end.” Yeah, I have to agree with these.
I’m on my third attempt at One Hundred Years of Solitude,
largely because many of my favorite authors note that as the ultimate Latin
American novel. I’ve made it further this time- about a hundred pages, but the reading
is not effortless. Daniel claims the book as “almost incomprehensible. The only
reason to buy it is you’re a poseur wanting to claim that it’s great
literature.” I’m a little confused by the story, but I’m underlining passages, and
I want to see what makes this a great novel.
Why do we read fiction? It’s a pack of lies, yet stories reveal the ugly
and beautiful truth of who we are. Whether that truth is revealed through zombie/vampire
novels, dystopia, cozy mysteries, Shakespeare’s plays, or in tomes by Brian
Jacques, we search for stories that speak our name.
Which novels have spoken to you, made you feel happy to be
alive? Which ones have you hurled out the window from a speeding train?
*some sequels are best
left unwritten. The Streets of Laredo,
McMurtry’s bizarre anti- sequel to his masterpiece Lonesome Dove,
is an example. McMurtry admittedly took liberties with his original characters
to reframe them in this unpalatable book. Why didn't he just write a new book
with new characters? I threw mine across the room by page 48. All of my friends
who also loved Lonesome Dove said they couldn’t get past 60.
Upcoming reviews:
Who is Martha? By Marjana Gaponenko
Repo Man by Bruce Cameron
