Be Kind to Alice Hoffman

By all accounts, Alice Hoffman is a good writer. She sells well and, until very recently, was well regarded by her peers. Now her reputation is in tatters – among her fellow writers at least. Ms Hoffman, you see, committed the terrible sin of striking back at a critic who gave her a poor review.  The review was by Boston Globe critic Roberta Silman. In all, Hoffman fired off 27 tweets about the bad review, and then closed her Twitter account. It’s true, she went way too far – one of the tweets included Silman’s e-mail address and telephone number and a request for Hoffman’s fans to get in touch with Silman to tell her what they thought of the review – but (apart from that) I’m not sure why the world has come down so hard on Hoffman, especially her fellow writers. Ironically, any number of commentators seem quite happy to call Hoffman rude names while berating her because she had the temerity to do the same to a reviewer.

There seems to be a ‘rule’ in the writing world, that authors shouldn’t react negatively to negative criticism. This serves reviewers very well, of course. They can say what they want, be as ignorant, ill-informed, bigoted and pompous as they like, and there is no come-back. In Hoffman’s case, the review was only mildly negative – it said her new book wasn’t as good as her previous work – but there are plenty of cases of awful, even downright vicious reviews. Should an author just take it on the chin?

There seem to be two main arguments for why authors should let bad reviews go unchallenged. One is that being cross and defensive in print is bad for an author’s image. Not only will their readers not like to see that side of them but neither will editors, publishers, agents and many others who might be able to damage the author’s career. So, by this argument, the author must just suck it up whenever they are criticised – however unjustly, however rudely, and however stupidly – because the author is a ‘brand’ and unless their public persona is one of smiling forgiveness, readers won’t want to buy it and publishers won’t want to sell it.

The other argument is that people have different tastes, you can’t please all the people all the time (etc., etc.) so authors shouldn’t worry about a negative review – it’s just one person’s opinion. After all, any idiot can be a reviewer. Of course, any idiot can be a writer too, it’s just that the bar for being a reviewer is way, way lower than it is for being a writer. Anybody can put a review on a website, in the local paper, or in their blog. I do it myself from time to time (although I only ever review books I have really enjoyed.) It is orders of magnitude easier than writing a story, incomparably easier than getting a story published. It is even debatable as to whether reviews have any influence at all on book buying (some stats I read a few months ago suggest they have no influence at all.) So why should authors make a fuss?

I suppose a question we might ask is why some people feel compelled to put their negative opinions of a writer’s work into print. Writers work hard and do the best they can. They are really trying to produce something we will enjoy. Most writers who make it into print have striven for years – probably decades – to achieve mastery of their craft. What kind of person wants to trash that effort with a bad review? Well, from the tone of so many reviews, I’d guess it is people who think they sound clever and feel powerful when they ridicule other people, mean-spirited people who are more happy destroying things than creating them, big, daft kids, kicking over the other children’s sandcastles, shouting, “Look at me!”

If it wasn’t for the public’s and therefore the publishing industry’s distaste for authors who get angry in public, I suspect reviewers would have a much harder time of it. The wonder is that more author’s don’t blow their tops at the constant sniping they get from every fool who thinks their half-arsed opinion is more important than another person’s feelings. Rather than turn as a pack and savage a writer like Hoffman who finally snaps, a humane response might be for her fellow writers to rally round her, to give her a hug and a soothing pat, to let her know we know how she feels and we understand her outburst, that we’ve been there and felt her pain.