12/24/2005: "NT Times Review: Christmas Comes Early..."

…although if this review is any indication of the sort of yuletide gifts I shall receive this season, I suppose I can expect to find a pile of shit in my stocking.

I had never received a scathing review up until now. A few had been kind, maybe a few TOO kind, but most had a little praise and a little criticism. I hesitate to call this a hatchet job, because I’ve always felt that term is extended towards books by well known writers; I always thought critics sort of held them in escrow for when a writer reached a level of success sufficient to merit or weather one. Plus I thought hatchet jobs were also extended towards works or writers a particular critic had it in for. As I am by no means an established name (and with a few more reviews like this, the possibility of becoming one seems remote) and I do not think I’ve done any personal injury to the reviewer, Lizzie Skurnick, so I don’t think the term hatchet job applies here. It’s just a very, very bad review. That it is my first US notice in the most influential book review perhaps in the world doesn’t make the review itself any worse---but running naked through in an empty field is a lot less embarrassing than running naked through a packed stadium, if that makes any sense at all. Or a bomb detonating in an empty field is a lot less harmful than that same bomb detonating in a stadium.

Anyway, what can you say? Once you’ve written a book it’s not yours anymore, it’s out there in the world and subject to anyone’s interpretation. I have no real problem with being hammered---I mean, it never feels nice, but it seems part and parcel of the deal. And Skurnick makes some valid points: maybe there IS too much gore, maybe the medical terminology IS a little thick, maybe my characters DO sound a little too educated for the lots I’ve given them. But I guess I’m not so keen on the general snarky tone in which it’s all delivered.

I’ve only read the review once (it’s sort of like a huge gaping wound in your gut: you don’t really want to pull the bandages off and look at it), but it starts by lumping me in with the “macho guy writers” pack, which is fair, then makes some back-biting remark involving the New Orleans hurricane. Then the review proper. Then some back-handed remark which can’t even really be considered faint praise, if my memory serves. Something like I'll be "on my way" if I take her advice. Maybe I’m wrong, or being unfair; I don’t plan to read the review again, so perhaps I’ll never know.

Do I feel as though I got a totally fair shake? Well, no. I can’t say she misread it, but I can’t say she read it particularly compassionately, either. But I don’t suppose it’s her job to. I do sort of wonder why you’d get the claws out for a first-time writer. It’s not like I expect to be handled with kid gloves, but if you’ve got utterly nothing good to say…well, what’s the use? A quick internet search brought me to Lizzie’s review page, and I read the first review I saw, of Ellis’ LUNAR PARK, which she killed. But Ellis can deal with it by now---I mean, not Ellis personally, Ellis might be pissed, but his books will do well regardless of the critical attention. But someone like me…well, I guess it’s yet to be seen whether a really bad review in the NY Times is preferable to no review at all. Only time will tell. And in Lizzie’s favor, I’m sure she’s given very good reviews to first books she felt merited them.

Maybe it’s another rite of passage. It helps to think of these things as “rites of passage.” When no people show for a reading, it’s a rite of passage. When you get a shit review, it’s a rite of passage. The rite of passage scenario presupposes a time, somewhere in the future, when I have some stability and success and can look back upon these early trials with a bit of wry humour. This is much better than the alternative---the “this is all you’ll ever have to show for it” scenario.

I’m closing comments to this, as I get the feeling the sort it might inspire: either nasty words for the reviewer, or sympathetic ones for me, neither of which I want. Just read the review, if you’d like, and we’ll leave it at that. I’m not the first writer to suffer a poor review, and it won’t stop me. Quite honestly, it fuels me. I’ve made a career---as short and ephemeral as it may be---out of of taking people’s underestimations and dismissals of me, using them to fuel my fire, and later spitting it back in their faces. Lizzie Skulnick became the latest, but not nearly the biggest, log on that fire.

Merry Christmas, everyone! (even Lizzie!)

All best, Craig.

'Rust and Bone: Stories,' by Craig Davidson

Snap, Splatter and Pop

Review by LIZZIE SKURNICK

Published: December 25, 2005

IT may, as the conventional wisdom goes, be harder to write comedy than tragedy - but it's also easy for a writer to shoot for the second and hit the first. That's what happens in Craig Davidson's short-story collection, where the author plunges a child under the ice and into a permanent coma, rips the face off a dog, lets a killer whale bite off his trainer's leg and finally snaps a character's manhood in two in a series of unsuccessful attempts to win the reader's sympathy that are equal parts amusing, appalling and just plain gross. Tough-guy fiction from young writers is starting to crack me up. If these authors would donate their wood pulp - or their labor - to FEMA, we could rebuild New Orleans.

Davidson has written several horror novels under a pseudonym, so his passion for gore is unsurprising, but his stories also recall those of Raymond Carver, who, in his quiet way, was interested as well in the brutal side of characters permanently down on their luck. "Rust and Bone" would benefit from a similar show of restraint. In the title story, a boxer, unable to punch through ice fast enough to save his drowning nephew, destroys his hand in a battery of increasingly violent fights. It's a fine setup, but Davidson subjects us, like his boxer's opponents, to the punishing blows of the symbolism until we're ready to scream. This excess also makes him violate the cardinal rule of "Show, don't tell," which he tends to finesse into "Show and tell." The narrator of "Rocket Ride" describes the men on a dominatrix Web site he frequents as: "Utterly helpless. Emasculated." But he needn't have elaborated. We had him at the name of the site: "Xtreme Valkyries."

The writer in Davidson cannot get out of his characters' way. He likes medical terminology - he uses enough words like "triquetrum" and "scaphoid" and "epididymis" and "molecular" to fill an anatomy textbook. But these stories are written in the first person, and it's hard to understand why a collection of ne'er-do-wells, thugs and losers are well-versed in this particular lingo. At a dogfight, a boor of a character switches inexplicably into "CSI" mode: "After rubbing powdered Lidocaine into the dog's gumline to kill the pain, she chemically cauterized the facial wounds with ferric acid." Does Davidson want us to connect with the character or fire up Google? Worse still is "Rocket Ride," in which the trainer coughed up by the orca frets over what's left of his leg: "a shredded mess, adipose tissues encased in a yellow layer of fat, splintered bone shining in the crisp sunlight." Couldn't he have had the decency just to pass out?

Davidson's writerly self-indulgence leads to some jarring juxtapositions of the lowbrow and the lyric. In "The Rifleman," a character taunts his neighbor to fight by spitting vulgarities, then, frightened, realizes the neighbor is crossing the "frost-petaled" lawn to take him up on it. The boxer in "Rust and Bone" lets us know that "the Texas sky was not completely blue; its color, I've come to realize, was more of a diffuse lavender." Thanks for sharing, tough guy! Briefly body-snatched by Davidson, the narrator of "Friction" details the "blood sausage" and "dusky eggplant" horrors of the book's most foul accident, then stops talking in paint chips long enough to conclude: "I'm not going to lie: it was pretty . . . revolting." If Davidson would simply switch his stories over to the third person, he would believably, if unadvisedly, be free to "fawn-color" and "violet-edge" us himself.

Still, while the stories often end in a melodramatic flourish, they begin with elegant economy. And though Davidson's attempts at tough talk are more "Deadwood" than Eastwood, an ironic joviality sometimes rises to the surface. In "On Sleepless Roads," a repo man "wondered what it was about property seizure that gave rise to soliloquies so melodramatic they'd embarrass a threepenny hack." Once Davidson can curb the same impulse, he'll be on his way.

Lizzie Skurnick is the editor of Old Hag, a literary blog.