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How Not to Respond to a Review

I've posted previously about when to respond to a critic. The answer, I wrote, was "almost never." Now comes a lesson in how to respond—or, rather, how not to respond. It comes courtesy of the gentleman pictured here, Alain de Botton.

On June 28, 2009, Caleb Crain published a review of de Botton's new book, Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, in the New York Times Book Review. As is typical of Crain's essays, it was intelligent and entertaining. It was also sharply critical of de Botton's book—not typical of Crain's criticism, for he is in no sense a literary hit man.

The next day, de Botton posted a response on Crain's blog, Steamboats Are Ruining Everything. You can read the full thing here, but allow me to excerpt from it:

"It is a review driven by an almost manic desire to bad-mouth and perversely depreciate anything of value. The accusations you level at me are simply extraordinary. . . . You have now killed my book in the United States, nothing short of that. So that's two years of work down the drain in one miserable 900 word review. . . . I will hate you till the day I die and wish you nothing but ill will in every career move you make. I will be watching with interest and schadenfreude."

Now, let me say that I have not read de Botton's book. I frankly have no basis to tell whether Crain's review is on the mark, off the mark, or is not "sane," as de Botton writes. More important than that caveat is the fact that I sympathize with de Botton's anger. The part of his response that was quoted in my hometown book review, the San Francisco Chronicle, was the "I will hate you till the day I die" sentence. But the most telling part is in the middle: "You have now killed my book in the United States. . . . So that's two years of work down the drain in one miserable 900-word review."

That sums up every writer's attitude toward reviews. Some guy on a deadline rushes through your book (or so you imagine), and delivers a summary judgment that can make or break the product of years and years of effort. Then the critic merrily goes on to demolish another life, as you sit in the ashes. Or so it seems. It's stressful, to say the least.

Indeed, I've been a reviewer, and the experience of being an author led me to temper my criticisms. I pulled back from some of my most negative feelings about the books I've reviewed, precisely because I didn't want to damage the prospects of something an author has labored so hard on—and because, on deeper reflection, I could see the strengths more clearly.

With that said, de Botton's response only reinforces my earlier statement that it almost never pays to respond to a negative review. At best, you look somewhat quarrelsome, oversensitive, unable to cope with criticism. At worst, you can come across as unhinged—as de Botton does. The vindictiveness and hatred in his response makes me (as an uninformed observer) believe that Crain had it exactly right in his criticism. Crain's review depicted a book that was arrogant and snarky in too many places; that impression may be false, but de Botton's intemperate fury only gives weight to Crain's criticism. As I said, Crain is in no sense a butcher of a critic.

I repeat: responding to critics is generally ill-advised. You're lucky to be reviewed at all, and even negative reviews boost book sales. We expect informed opinions, not reporting, from book critics, which means we (readers as well as authors) will often disagree with them. Indeed, anyone who reads book reviews with any regularity knows that even the best books sometimes get undeservedly bad reviews. Many a Nobel and Pulitzer prize-winner has gotten scorched in the New York Times Book Review.

But, if you must respond, do not get emotional. (I've responded angrily to critics—privately, though, not publicly—and I looked like an ass, whether I was right or not.) Rather, calmly and rationally present your case. If there are measures by which you can factually disprove a criticism, lay them out. If there are examples you can give to counter the impression left by a critic, then give them dispassionately.

Obvious advice? Of course. But it's incredibly difficult to calm down before reacting to a bad review. Whatever you do, do not tell a critic you hate him and hope he will suffer. You may think it, but saying it will only hurt your cause.

Addendum to the Post Below

I would add one more thing to the post below:

The book under discussion (Free: The Future of a Radical Price by Chris Anderson) argues that things composed of ideas have a natural tendency to become free—that information "wants" to be free. But this notion can easily be disproved. There are a number of things that no one would ever propose be distributed for free, yet are composed of ideas, consist entirely of information, and are distributed electronically. They have no physical substance. The most important of these is money itself. Most money does not consist of paper bills; the vast majority of the dollars in circulation exist entirely as electronic records, sitting on servers somewhere. They are not physical, and represent nothing tangible, but rather are pure information, pure ideas. Many other things, such as shares of stock, are no longer transmitted by the physical distribution of share certificates, but rather are electronic records in brokerage accounts.

Do these kinds of information want to be free? I don't think so. So why should intellectual property, the product of individual vision, expertise, artistic ability, and years of work be free for all takers? The answer is that there is no reason why this should be so.

Of course, a writer can create intellectual property and choose to distribute it for free. That's what I'm doing with this blog. But the amount of effort that goes into it, sorry to say, is represented in the price. And the price reflects the market demand. In other words, no one reads my blog. This intellectual property is priced for free, because it's worth a lot less than the books I write, which cost actual money. But you knew that, because you're not reading this, are you?

My Information Wants Money, Thank You

Malcolm Gladwell has written an excellent review in the current New Yorker of the book Free: The Future of a Radical Price by Chris Anderson (who got into trouble for stealing much of his text from, of all places, Wikipedia). You can read Gladwell's review here.

Anderson makes the tired, baseless argument that "information wants to be free." Things made of ideas, he writes, are so cheap to produce as to be basically free. This is nonsense.

First, Gladwell makes the excellent point that "almost free" is a long way from "free" when you start dealing with large volumes. Bandwidth still costs money. But more to the point, in my case, is that the cost of production is not in copying and transmitting an e-book, or even printing a physical book. The cost is seven years of my life, in the case of The First Tycoon. Seven years spent conducting research no one else had ever conducted, that no one else was willing to conduct. Seven years crafting the enormous mound of information I had amassed into a narrative, identifying and fleshing out characters, pacing, foreshadowing, bringing to resolution the flow of events, examining the context, writing.

Why these seven years of my life should be free, because the book is read on a screen instead of a printed page, is beyond my comprehension. I did not simply produce a research report: I created intellectual property. If someone wants it, that means it has value.

My information does not want to be free. It wants money.

Some of my Best Friends are Historians

Since my last post, I've read further in the "round-table discussion" of biography and history in the American Historical Review. I think the relationship between biography and history—or, more precisely, the historical profession—deserves lengthier consideration.

First, a clarification: Blogging is a form that leads to snarkiness with alarming ease. So allow me to expand on what I wrote in my last post. I don't want to suggest that I think academic history or historians are bad. I have no interest in writing scholarly monographs, but I devour many such treatises in my research, and I'm grateful for the hard work that went into them. When I write a biography, I consider it my duty to engage the historiography on subjects vital to my subject, and to offer a fresh perspective on those issues—to make my biography a contribution to historical knowledge, as well as to the mass of biographical details about my subject.

So it is with some dismay that I read the comments of the editors of the American Historical Review about the journal's official attitude toward biography. Clearly, it considers biography to be not merely a different, but a lesser form of scholarship. It does not publish articles biographical in nature, and it does not review biographies.

I find this to be dismaying. With regard to reviews, technically the journal makes an exception for biographies that make a major historical contribution—but how would the editors know, if they refuse to even consider biographies? With Jesse James, I tried to provide a far-reaching argument about the social and political origins of the Civil War in Missouri, and how its conduct there affected the state for decades afterward. This was necessary for my explanation of Jesse James's outlook and popular appeal, but I see it as an intrinsic part of my job as a biographer. I was honored to receive a juried scholarly prize for Civil War scholarship for the book. Yet the American Historical Review did not bother to review it.

Trust me, I'm not angry or peevish about it. Rather than being upset that AHR didn't review it, I was surprised and pleased that a noted historian did review it for other scholarly journals, such as the Journal of American History and the Missouri Historical Review. The problem, rather, is that the oversight represents a deeper problem in the historical profession, one that is a byproduct of professionalization itself.

Professionalization begins as a good thing. It springs from an attempt to eliminate amateurishness, to create consistent standards, establish a systematic approach, and raise the quality of work performed in a field. But it often becomes a means by which a group attempts to close and control a market—to fend off outsiders. This process works in such a way that the participants are unaware that this is what they are doing. They see themselves as upholding scholarly standards, when what they are sometimes doing is fighting to maintain monopoly control of the market against interlopers—some of them worthy.

In the case of academic history, the market is historical publications, and the outsiders are non-academic writers. Biography represents a special challenge in this regard. It is a genre that breaks all the rules of academic history, since it focuses on individuals, transgresses across the field's standardized time periods, and tramples willy-nilly into various specialities. It is also popular with a general audience, which means it can be and is produced for reasons other than academic advancement, which means it can be and is produced without regard to academic preoccupations (such as jargon, or checking through the list of current academic concerns), which means it can be and is produced by writers outside of the field of academic history, who are paid for their efforts with money, not tenure.

The freedom with which biography is published outside of the academy leads to two results: First, a lot of bad biographies get published, as far as I'm concerned. For all of my kvetching about academic historians, I share many of their concerns, and have definite views on what makes a good and important biography. Many popular biographies are indeed bad history, and I regret it. But that fact does not justify the second result: that academic historians often scorn biography and biographers.

This scorn is particularly ironic, as David Nasaw points out in his introduction to the round-table discussion, because academic historians (such as Nasaw) are producing biographies at an increasing rate. Why do they do so? Because biography is a marvelous means of exploring history—and you needn't have the "great men make history" outlook to believe that. As I mentioned, biography crosses the chronological and thematic divides of the historical discipline, offering a richer, more organic portrait of the past, often providing the biographer with a longer-range and more nuanced understanding.

With The First Tycoon, I traced the evolution of the culture and politics of the economy—as well as the economy itself—across many decades, from the eighteenth-century culture of deference to the birth of the corporate economy. Even as I read widely, my biographical research took me deep, into sources that I had not seen in standard historical works. Now, critics both in and out of the academy will decide if my book represents a contribution to our historical knowledge; but writing it was truly an enlightening experience, one I would not have had as a standard historian.

When it comes down to it, I think a strong distinction between historians and biographers is silly and artificial. There's a reason why academics such as David Nasaw and Maury Klein produce fine biographies, and why such non-academic biographers such as Jean Strouse produce works that are also excellent history. I think biographers are fully aware that what they do is a part of the larger enterprise of history, as much as it is also a branch of literature; let's just hope the editors of the American Historical Review wake up to that, too.

Historians to Biographers: You scare me

The current issue of the American Historical Review offers a revealing look at what academic historians think of biography.

It scares them.

The journal features a "round-table" discussion (i.e. a series of brief, relatively informal essays) about biography and history. The piece most worth reading is the introduction by David Nasaw, an academic historian who is also a good biographer. He notes the intense discomfort that historians feel when it comes to biography—how even some of the biographers who contributed essays refuse to accept the label of biographer. They leave the impression that they think of themselves as more serious scholars than mere biographers would be. Indeed, all the essays are laden with scholarly jargon—which, as Orwell taught us, is the enemy of clear and incisive thought.

One of the most interesting comments was one that suggested that biography is more akin to fiction than to history. That got my attention. The most casual reflection would reveal how silly that connection is. But it does point to the subject of one of my earlier posts: the fact that biography straddles both history and literature. And that, perhaps, was what this befuddled scholar was trying to say (not being clear on the fact that literature includes nonfiction as well as fiction).

The fact that biography is both history and something more than history, I believe, disconcerts academic historians. One must labor mightily to avoid a narrative in writing a biography; one must confront the necessity of developing characters, of crafting both a story and a plot. (As E.M. Forster wrote, "The king died, then the queen died" is a story. "The king died, then the queen died of grief" is a plot.) By focusing on an individual, a biographer must match a rich understanding of the context (the stuff of history) with a sensitivity to the profoundly human (the stuff of literature).

There is something else, too, that is unsettling about biography for the historian. Academic history, as it now stands, leans steeply away from the notion that the individual has any effect on the broad currents of history. Indeed, the best biographers avoid any exaggeration of their subjects' personal role in shaping history. But we all live our lives as individuals, so we must believe that the individual matters or we could not bear to exist. We will always hold, to some degree, the belief that the individual does have an impact on the world. No matter how dispassionate, biography is ultimately rooted in that fact.

That can be a little scary.

A Matter of Proportion

Far be it from me to criticize how readers see my books. Entire schools of literary criticism are based on the notion that the reader's response is as valid as the author's intent in making sense of a work.

But to hell with that.

There's one reaction that I've had on a few occasions to both my books that strikes me as a little strange. In the case of Jesse James, some readers and critics remarked that it didn't have much information about Jesse James himself; they thought the book was mostly about the historical context. With The First Tycoon, some have declared that there isn't much information about Vanderbilt's personal and family life.

In both cases, my response is: Huh? What are you talking about? In Jesse James, there is more detailed information about his life and crimes than there is in virtually any other book (though some have more detail about this robbery or that). In The First Tycoon, I offer scores of pages about Vanderbilt's personal and family life, providing far more material than has ever been published before (in an annotated work of nonfiction, that is).

But I think I know what is going on: It's a question of proportion. Both my books offer quite a bit of contextual information, in an attempt to better explain the person and his actions. In the case of Vanderbilt, there is a great deal of material on his business life, for he had an extraordinarily long, far-reaching, and consequential career. With Jesse James, I explored the complex history of Missouri in the Civil War era, which I see as necessary to explaining the famous bandit and his popular support. Given the abundance of this material (lengthening my books far beyond previous biographies of the same subjects), some readers develop the impression that there isn't very much, in absolute terms, in those other areas (the details of Jesse James's crimes, and the inside story of Vanderbilt's personal life). The proportion distorts the perception of the absolute quantity.

Is that a mistake on my part? Hmmm... hard to tell. On one hand, I don't want readers to have the false impression that they're getting less information than might exist out there somewhere else. It's my job to convince them that they're getting all there is, at least all that matters. On the other hand, I include the other stuff (the contextual or business-career information) because it's extremely important. I think the reader would have a poorer understanding of my subjects had I cut back.

Perhaps it's a matter of how I handled it, then. Or maybe some readers will never see my writing the way I would like them to, no matter what I do.

When to Fight a Critic

I've blogged before about when to openly fight with other biographers, when writing a book. But what about after your book is published? 

Virtually every writer who has ever been reviewed has been infuriated by a critic. Even positive reviews can be irritating when they get something about the book wrong. When I wrote Jesse James: Last Rebel of the Civil War, I took great care to avoid sensationalizing my thesis that Jesse James was more like a terrorist than a simple bandit, let alone a Robin Hood. I wrote the book before September 11, 2001, and took pains to point that out, to say that I was not equating the James-Younger Gang with Al Qaeda. But some reviewers still wrote (admiringly) that I made the case that Jesse James was a nineteenth-century Osama Bin Laden. Drove me nuts.

But it's a mistake to fight over such fine points. The nuance is important to me, but it's essential for every writer to remember that you can't police the opinions and interpretations of every—or any—critic. (Speaking of critics, I'm illustrating this post with a photo of one of the greats, Lionel Trilling.) I admit, I still take offense at cranks who disbelieve the endnote that explains how I wrote the book before 9/11, who claim that I tried to profit off of the terrorist attacks (as transparently stupid as it is wrong, since my thesis is woven throughout the entire manuscript, and obviously was not a last-minute addition), but some people will, frankly, be stupid, and you can't smarten them up. 

Nor can you get a serious critic to see your point the way you want it to be seen. Case in point: The excellent historian Glenn C. Altschuler reviewed The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt in this article in the Tulsa World. Professor Altschuler doesn't think that I was critical enough of Commodore Vanderbilt, to the extent of doubting my evidence that Vanderbilt grew more polite over time. I could complain! I could explain in excruciating detail why I think he's wrong! But it would be idiotic to do so. First of all, it's actually a very positive review, so I wouldn't be helping myself to fuss over it. Second, of course I would disagree, since I went first, so to speak, and he's disagreeing with me. Spelling out my case all over again would be redundant and foolish. 

The fact is, such disagreements are what reviews are all about. Critics are not reporters; they are supposed to be thoughtful analysts who provide informed opinions. Professor Altschuler obviously took the book seriously, read it intently, seems to have enjoyed it, and developed some opinions about it. That tells me I did my job.

But every once in a while it really is worth taking issue with a review. I had one such case with Jesse James. Richard White of Stanford University, one of the leading American historians, a true dean of the profession, wrote what I thought was a shockingly bad review in the London Review of Books. Of course it was negative, but most alarming was the fact that it was completely off base—not at all the quality of work that we justifiably expect from Professor White. He was simply wrong about almost everything, both factually and in terms of the prevailing historiography. I could have written a much better critique of my own book. 

So what was at work here? Frankly, I think that Professor White, a man at the top of his profession, was personally offended, because I, an unknown "popular historian" (as he described me) criticized a two-decade-old article he wrote about Jesse James. I suspect this because of (1) the angry tone of the review; (2) the fact that he failed to mention my critique of his work in his review, a rather glaring omission; and (3) he used an unusual adverb, "lamely," in criticizing something I wrote, which is precisely the word I used to describe how he drew his conclusion about Jesse James's popularity. 

So I replied. You can read my response here, on the LRB website (though the original article is unavailable, except to subscribers). The editors cut it down, but it makes all my basic points.

Was it worth it? Hmmm... I doubt it made Professor White any angrier at me, since he already seems to have been about as infuriated as you can get by my book. But probably not too many of the LRB's readers bothered to take note of my response. And who cares? The only two really negative reviews I got were this one and one by an apparent neo-Confederate in the Houston Post. In the UK, the reviews were exceptionally positive—so there were plenty of contrary opinions to counterbalance this one. But the review was so negative, so groundless, and by so important a historian that I felt that I had to set the record straight.

And, in a sense, that is the only point to responding to a review. I doubt that letters pages are read by a very large fraction of the people who read the original review. Even when completely justified (as I felt myself to be in this case), it's kind of a purely egotistical exercise, soothing one's bruised sense of self-worth, so you can go to bed knowing that you didn't take it lying down. 

I was lucky. This response did not lead to a nasty exchange. But much more often responses to reviews simply make you look bad. Everyone knows that bad reviews are common—that even some of the best books, true classics, get panned on occasion. It's very hard not to look like an ass when you complain about a review, even a stupid one.

Years later, I've gone on to other work without suffering any repercussions from this isolated review, and Professor White has gone back to more serious (and better quality) writing, probably without a thought for the popular historian who wrote a lousy letter to the London Review of Books.

To Cut or Not to Cut

Finally! At long last, a customer reviewer on the website of a certain giant online book retailer (which starts with "A" and sells an electronic reading device that rhymes with "swindle") complained about the length of my new book, The First Tycoon.

Well, it's about time.

Not that I agree. But it's not a short book, and I'm kind of amazed that it's the first real complaint about the length. Even this reviewer gives it four stars out of five. So, hooray! 

But why don't I agree? Why shouldn't a book with some 600 pages of narrative be cut down? It's a serious question for the biographer, who often feels the impulse to include everything that turned up in the course of research. When writing what one hopes will be the definitive biography (as in my case), the urge to provide a comprehensive catalog of absolutely everything in a crowded life can be overwhelming. 

But those aren't good reasons to include absolutely everything. Indeed, I cut hundreds of pages out of my final manuscript. The well-meaning customer reviewer I alluded to above commented that she saw no need to read about every single vessel or line that Cornelius Vanderbilt ever operated. I agree. I left out a good many vessels, lines, and other business enterprises.

OK, so why couldn't I have cut further? What are the criteria for including information?

Here are a few. This is by no means a comprehensive list, but here goes:

1) Information should be included when it reveals something about the subject that cannot be evoked as effectively in any other way. Example: I mentioned the death of a crewman on Vanderbilt's steamboat in 1822, not because the crewman was important, but because Vanderbilt wrote a letter discussing how the crew had raised money for the widow, and offering his thoughts on the legal obligations of the enterprise toward that widow. The letter sheds rare light on his attitudes toward charity and his duty as a boss.

2) Information should be included when it places the subject in historical context, and brings out the full meaning of his activities, expressions, or beliefs. Example: I discussed the patrician class in eighteenth century America and the "culture of deference," in order to show how Vanderbilt's campaign against a steamboat monopoly in the 1810s and '20s spearheaded a huge cultural and social shift. I also launched into an account of the clash between President Andrew Jackson and his Whig opponents to explain Vanderbilt's advertising slogans (which used political rhetoric) and his personal beliefs.

3) Information should be provided when it advances the narrative, when it adds to the larger arc of the overall story. Example: I mentioned Vanderbilt's entry onto the boards of directors of several New England railroads in the 1840s—railroads that would be considered tiny by later standards—because I found that these moves were part of an unfolding campaign to take control of the most important (and most hostile) of the region's railways. I didn't really care much about what he did as a director of the Norwich or Long Island Railroad in this period, but his entry into those lines' management fit into a larger story—that of his rise to the presidency of the first railroad he ever controlled.

4) Every once in a while, a detail or anecdote bears telling because it's just plain interesting. After Vanderbilt had risen to control of a railroad empire, for example, he made friends with John Morrissey, a prize-fighter, gambling-saloon operator, and Democratic party operative. A working-class Irishman at home in the mean streets and Wall Street alike, Morrissey made a point of cultivating Vanderbilt. Did their relationship mean much in the vast canvas of Vanderbilt's life? No, not really. But, frankly, it's a fun and colorful sidelight. 

I think I included only information that fit these criteria. (Then again, there may be additional guidelines that are equally valid.) And I tried to weave them into a narrative that moves along, that makes the reader feel that it's going someplace. 

In a long and eventful life like that of Commodore Vanderbilt, there are a lot of places the reader needs to go.

Biography: History or Literature?

When I was in college, I learned to my amusement that the history department was once called the department of "History and Biography." It was amusing, I thought, because it seemed to reflect a great-man school of history that we post-moderns had crushed out. Little did I realize that I would become a professional biographer one day.

But that raises a couple of interesting questions: Is biography a branch of history? Or is it a form of literature?

The answer to the first would seem to be an obvious yes. But my youthful snorting at biography is much to the point here. History is the study of the human affairs in general terms. Even at its most microscopically focused, it seeks to shed light on the wide expanse of society, culture, and politics. If we believe that history is about more than the study of great and powerful individuals, then this must be true. Biography, on the other hand, is specifically the study of particular individuals.

Of course, biography most definitely belongs to the discipline of history, if done properly. The biographer must pave a two-way street between history and a particular life. That life should illuminate larger historical questions, and a rich historical context should illuminate that individual's story. A good biographer should ask hard, fundamental questions about the meaning and origin of elements of the subject's existence, which often demands a critical engagement with scholarly thinking on big topics. 

In writing about Cornelius Vanderbilt, I tried to take a fresh look at such questions as the antebellum political debates over the economy; the cultural meaning of stocks, dividends, and financial markets; and Americans' attitudes toward government regulation. This led, I hope, to a richer and more complete understanding of Vanderbilt's life, and its significance.

But biography is more than a mere subset of history—again, if done properly. I do believe that the genre should be counted in the ranks of literature. What is literature? My definition (and perhaps there is no one satisfactory definition) is that it is the creative exploration of the human condition, an attempt at finding both truth and beauty through the written word. Where history is general, literature is highly specific, seeking the universal through the imaginative habitation of the lives of others.

Biography is nonfiction, fenced in by the barbed wire of evidence. But it is far more than a recounting of research findings. As the story of an individual, it is a creative form, requiring empathy and imagination. Individual lives trample the neat boundaries of historical studies, and ramble between historical eras. If it sheds light on the larger world around its subject, it also is emphatically a life story, requiring a novelist's engagement with the idiosyncratic, complex, and contradictory nature of human existence.

There are works of history that stand as true literature, and there are novels that shine as beacons of historical knowledge. But a biographer should be striving to write both history and literature with every volume, and every page.