You Liked It? Are You … A Crazy Person?

There's a point to this, read on

Over on Facebook, Smart B*tches Who Love Trashy Novels posed the question:

I have many readers who email rants about books they wanted to like but didn’t. Am pondering category of “book rants.” What do you think? Interested?

The response could be summed up as “Yes.”  If you haven’t hated a much loved and ballyhooed book, then either you don’t read or your opinion switch is stuck on “Pollyanna loves everything.”

When I look at my responses to novels (and movies), it’s obvious that my nastiest are leveled at bestsellers and critics’ darlings whose charm utterly escaped me.  (Like No Country for Old Men and Let the Right One In.  There are a few, miserable, lugubrious hours, I’ll never get back.)

But this kind of rant negative review really isn’t about the book (or its author). It’s about the reviewer’s relationship with the book’s fans.

Let’s wind the clock back, nearly two decades ago, when someone recommended Stephen R. Donaldson’s Lord Foul’s Bane. “If you like Lord of the Rings, you’ll love this,” said this “friend.”

With such a glowing recommendation, I expected to love it. But instead of an adventurous tale about good overcoming evil, with the obligatory McGuffin, I got a sniveling, self-pitying, rapist protagonist.  And gobs and gobs of description of a magical land. It was like a tour of The Land, guided by a rapist.  Fans of the books will whine (like the protagonist) that it is a tale of redemption and that I’m a knuckle-dragging troglodyte who’s missing the point.

Which is fanboy-ese for “We know the first 200-pages suck…”

My issue, BTW, isn’t with rape as a plot point, but rather its use as a means of engendering sympathy for a character, who is, coincidentally, the rapist.  “Poor, poor, Thomas.  He has leprosy and his wife left him.  He didn’t rape the girl. No, it was cruel, cruel circumstance that forced him, forced, I say, to rape the girl.  Poor, poor, Thomas.”

I found myself baffled by the complete and utter disconnect between myself and the “friend” who recommended this book. This compounded by this person endless badgering: “Well, did you read it?  Did ya?”

I hadn’t grown much of a spine, yet, but my answer should have been. “Really?  You thought I’d like a book about unapologetic rapist? Got any other winners to recommend?  Maybe something about a child molester?”  Instead, I changed the subject, and a while later, when I found the book, chucked it in the trash.  The only book I’ve ever thrown out.

Next, there was my one and only exposure to Nicholas Sparks’s schmaudlin writing: The Choice. I think every sob story Sparks writes gets turned into a movie; he has legions of devoted fans (most female).  He must be good–right?

That would be a negative.  The Choice features a heroine so stupid that the book’s IQ went up 50 points when she fell into a coma. (Better that she fall into a pond of piranas, but I digress.) The heroine has a dog, a sheltie.  One day her sheltie turns up preggers.  And the first thing this idjit does is start whining about how her precious, little darling has been violated (seriously, “violated”), soiled by the neighbor’s horrible dog.

The neighbor, the hero in this stupid-fest, does have a dog. A short-haired dog who is neutered. The heroine, who is supposedly a physician’s assistant, must have failed her anatomy classes, because the absence of doggie balls should be fucking obvious, especially on a short-haired dog.  More importantly, the whole mess, the rape of her precious Poopsie, could have been avoided by spaying Poopsie.

(Seriously folks.  Spay/neuter your pets. If you can’t afford it, there are programs that will help.  But don’t be an asshole like Sparks’s idiot heroine.)

The Choice left me wondering what was wrong with a sizable chunk of the female population.  Or, conversely what was wrong with me? Apparently, when they were handing out The Guide to Being Female, I was out in the shop, welding up metal objects d’art, or doing something else that wasn’t in the guide. Which is my point.

A well-recommended, much lauded, novel that you hate, can make you feel like an alien, a baffled changeling dropped amidst incomprehensible humans. The resulting nasty review is code for “You liked this book?  Are you …. on dope?”