I always feel guilty when I enjoy a snarky review of a book, especially of fiction. I know how hard it is to write, so I rarely say much about books I don’t like, unless they’re the kind of book I want to throw across the room.
But sometimes a snarky review not only tells me I wouldn’t want to read a book, but also tells me why. And that saves me money and time and keeps me from throwing things.
Ron Charles – who reviewed for The Washington Post for many years and now has a newsletter – did just that in his recent review of Matthew Aldrich’s book, The Natural Order.
There are several delightful lines in this review, but it was this observation that really sucked me in:
[The main character’s] stew of self-aggrandizement, self-pity, and self-delusion requires a degree of irony that’s missing here because, like Fitzgerald, Aldrich is caught between satirizing the rich and idolizing them. But unlike Fitzgerald, he does not write like Fitzgerald.
Now you should understand that I think The Great Gatsby is terribly overrated. I’ve read it a couple of times, but while I agree that Fitzgerald had a lovely way with words, I don’t think it’s the great American novel.
In those two sentence, Charles encapsulates in a nutshell what’s wrong with The Great Gatsby as well as what’s wrong with the book he’s reviewing. You can only get away with that angsty idolization of the rich if you can write like Fitzgerald. And in my opinion, even Fitzgerald shouldn’t be allowed to get away with it.
But of course, by doing so, Charles is damning Aldrich’s book, which is a first novel. That seems a bit unfair, but since Aldrich is also a screenwriter and sold the screen rights to this book before it even came out, I don’t think it’s going to make a lot of difference in his life. He obviously will make more money from the movie than the book in any case. Continue reading “The Guilty Pleasure of the Snarky Review”…