I am a huge fan of anti-war books. This is largely because I’m a big fan of books that talk about the human condition. They stir something in my cold, dead heart that should probably be stirred every once in a while so I don’t become ossified in apathy. For this reason, I am currently reading the highly acclaimed novel Johnny Got His Gun by Dalton Trumbo. There will likely be a book review of it here in the future.
Speaking of reviews, I chose to read this book specifically because I saw a horrible review of it. As someone who (rather infrequently) writes book reviews, I am fascinated by other people’s opinions on books. I will look at book reviews after reading a book, not to inform my own opinion, but to see how similar or different my interpretation and experience was from others who have read the same book. It is so satisfying to see others have similar insights into a book as I did, and it is equally frustrating to see others point out mistakes or inadequacies I would rather ignore.
Literary critics do this frequently. It’s important to widen your perspective as a critic and an author. I may read a book and think it’s wonderful, but someone from a different background will notice something that I, based on my own experiences, may not have thought of. This happened with The Feminine Mystique after it was praised for starting second wave feminism. It is a feminist novel with a lot of merit, but it still nearly entirely ignored black women and their struggles. As a white woman, I may not have considered this until I read a review or critique from someone else’s perspective.
That is an older example, and I think those kinds of critiques are brought up with literary novels quite frequently, but it should apply to genre fiction as well. I had a personal experience with this as I was reading reviews for The Nevernight Chronicles. I thought those books were fantastic, and I still do, but I read several reviews where people pointed out how drawing from an actual culture for your fantasy work, and making said culture the bad guys, can be quite offensive to the people of that culture who still exist in the real world today. Also, Kristoff’s prose is rather flamboyant. I already knew that, but the reviews really sent the message home.
It’s important to me to read reviews because I want to have a more well-rounded and informed opinion on the books and novels that I’ve read, and I think it’s a really effective learning tool. That being said, there are a lot of reviews that are in poor quality or poor taste, and it’s important to be able to discern one kind of review from another.
Back to the novel that sparked this post, Johnny Got His Gun has a pretty high average rating; it has a 4.2 on Goodreads, where anything above a 4 is acceptable reading material. I soon noticed, however, that there was a 1/5 star rating right beside that one. This was peculiar, and thus worth investigating.
The review was essentially an attack on communism, arguing that Trumbo’s book was in favor of communism (not true), and they deemed the novel quite the hypocritical affair. They stated that Trumbo’s book argued for pacifism while misinterpreting the ideals of the concept. Pacifism is that nothing is worth killing for, while Trumbo argues nothing is worth dying for, the review says. Trumbo has ineffectively argued his position entirely because of this one misconception on his part, got ’em!
They may be right about pacifism, but I found this a supremely interesting take for a blog that was arguing against communism and exhibited rather individualistic thinking. Is dying for a grand cause not part of collectivist thinking? In an individualist society, what is worth more than oneself, and is thus worth sacrificing oneself for? It was just an odd interpretation for a book that is largely about the individual and the suffering caused (to the individual) by being conscripted in a pointless war. It seemed to me that their opinions were highly motivated by political ideals and were likely quite biased. This is not the type of post that would convince me to think differently about a book I’ve read, but it was really interesting how they seemed to assert their view as an objective or dominant interpretation.
I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about the “subjectivity of book-liking” and if there is a definitive objectiveness to a book being “good” or “bad”. It’s much easier to say a book is good because nearly every book out there has a fan for one reason or another (Fifty Shades *ehem*). It’s much harder to qualify a book as “bad” as this reviewer (or reviewers) did because even “bad” books have people who appreciate them for their awfulness.
One could argue that there are objectively good and objectively bad qualities to a book. We have writing rules for a reason, right? Writing a certain way will make our books more cogent. Writing a certain way will make us sound more professional, more esteemed, etc. Except for when it doesn’t. I was frequently told that I have to know the rules of creative writing before I can break them, as so many popular authors have done. Hemingway had paragraph-long sentences. Frank Herbert switched perspectives multiple times on a single page. Every single one of the beat writers said “screw these conventions”, which is literally what made them cool. They likely had some idea of how to write properly, but decided it didn’t matter in favor of imparting their ideas in their own style in a way that to them felt more genuine.
How can you have objectively good qualities of a book if there are books that flaunt bad qualities like nobodies business and are heralded as some of the most esteemed works of literature? Really, I don’t think you can. This is my subjective opinion, as are all the opinions I post on my blog. This review was a good reminder for me (and an interesting blog topic for you, I hope) that we should think of our own personal biases when we’re reading or reviewing a book. Do you absolutely hate when an author drones on about setting description for pages without moving the plot forward? That might make a book “bad” to you, but that is most of The Lord of the Rings and those are some of the most well-regarded fantasy books of all time. For a more literary comparison, this is also what Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings does in The Yearling and Cross Creek. In that sense, even though it may not be your cup of tea (and it is certainly not mine), we cannot say it’s objectively bad.
My book reviews are all blatantly subjective, I think. I like or dislike a book for reasons that are my own personal opinions, and then I recommend things that I think the majority of people would like. I am not a person qualified to say whether a book is objectively good or bad, I can only say whether I personally think it is a good or bad book. It is important to remember that a lot of other reviewers fall into this same category, especially the yahoos who wrote the aforementioned review of Johnny Got His Gun. Very few people are actually qualified to judge the objective merit of a book, and as we’ve discussed, the “objectivity” of this merit is still quite subjective. A few of us are semi-professionals, most of us are amateurs, and a good chunk of us are amateurs with excessively edgy or biased takes. Basically, we’re all yahoos.
The Lit Wiz