The results are almost always unappealing, such as when Alice Hoffman encouraged her readers via Twitter to call a negative Boston Globe reviewer at home, or when Alain de Botton left a note on a reviewer’s blog stating “I will hate you till the day I die.” Wounded pride has never led to sober argument and self-pity rarely leads to sympathy. Again and again novelists succumb to the ill-advised yet seemingly irresistible decision to strike back, in writing, against the reviewer who slighted them. We’re taught to turn the other cheek, but the instinct for self-defense is hard to repress. How bad does a negative review sting, how much does it get beneath the skin? it’s been eight years since Jonathan Lethem‘s The Fortress of Solitude was reviewed in The New Republic by James Wood and, as he writes in his essay titled “My Disappointment Critic” at The Los Angeles Review of Books, ”Eight years later, I haven’t quit thinking about it.”
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