Reviewing Books You've Never Read

I haven't read them, either!

Yesterday, Emily Everett announced the sale of her debut novel. She is a professional writer with an agent who sold a book to a big publisher in a tough market for new fiction. The Middlebrow can’t comment about the quality of her book because it doesn’t come out until spring 2023 and there are not even galleys to be had.

The Middlebrow has been a hopeful novelist since childhood and despite accomplishing some things as a writer, has never sold “the big one.” So, The Middlebrow feels badly for Everett, who has achieved at least one of her major ambitions only to have loudmouthed online scolds recoil at the announcement of her success.

They’re dismissing the book, based on its description as a “Nazi romance,” and are accusng the Everett of “litwashing” Naziism. All this, based on a handful of words describing a book they’ve never seen. Few seem surprised by the more interesting element of the book’s premise, which is that German prisoners of war were sent to America to work in heartland farms, interacting with Americans and forced into labor. Though, one ambitious Twitter-whiner complained both that the romance is inappropriate because the POW is both a Nazi and a slave. So, on one hand, the POW is morally repugnant and unlovable and on the other unable to consent to the farm girl’s advances. If the POW turns out to be under 18, we hit a trifecta.

In any event, we know nothing about the POW, the circumstances of his capture, or whether he enlisted or was conscripted. He might even have been a saboteur, taken prisoner before he would have brought down the Reich. It’s fiction. There’s a universe of possibilities here beyond “Nazi romance.” Heck, the prospective reader should expect a twist. “Nazi romance,” seems an unlikely premise to earn a sale to Putnam or representation by CAA.

Another possibility is that the POW changes over the course of the story. Book Twitter strongly objects to this possibility, declaring that some people (even some made up people) can and should ever be redeemed. For these readers, some subjects are morally off-limits for artistic exploration. But even this objection fails to consider another possibility — what if the Farm Girl is evil, condemned by the story the author tells? A twist like that would morally align Everett with her attackers.

At this point, nobody knows.

Aroud this time, book Twitter also descended on author Sandra Newman, for a novel coming out this June called, The Men. Newman is an accomplished author and her book is probably available to advance readers but, as with Everett, the online criticism seems solely based on a short description, this time from the author’s Twitter. Here we have a work of deep speculative fiction, as described by the author:

“Everyone with a Y chromosome suddenly, mysteriously disappears. In the months that follow, the world gets better: safer, kinder, more egalitarian. But the book is about women who can't let go of the men they've lost, and devote their lives to getting them back.”

There are many possible societal consequences to a world without Y chromosome carriers. Perhaps the world would become more dangerous, less kind and more unequal. The ancient Greeks imagined the Amazons, for instance. But that vision doesn’t counter Newman’s. It’s just another vision. Newman chose her world and built it. If her story offends you, invent another.

The summary doesn’t mention transexuals, but Twitter immediately jumped on the implication that women with Y chromosomes will also be erased, rendering her vision of a “safer, kinder, more egalitarian” world transphobic. Again, we have no idea from the summary how this issue is handled in the story and the summary also doesn’t say what wipes out people with Y chromosomes. Twitter assumes some sort of plague. Do they expect a pandemic to cross reference its effects with people’s preferred pronouns Also, one could as easily argue that her premise would also require the disapearance of all Pacific Islanders with Y chromosomes and that she’s blaming the world’s ills on men from Fiji.

We don’t even know from the summary that the author believes this is a better world, just that it is “safer, kinder, more egalitarian.” Indeed, the next sentence, which accounts for half the writing under critique here, suggests that getting to those values is not worth the loss of the world’s men, at least to some of the surviving women.

Newman has written a lot of imaginative fiction and, absent the actual text of her forthcoming novel to criticize, Twitter took to out of context excerpts from her past work, particularly a post-apocalyptic novel called The Country of Ice Cream Star, which takes place in another peculative future. The name of the former state of Massachusetts is abbreviated to “Massa” in the novel’s futuristic lingo. Seems thin evidence for labeling an author “racist” but, as we know, Twitter is not a real place.

For anybody interested in books, reading before criticizing seems like a nice place to start. For anybody interested in culture and having more art in the world, not jumping to the worst assumptions about novels that have not even been released also seems like a useful modus operandi.

But some people who claim to love books would rather be angry than read.