Fake political correctness in Amazon.com’s “Editorial Review” section

Let me say off the top that I like Amazon.com.  Even as a huge corporate entity, they provide a fairly even playing ground for small literary fiction presses.  They are even more democratic in this regard than many independent bookstores. But today I have some criticisms to make regarding their practices of posting “Editorial Reviews.” These are the unsigned reviews that appear at the top of the review section and that are the most visible.  Amazon has an agreement with Publishers Weekly, Booklist and Library Journal to post their reviews in this section. Publishers cannot opt to replace these reviews with others from equally respectable review publications. Amazon claims they  are under contract to post reviews and do not have a choice in the matter.

Midwest Book Review of Trixie

If you think they’re just a piece of meat for you to ogle, you’re doing it wrong. “Trixie” follows one stripper as she faces her life and author Victoria N. Alexander hopes to teach readers a little something about life and where it’s going, and why some women go down paths others may feel degrading. With plenty of food for thought, “Trixie” is a fine pick and will entertain as it enlightens and is highly recommended. See more reviews

Trixie, review by Kirkus

In her new novel, Trixie, Victoria N. Alexander (Naked Singularity, 2003, etc.) looks at strip clubs and the women who work in them. A pale waif with dark hair, Trixie is a stripper at the Girlie Playhouse. The narrator Pixie is also a dancer who works with Trixie and whose stripper-mother was killed. Set up as a Daisy Miller-like figure, Trixie meets equally tragic results. And thus the novel becomes Pixie’s retelling of how Trixie gets involved with Max, and of how she meets her untimely death, with

How to write a book review

I’m the editor at an online literary fiction review called Dactyl Review. We  receive a lot of  emails asking  for some general pointers for writing reviews.  Most requests have come from conscientious readers who want to post their first review on Amazon.com, GoodReads or LibraryThing.  As a supporter of literature, I liked to help the reviewing world do a good job, on Dactyl Review and elsewhere.  So here’s some guidance that (I hope) will help you write the kind of review that will be useful to readers and writers alike, no matter what you think of the book.

Candy Girl by Diablo Cody

In response to a reader who asked me to compare my novel, Trixie, to Diablo Cody’s Candy Girl: A Year in the Life of an Unlikely Stripper, I looked it up. This is what I found.

There is a long tradition of confessional “novels” about stripping by Harvard grads, clever journalists, med students, and, as Cody calls herself, otherwise “unlikely strippers.” In addition to these confessional, somewhat fictionalized memoirs–for they cannot be called novels–there is also a slew of scholarly works on the topic (for example Stripped: Inside the Lives of Exotic Dancers by Bernadette Barton), also undertaken by bright, clever, and adventurous women who probably didn’t mind the “research” work. Apparently, Cody’s smart-girl type is more likely to try stripping than she wants us to think.

Review of Yellow Dog by Martin Amis

“Male violence did it.” Martin Amis has a bit of a reputation for making sweeping, declarative statements like this one that ends the first paragraph of Yellow Dog. I’ve read all of Amis’ books except Pregnant Window and Koba the Dread (on my list, next) and I’m very familiar with the Amis conception of gender.  I can make sweeping generalizations about his Men and his Women.

Death and Sex

Death and sex are literature’s subjects, not science’s. What we care most about is what these subjects mean to us—not what they, in fact, are. When scientists attempt to enlighten us on these matters, they often fall to recounting certain metabolic processes, generally missing the point, while we readers sigh or snicker, wondering if the researcher has any experience out of the lab. This is not the case with Death and Sex by Tyler Volk and Dorion Sagan. See my review in New York Journal of Books.

Philip Roth: The Copulation of Clichés

Marty Shepard, blogging for The Permanent Press, reports that the NY Times has officially admitted to what we have long suspected. The Book Review is primarily interested in non-fiction. It exists for the purposes of information dissemination, not the promotion of literature.  ”The most compelling ideas tend to be in the non-fiction world,” says Managing Editor, Bill Keller. “Because we are a newspaper, we should be more skewed toward non-fiction.” Hence if the Times is to review a book it is more of a commitment to  giving out product information that helps the consumer decide “what to buy at the airport.”  And, Keller adds, as if he hadn’t said enough already, “Of course, some fiction needs to be done. We’ll do the new Updike, the new Roth. But there are not a lot of them, it seems to me.”

Was anyone wondering how Philip Roth was able to publish his latest appallingly bad novel, The Humbling? Well now you know.  See my review in the New York Journal of Books.

Death with Interruptions by Jose Saramago

As a reviewer, there are two things you’ll want to know about me before bothering to read further. I only like literary fiction, and I only like literary fiction that’s a bit “difficult,” in one way or another, style or theme, preferably both.

A good theme for me might include controversial social issues, human paradoxes, ethical puzzles– problems to which there are no easy solutions. The concerns of unmarried 32-year-old woman and the plight of a middle-aged man whose affair is petering out are not real “problems,” in my view, nor is the temporary loss of faith in God or humanity.

Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy

With all books, there is a difference between author and narrator. Sometimes the difference is slight, sometimes great. Omniscient narrators tend to reflect the author’s stance about the story more than, say, first-person narrators, which often strike poses very unlike the authors’, excepting the case of confessional “fiction” (which is not actually fictional). At first I thought Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West (Modern Library)‘s narrator spoke without irony, without distance being injected between his voice and the author’s feelings about the story. As I read on, I felt more and more an ironic distance between McCarthy and the narrator. I felt as if

The Names by Don DeLillo

DeLillo surely kept a journal while living in Athens and visiting various places in the Middle East and India. He noted scenes, described the climate and vegetation, philosophized on the locals then published his journal as the novel, The Names, after he added a “plot” about a cult that murderers people for the completely uninteresting reason that their initials match the initials of the place name in which they are murdered. DeLillo also added the equally uninteresting denouement in which it is

The House of Meetings by Martin Amis

The House of Meetings is a narrative delivered as a long letter from an unnamed narrator, an 86-year-old Russian man, to his step-daughter Venus, living in Chicago. He is in the midst of traveling back home after many years in the U.S. The point of his journey is to revisit a work camp in the Artic where he had been held prisoner and slave laborer in the 40s and 50s. Particularly, he wants to visit the “house of meetings,” where, late in the labor camp era, the Soviets had begun allowing some prisoners to meet briefly with their wives. The narrator’s brother, Lev, with whom he shared most of his prison years, had been able to meet with his wife Zoya there on one occasion. Something occurred during the meeting that changed Lev’s life for the worse, and

The Sea by John Banville

Don’t read this review of The Sea if you don’t want to ruin the surprise ending because I’m going to give part of it away. If you’re at all like me, you may find it preferable to know, to know more than what the jacket cover reveals, that there was a death in the narrator’s childhood that he revisits in memory as an old man. At the end of the book the narrator relates the sudden double death of twin children. And he reveals the true identity of Miss V, their former

Black Dogs by Ian McEwan

Black Dogs: A Novel is a skillfully written novel on an interesting and profound topic. McEwan does a wonderful job describing June, an eccentric old woman, the narrator’s mother-in-law. He also handles what could be a very artificial story device in a reasonably natural way. The idea of the book is to explore the conflicts between mystical thinking and rationality, and the narrator is interviewing and writing a memoir on his mother-in-law and father-in-law who represent those views respectively. This passage exemplifies well McEwan’s sensitivity and talent as a writer;

Walk On, Bright Boy by Charles Davis

Set in Medieval Spain, Walk On, Bright Boy is story of a boy’s first confrontation with political and religious corruption strives less for historical accuracy than for universal applicability. Written with lovely economy and sensitivity, it is reminiscent of a fable or of a young adult coming-of-age tale. At the same time, however, it is also complex in its exploration of human foibles and philosophies.