Once Upon a Review

by Lev Raphael

 

Lev Raphael (www.levraphael.com) published his first short story 22 years under auspicious circumstances: it won the Harvey Swados prize from Martha Foley of STORY fame and appeared in Redbook. After publishing dozens of short stories, he won a Lambda Literary Award in 1991 for his collection "Dancing on Tisha B'Av"; he is also a winner of the Reed Smith Fiction Prize and the International Quarterly Award for innovative prose. Widely anthologized in the U.S. and Britain, he has published books in many genres including mystery, literary criticism, psychology, and children's literature. He has read from his work across the U.S., in Canada, France, England and Israel, and his stories and essays appear on many university syllabi. He is the book critic for National Public Radio's The Todd Mundt Show and mysteries reviewer for the Detroit Free Press.

 

In John Updike's hilarious Bech at Bay, his satirical alter ego, Jewish novelist Henry Bech, goes on a murder spree in his mid-70s. What's fueling his criminal outbreak isn't senility, but decades of rage at the reviewers who trashed his work and, as he sees it, committed "virtual murder." Like Bech, most authors can remember stinging phrases from bad reviews with as much accuracy as raves, if not more so. I know I can. But the review that's had the most devastating impact on me was one that I didn't get.

Soon after my first book of short stories Dancing on Tisha B'Av was published in 1990, I heard the unbelievably wonderful news that it was going to be reviewed in the New York Times Book Review. I wasn't just thrilled as an author, but as a native New Yorker who had grown up believing that the Times was simply the best newspaper in the universe. Good or bad, a Times review was the ultimate imprimatur; until the Times recognized you, you didn't exist as a writer.

The report of this impending joy came on the rainy fall evening I was in New York to launch a reading tour for my book. A novelist friend who had blurbed my collection--and was introducing me at a Greenwich Village bookstore reading that evening--greeted me with an announcement: he'd just gotten a call from the Times asking him to review the book. I could hardly breathe out my reply: "And?"

He shrugged. "I said I knew you too well and it was a conflict of interest. They're asking someone else. The review should be out fairly soon." We both grinned a bit sheepishly.

It was only afterwards, long afterwards, that I wished I'd shouted, "Call them back! Say it was another Lev Raphael you were thinking of! Say you'll do the review!"

Fueled by the enthusiastic crowd at the book store, and by the news, my reading was a success and its glow stayed with me on the ensuing book tour and every week from that evening on as I opened up the Book Review waiting to see my name and the title of my book. I now know that if I were going to be reviewed, my agent and my publisher would have found out a week in advance, but to me, a beginner, the New York Times was as magnificently mysterious as the black obelisk in "2001: A Space Odyssey."

Weeks passed, then months. The reviews rolled in from across the country, even from the London Times, but nothing in New York. I pestered my editor. He had no idea what had gone wrong, and told me there was absolutely no way of finding out: "They're as secretive as the Vatican over there," he explained. My writer friends came up with various scenarios: the review had been killed because it was too negative, or because it was too positive; maybe it was badly written; maybe it was never re-assigned or written at all, and simply fell through the cracks after the first phone call. Most of them had not been reviewed in the Times either, but none had seen the hot promise of a review there turn cold.

Still, I didn't despair completely, because I kept seeing reviews of other books appear long after the books they discussed had been published. Surely there was hope for me?

But after nine months of fruitless waiting, I gave up. I felt as confounded as the builders of the Tower of Babel who had aimed too high. How could I have expected to be reviewed in the Times? Who did I think I was? It was supremely humiliating, too, to have told so many friends and colleagues that I was going to be reviewed in the Times. Why couldn't I have kept my mouth shut?

I got so depressed I eventually had to stop reading the Book Review. When the Sunday paper came, I would slip the Book Review out, tear it in half, and throw it in the garbage. Even that precaution didn't always work because it seemed to emit noxious fumes of shame, and I'd have to put it out with the trash in the garage so as to have more walls between us.

On the few occasions I made the mistake of even glancing inside the Book Review, perhaps vainly willing myself to be over the disappointment, I'd either find reviews of books by people I knew or advertisements for their work--and sometimes both. Every printed line seemed a face in a jeering crowd that mocked my failure. An essayist friend here in Michigan has coined a phrase for the long gray Michigan winters in which other people's lives seem brighter and more successful: he calls them "The Envy Months." For me, that season of overcast emotional skies became perpetual.

I went on to publish a novel, a book of essays and memoirs, a study of Edith Wharton's life and fiction, four co-authored books in psychology and education, and an academic mystery, but still the unanswerable question haunted me: why wasn't my first book reviewed? And more haunting still: what would have happened if the review had appeared? How would it have changed my stock in the publishing world?

Then in the fall of 1997, the unbelievable finally happened, and it was not a disappointment. One Monday afternoon I heard the thin ring of the fax, and approached warily. I'd had my share of bad news come over the fax line, and often when it rang I recalled Dorothy Parker's pungent question "What fresh hell is this?" But what unreeled from the fax this day was paradisal: a copy of Marilyn Stasio's "Crime" column from the coming week's New York Times Book Review, with a paragraph bracketed and a jubilant note from my agent.

I read it quietly. I read it several times. I tried to absorb the fact that here at last was a review of one of my books--and placed right after the review of Martha Grimes's new mystery! And it was not just any review. Stasio, the country's most important mystery reviewer, had given my second academic mystery, The Edith Wharton Murders, a flat-out rave that would make for great pull-quotes. I was finally on the map, and my exultation erupted in shouting, jumping up and down, a flurry of phone calls, a purchase of champagne, celebrating and then more celebrating. After seven years, I was determined to keep enjoying this triumph as long as possible. When the review actually appeared in the paper, I had it blown up and framed so that I could see it every time I went into my study to work.

And the results of this success were immediate. Library sales of the book doubled, it went into a second printing, and the publisher was bombarded with requests for review copies. Mystery writer friends told me they'd never been reviewed by Marilyn Stasio, even after a dozen books. As the glow faded, I realized how very fortunate I was to have been singled out this time. Because once was enough; even if I never got reviewed in the Times again, the review could be quoted for the rest of my writing career. As my partner wryly said, "They won't take it back."

Indeed they didn't, and a excerpted version ran when the paperback came out, and friends around the country reported they saw the book face out in literature sections as well as mystery. Did that review and its postscript eclipse the one I never got? I wish I could say yes, that the pain of my first major disappointment has been completely healed. I don't know if anything ever makes up for a lost opportunity early in your career.

But my career took an ironic turn in the mid-90s, and I'm now a book reviewer for the Detroit Free Press--with my own monthly mystery column--and a book critic for National Public Radio's The Todd Mundt Show. While neither venue has the clout of the Times, I find myself eagerly sought out as a reviewer. An editor at a major publishing house recently lamented to me that he used to expect at least a dozen reviews for a debut novel, but no longer, because review space is shrinking. And with mega-writers like Patricia Cornwell guaranteed wide media coverage, new writers have less access than ever before, thus every review they get is crucial.

Given my own experience, it's impossible for me not to wonder now and then--especially when I'm surveying a boxload of ARCS--if there are newly-published writers out there hoping and praying for me to review their work. Or even worse, feeling miserable because I didn't.