A book to avoid

Is it so desirable to have your book reviewed in the NYT that it hardly matters what the reviewer writes? The flip side of this Q is – why review a book in the Times of a fairly unknown author if you can find absolutely no redeeming value in the work?

There are five novels reviewed in the Books in Brief section of the NYTBR. That’s not bad – each novel gets about half a column of text. One of the books is “Something Rising” by Haven Kimmel. I had read, no yawned my way through, her first book, a memoir called “A Girl Named Zippy.” I kind of like memoirs, and I wanted to see if this one, about a very ordinary life of a girl in the Midwest, could provide some nice zip to a lazy afternoon. It could not. It was an excruciatingly boring book. Possibly Kimmel thought that she could pull out an interesting text out of the dullness of her life (“my life is so ordinary! let me tell you all the ways in which nothing significant can happen on a daily basis!”), but really, she failed. I’m sure people bought the book because it had a very sweet picture of a little girl – the type that usually appears on the cover of a book about overcoming tragic circumstances. Perversely, you grow resentful that chapter after chapter nothing bad happens.

This would not be an author primed for a return appearance in the NYTBR. And yet there she is today, with her new book under scrutiny. You would think, then, that she wrote something exceptional, but no! The reviewer writes:

The father-daughter competition is effective and unusual, but is insufficient to redeem this meandering novel. Of no help are occasional clunky sentences, their meanings elusive, their locutions dubious. Fine books have come from close study of pool hall life. ‘Something Rising’ isn’t one of them.

Harsh words! Someone was not happy to be reviewing this book. If Kimmel didn’t have any rough bumps in the road during her childhood, she’s getting them now.