We’re not haters here. Book Marks is a benevolent oracle, existing only to enlighten. All we want is to spread the gospel of high quality literary criticism so that our readers can find the books they’ll love.
Sure, we house negative reviews alongside all others, because our church is a broad one and because the people demand it, dammit, but the warm spotlight of our favor shines predominantly on the positive. We like to look for the good in every book.
However, we also realize that in this savage Trumpian era of ours, there are times when the knives must come out. Every modern dystopia needs a Purge: one day of the year when the inmates can take over the asylum and the streets can be slickened with the blood, or in this case the ink, of the sacrificed so that the rest of us may move more smoothly through the world. It’s not pleasant, but then neither is late-stage capitalism.
As this annus horribilis draws to a close, we look back on fifteen of 2017’s most scathing reviews, and the books they condemned to be cast into the volcano/stoned by Bennington villagers/locked up inside the Wicker Man for the good of the many.
N.B. Each one of these books also received numerous glowing reviews (except Ivanka’s), and each deserves to be considered within the context of the larger critical conversation that happened around it (especially Ivanka’s). Literature, like all art, is subjective, and one reviewer’s pan, no matter how savagely erudite, should never condemn a book to the funeral pyre (except Ivanka’s. Seriously, Ivanka. Stop this. It’s not too late for you). All that is to say, we hope you treat these little fires as beacons, and move toward the flames for a closer look.
As Eagles frontman Don Henley once sang, “sometimes you get the best light from a burning bridge.”
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Women Who Work by Ivanka Trump
“It’s a sign of how perilous and debased American life has become that people are putting faith in Ivanka Trump, creator of a line of mediocre synthetic workwear, to head off fascism … Ivanka makes [Sheryl] Sandberg look like Rosa Luxemburg … As vapid as Women Who Work is—and it is really vapid—there is a subtle political current running through it, one that helps explain how the socially liberal Ivanka can work for her misogynist ogre of a father. Beneath the inspirational quotes from Oprah and the Dalai Lama and the you-go-girl cheerleading, the message of Women Who Work is that people get what they deserve … Her refusal to acknowledge any contradiction between her feminism, however superficial it is, and her father’s reactionary politics almost feels like gaslighting.”
–Michelle Goldberg (Slate)
Uncommon Type by Tom Hanks
“It’s true that the bulk of these seventeen—seventeen!—stories sound like Tom Hanks movies. Or rather, they are stories that could have been written by an alien whose only exposure to the planet earth is through Tom Hanks movies … This book-shaped object made of cardboard and paper was never going to be a book exactly. It is a gift, something that parents give to their college-bound children as revenge for making themselves difficult to understand … in four hundred pages, there’s hardly even a hint of conflict or a suggestion that American life is anything less than a holiday where everyone rides Schwinn bikes, leaves the immigration office to go bowling, and has a dog named Biscuit. If there’s anything good to observe about Uncommon Type, it’s that Hanks may have accidently revived a long-lost literary form: the idyll, as practiced by Goethe, placid and innocuous pastorals that invoke ornate symbolism … The impregnable constellation we call ‘Tom Hanks,’ with its observations on what life is like a box of, can give no real offense, can do us no lasting harm. But Uncommon Type is pushing it, man, a collection of clichés that only deserves clichés in return.”
–J. W. McCormack (The Baffler)
Artemis by Andy Weir
“The results are so clunky, Watney himself couldn’t jerry-rig them into functioning. The book reads like the first draft of a space-set crime thriller that has no clue how women think…Time and again, Jazz comes across less like a smart and resourceful woman, and more like Mark Watney’s been beamed into the body of a twentysomething Muslim woman. And then given a minor lobotomy … As it turns out, there was a very good reason for The Martian to be about someone who is literally the only person on the planet: Weir isn’t very good at creating any believable human interaction, or even characterization, above all when it involves someone the slightest bit different from his original dorky but genial white guy protagonist. It’s not a shock the most plausible character in Artemis is a socially clueless scientist guy with no sense of how other people think or behave. Were that gentleman to try his hand at writing a lunar-based crime novel, he’d likely come up with something close to this misbegotten story in which he sort-of exists.”
–Alex McLevy (The AV Club)
Into the Water by Paula Hawkins
“Into the Water isn’t an impressive book. Its tone is uniformly lugubrious and maudlin, and Hawkins’ characters seldom rise to the level of two dimensions, let alone three. Their depth is telegraphed by the way they brood over their failings while staring into the dark waters, and they seem to be constantly exclaiming, ‘You don’t understand what I’ve done!’ Hawkins makes liberal use of coy suspense-building devices, such as having people think in vague terms about an important event or object without describing it clearly enough to give away later plot developments. Yet few readers will have difficulty figuring out who’s guilty of what well before Hawkins delivers the obligatory twists.”
–Laura Miller (Slate)
The Dinner Party by Joshua Ferris
“Put a one-dimensional jerk at the center of a story and it dies on the page. The Dinner Party is a parade of such jerks who march by one by one, usually onto a punishment neatly arranged to show just how bad their author knows them to be. Occasionally he spares them, a testament to the mercies of their virtuous and similarly one-dimensional wives … The stories in The Dinner Party that don’t take a preposterous turn tend instead to pile on the clichés. This might work if the clichés were ironized or if the characters had inner lives, but the stock scenarios are deployed in earnest, and inside the characters’ heads we find bundles of pat insecurities … In short, they’re charmless, which is the worst way to be an asshole. John Cheever is rolling in his grave.”
–Christian Lorentzen (Vulture)
Heather, The Totality by Matthew Weiner
“Spanning decades within a little more than 100 pages, it tells a basic story in an increasingly perilous context. It intends to grab you, hold you, and never let you go—but it never really does … Working in such a small storytelling space and with so many swirling elements, there’s precious little room for error here. This proves untenable. Weiner’s drawing of Bobby, for starters, is offensively off-base: The book indulgently examines his homicidal nature with doses of poverty porn, yet he’s merely used to establish contrasts of class and stability. Further, the breakdown of the Breakstone marriage, which takes up most of the action, is chronicled without distinctiveness. That these stories are paralleled throughout is an almost jarringly cynical choice. Weiner’s style is neither comic nor empathic nor particularly insightful; the narrative plods forward with simplistic characterizations that grow tiresome, and flabby sentences mistaken as artfully unformed … In its empty cynicism, there’s simply too little to feel or to contemplate; in more ways than one, Heather, the Totality marks a pretty thin debut.”
–David Canfield (Entertainment Weekly)
Bed-Stuy is Burning by Brian Platzer
“To say that Bed-Stuy Is Burning is ambitious would be like saying Taylor Swift is popular. Platzer takes on topics as big as God, money, parenthood, marriage, gentrification and police violence. But this level of ambition can leave a story unfocused, or worse, focused in the wrong direction … What black characters we do encounter never fully emerge past their plainly drawn biographical sketches … The descriptions of nonwhite characters range from lazy and stereotypical (‘She was Asian and very skinny’) to outright offensive (‘The man was Indian. Dot not feather,’ the extortionist notes). Worse than that is how many characters go without description. These are the black residents of Bed-Stuy … The most generous reading of Bed-Stuy Is Burning takes its inadequate interest in its black characters as a larger comment on the way these kinds of stories typically sideline black people’s narratives. But the earnestness with which the white characters are portrayed frustrates that generosity … this is ultimately a novel about black people happening to white people.”
–Mychal Denzel Smith (The New York Times Book Review)
The Stranger in the Woods by Michael Finkel
“The intent seems to be to elevate Knight by association into a flawed saint of solitude. But artlessly surrounding him with canonical figures (‘He looked a bit like the Russian writer Leo Tolstoy’) and hoping for the best isn’t enough to do the trick. One wants the connections to be explored rather than simply raised. More important, you want to be brought, somehow, into the inner reality of Knight’s experience … more often he’s uncomfortably playing to Finkel’s eagerness for profundity or even more uncomfortably fending it off … Next to the great fictional solitaries and rejecters of the world—Crusoe, Bartleby, Boo Radley, Kafka’s Hunger Artist, half of Conrad’s protagonists—Finkel’s errant knight cuts a dim figure. There’s no reason to hold that against him. Oblivion appears to have been what he sincerely craved (he eventually sent Finkel packing), and it’s probably what he best deserves.”
–James Lasdun (The Guardian)
Autumn by Karl One Knausgaard
“It’s an impressively cynical hustle, a publishing Ponzi scheme designed to attract interest to a new series in the narrowing interval that the Norwegian’s star is in ascendance. In fairness, something as thin as Autumn requires such machinations … The author has always been an heir to the Romantics, but here he has dropped the bad-boy Byronic posturing of My Struggle in favor of gaseous Wordsworthian odes. The entries are either maudlin (to see porpoises swim is to feel that ‘they are touching you, as if you have thereby been chosen’) or jejune (churches, you will be amazed to read, ‘represented another level of reality, the divine’).”
–Sam Sacks (The Wall Street Journal)
The Schooldays of Jesus by J. M. Coetzee
“The Coetzeean landscape is eerily stripped down, often physically rudimentary, like a vista by De Chirico: a featureless arena in which colossal philosophical questions cast long shadows. In The Schooldays of Jesus, however, the scenery is so flimsily assembled that it could come straight from Ikea … In spite of its declared suspicion of Platonic idealism, the spirit of Plato, rather than the anarchic Jesus with his boundary-pushing parables, hovers over this book. Plato was famously dismissive of the seductive properties of mimetic literature, which urge us to make an imaginative identification with a fictional world. He would have agreed without hesitation that novels are for babies. Philosophy is for adults. On the evidence of this austere, barely realised mise-en-scène, it is difficult not to feel that Coetzee, like Plato, is no longer much interested in the accidents of our quotidian human world, the shadows on the cave wall. He is after essence alone, the pure, ungraspable fire. In his fidelity to ideas, to telling rather than showing, to instructing rather than seducing us, he does not actually write fiction any more. The Schooldays of Jesus, philosophically dense as it is, is parched, relentlessly adult fare—rather like eating endless bread and bean paste.”
–Elizabeth Lowry (The Guardian)
Mrs. Fletcher by Tom Perrotta
“Perrotta is an affectionate comic writer, but to his own detriment, he has mastered the art of suburban titillation—and he rests on it. Although lusty subjects thrum through this novel, they’re often blanched. The effect can feel like reading the essays of Camille Paglia printed on slices of Wonder Bread … In the libidinous groves of academe, Brendan finds his romantic thrusts blunted by women more sophisticated, enlightened and aggressive than his pliant high school sweetheart. And yet his story never develops the psychological depth or satiric edge to make these scenes sufficiently moving, witty or arresting … Without a more discerning narrative voice and a greater willingness to explore the complexity of desire, there’s nothing to disturb the comfortable patter of Mrs. Fletcher. The novel hovers awkwardly between farce and psychological realism. Its neat checklist of sexual experiences—Lesbians! MILFs! Three-ways!—starts to feel like a weird session of Wednesday night bingo.”
–Ron Charles (The Washington Post)
What Happened by Hillary Rodham Clinton
“What Happened suffers from stilted prose and insipid inspirational quotes, but that is par for the course for a political memoir. The real problem with What Happened is that it is not the book it needed to be. It spends more time on descriptions of Clinton’s various post-election coping strategies, which include chardonnay and ‘alternative nostril breathing,’ than it does on her campaign decisions in the Midwest. It is written for her fans, in other words, and not for those who want real answers about her campaign, and who worry that the Democratic Party is learning the wrong lessons from the 2016 debacle … In What Happened, good fought evil, and evil won. It is a fairy tale. The great tragedy is that Clinton seems to think it is true … Hillary Clinton must have her scapegoat. Bernie Sanders did this, Bernie Sanders did that. Above all, Bernie Sanders had the audacity to be mad about American inequality.”
–Sarah Jones (The New Republic)
Sleeping Beauties by Stephen King and Owen King
“It too has a lot of characters, but very few of them spring to life, and many of them seem repetitive. Without speculating on what the father-son writing process was like, it feels as though some kind of politesse kept this 700-page book from being usefully tightened … Sleeping Beauties will inevitably wind up on the screen somehow. Whoever adapts it will have to beef up the characters and deflect attention from the nonthrilling main theme … What you may well come away thinking is: meh. For a book about resetting gender stereotypes, this one clings surprisingly tightly to them. Women are healers (though there are some tough customers here, thanks to the cast of law enforcers and prison inmates); men are either warriors or jerks who deserve to die. Everyone who survives this story is a little nicer by the time it’s over, but the basics still apply. And for a book that separates the sexes, the sudden impossibility of heterosexual sex goes strangely unnoticed … Stephen King didn’t become Stephen King by waffling this way.”
–Janet Maslin (The New York Times)
The Red-Haired Woman by Orhan Pamuk
“Pamuk’s chief handicap as a novelist has always been his eager didacticism, his spotlighting of all the allusions and symbols. Here there are symbolic stars, symbolic books, symbolic women, intercut with loads of uselessly deep musings about the firmament. To be insistently metaphorical is one thing; to be insistently metaphorical while repeatedly explaining those metaphors is something else. Pamuk is forever afraid his reader isn’t paying attention. The marshaling of myth can make for dynamic storytelling, but Pamuk is too frequently a stranger to the potency of nuance, to the furtive unfoldings of character and plot. The real trouble here is the translator’s prose. Ekin Oklap’s incessant reliance on dead language does great injury to Pamuk’s already damaged tale … What you’ll have to decide is whether Pamuk has penned the Sophoclean tragedy he aimed for or just another Turkish melodrama.”
–William Giraldi (The Washington Post)
The Once and Future Liberal by Mark Lilla
“[Lilla] says his aim is to unify today’s fractured liberals around an agenda ’emphasizing what we all share and owe one another as citizens, not what differentiates us.’ Unfortunately, he does this in a way guaranteed to alienate vast swaths of his audience, and to deepen left-of-center divisions. Rather than engage in good faith with movements like Black Lives Matter, Lilla chooses to mock them, reserving a particularly meanspirited sneer for today’s campus left … All too often Lilla opts for attitude over substance. Though he calls for liberals to adopt ‘a coldly realistic view of how we live now,’ he spends much of his book jeering from afar at millennial ‘social justice warriors,’ whose ‘resentful, disuniting rhetoric’ supposedly destroyed a once-great liberal tradition … Lilla’s labels can be slippery; he often conflates liberals, leftists and Democrats. By contrast he takes a rather narrow view of ‘identity politics’ as something practiced mainly by left-wing movements and not, say, by the Republican Party … The Once and Future Liberal is a missed opportunity of the highest order, trolling disguised as erudition.”
–Beverly Gage (The New York Times Book Review)
