JK Rowling and the deathly book review – it’s got fine company

Let’s just say the two have differences of opinion when it comes to the questions of Scottish independence and gender identity/self-ID: it’s hardly surprising that Rowling was going to weigh in. Like Taylor Swift, the Harry Potter creatrix has no need for the likes of us here at a newspaper and published her 2,800-word screed on her own website.

“The only time Sturgeon makes what I think is supposed to be a joke is when she says of a teenage boyfriend, ‘His nickname was Sparky (he wasn’t an aspiring electrician).’”

You get the idea. No reader who knows anything of the pair’s history is going to be startled by Rowling’s take on the former first minister; this is personal, no doubt about it.

The bad review is an art form. Who can forget James Wood claiming that Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled “invented its own category of badness”?

So to satisfy your craving for bile, please enjoy our choices of some tip-top pastings from across the ages.

A couple of months ago, novelist and critic Tom Crewe caused a stir with his review of Ocean Vuong’s latest, The Emperor of Gladness, in the London Review of Books. Vuong’s admirers include Oprah Winfrey, but Crewe’s not on that train.

“Vuong has a genius for the simile or image that baffles, that is in essence a non sequitur, or series of non sequiturs:

‘About 70 ... with mined-out blue eyes, she has the stare of someone who had gone beyond where she needed to go but kept walking anyway ...

‘The crows floated over the field’s wrinkled air ... their shadows swooping over the land like things falling from the sky.’

“If this wasn’t enough, the book is intolerably busy with vatic, empty utterances of this sort:

‘Who will be lost in ourselves? A story, after all, is a kind of swallowing. To open a mouth, in speech, is to leave only the bones, which remain untold.’

“This language is not poetic, but ridiculous, sententious, blinded by self-love and pirouetting over a chasm.”

Then there was The Observer’s own Rachel Cooke, refusing to play her cards close to her chest when it came to Prince Harry’s memoir, Spare:

“What kind of person insists on an air-clearing meeting with their father on the day of his father’s funeral? A myopic, self-obsessed, non-empathic kind of person, I would say. Exactly the same kind of person, in fact, who would talk about reconciliation in the same breath as they publicly slag off their family. Such things are made all the more jarring by the yawning gap between the way Harry speaks and the way his ghost, JR Moehringer, writes …

“I suppose he wishes he were Ben Lerner, or some other hip young literary American gunslinger, rather than having to channel a raging Sloane who must look up the word compere in a dictionary when his brother asks him to be one at his wedding and whose epigraph from Faulkner – ‘The past is never dead. It’s not even past’ – he found on brainyquote.com.

“Sometimes, Moehringer writes. Like this. In short sentences. Bang. Bang-bang. At other times, it’s as if he’s been at Harry’s weed or something…

“So here we are. Penguin Random House has helped him out and we can only hope he’s happy with his end of the deal, a pact more Faustian by far than anything his father or brother have ever signed.”

Meanwhile, Parul Sehgal, writing in the New York Times, laid into Kristen Roupenian, who shot to viral fame with Cat Person, a story published in the New Yorker in 2017 in the thick of #MeToo; her collection of stories, You Know You Want This, appeared two years later.

Sehgal was not a fan. “This is a dull, needy book. The desire to seem shocking – as opposed to a curiosity about thresholds physical and ethical – tends to produce provocation of a very plaintive sort.

“Ellie in Biter bites. Ted in The Good Guy needs to fantasise about stabbing women to sexually perform. Laura in The Matchbox Sign imagines that her body is crawling with parasites – and her boyfriend participates in the fantasy. These characters remain their pathologies; the curtain falls on them before we can ever ask: now what?

“There’s none of the simmer of Cat Person or its attention to language in the rest of these stories. Roupenian will work a metaphor until it screams. On a walk in the woods: ‘The vaginal lips of a pink lady’s slipper peep out from behind some bushes; a rubber shred of burst balloon, studded by a plump red navel knot, dangles from a tree branch, and the corpse of a crushed mushroom gleams sad and cold and pale.’

“I might stay indoors for the rest of my life.”

Let’s also have Peter Kemp, a world-class trouncer, going after Donna Tartt in the Sunday Times when she published The Goldfinch in 2013.

“Outdoing even The Little Friend, famously a decade in the writing, The Goldfinch has taken 11 years to appear. These epic gestations are attributed by awed Tartt admirers and devotees of websites such as Donna Tartt Shrine to uncompromising perfectionism. ‘It’s because of perfectionism that man walked on the moon and painted the Sistine Chapel, OK? Perfectionism is good,’ she has stressed. But it’s hard to spot much of it in this ineptly put-together book …

“Tartt’s fictional world has always been one of opposing extremes: preciousness and sensationalism, the rarefied coterie of students in The Secret History and the bloody violence they get mired in, the gracefully declining aristocratic southern family in The Little Friend and the near-feral trailer trash around them. In this novel, creepy lowlifes – hitmen, conmen, fakers – are opposed to beglamoured art lovers. Fervent pages pay throbbingly emotional tribute to the latter and art’s power to soar above death and corruption.

“But no amount of straining for high-flown uplift can disguise the fact that The Goldfinch is a turkey.”

And, finally, just a reminder that time catches up with us critics. Here’s HL Mencken on The Great Gatsby in the Chicago Daily Tribune in 1925.

“Scott Fitzgerald’s new novel, The Great Gatsby, is in form no more than a glorified anecdote, and not too probable at that.  The scene is the Long Island that hangs precariously on the edges of the New York City trash dumps – the Long Island of the gaudy villas and bawdy house parties. The theme is the old one of a romantic and preposterous love – the ancient fidelis ad urnam motif reduced to a macabre humour. The principal personage is a bounder typical of those parts – a fellow who seems to know every one and yet remains unknown to all – a young man with a great deal of mysterious money, the tastes of a movie actor and, under it all, the simple sentimentality of a somewhat sclerotic fat woman. This clown Fitzgerald rushes to his death in nine short chapters. The other performers in the Totentons are of a like, or even worse, quality…”

“Fitzgerald’s latest a dud,” ran the headline in the New York World.

Remember: you can always think for yourself.

Photographs by PA Images/Alamy Stock; Roberto Ricciuti/Getty Images