Vladimir Nabokov reaped nothing but scorn from the New York Times when his novel “Lolita” was published in the United States. (Wikimedia Commons via Bay City News)
Some distinguished authors over the course of sterling literary careers have nonetheless been slammed with scathing reviews from benighted critics who just didn’t go with the flow of their poetry or prose. One famous example is the invective hurled at Vladimir Nabokov in August 1958 upon the U.S. publication of his most famous novel “Lolita,” already raising eyebrows in France over its release there two years earlier. OK, the tale of creepy Humbert Humbert’s obsession with a 12-year-old girl may not be everybody’s favorite read, but did Nabokov really merit this New York Times rebuke from critic Orville Prescott, who acknowledged it was making news in the book world? “Unfortunately, it is bad news,” Prescott fumed. “There are two serious reasons why it isn’t worth any adult reader’s attentions. The first is that it is dull, dull, dull in a pretentious, florid and archly fatuous fashion. The second is that it is repulsive.”
If you think that double whammy was a bit harsh, consider this blistering summary Virginia Woolf deployed when sizing up fellow author James Joyce’s “Ulysses,” also a subject of great controversy at the time of its publication. In an August1922 diary entry, she labeled it “an ill-bred book” written by “a greasy undergraduate scratching his pimples.”
Famous authors dumping on other authors is not an uncommon phenomenon, to be sure. One has to laugh at Mark Twain, who took umbrage with Jane Austen for her most widely read novel, “Pride and Prejudice.” America’s most famous humorist snarled that every time he read it, “I want to dig her up and hit her over the skull with her own shin-bone.” (Which of course raises the question of why he was bothering to reread it at all?)
An earlier swipe, taken at Emily Bronte over her daring to publish “Wuthering Heights” (under the pen name Ellis Bell) took extra pains to rope her more famous sister into the doghouse as well. James Lorimer, writing in the North British Review in 1847, declared that “Here all the faults of Jane Eyre (by Charlotte Brontë) are magnified a thousand fold, and the only consolation which we have in reflecting upon it is that it will never be generally read.”
More contemporary criticism has shown no signs of mellowing. The legendary Michiko Kakutani, longtime book reviewer for the New York Times, had this to say in 2006 about Jonathan Franzen’s memoir “The Discomfort Zone”: “Mr. Franzen turns his unforgiving eye on himself and succeeds in giving us an odious self-portrait of the artist as a young jackass: petulant, pompous, obsessive, selfish and overwhelmingly self-absorbed.”
Both revered and feared for her formidable expertise as the Times’ literary critic during her 1983 to 2017 reign, Kakutani was herself the butt of this humorous little ditty from writer Annie Lamott, who submitted it to the online magazine Salon in 2002 while admitting that she, too, cowered at thought of being subjected to Kakutani’s piercing appraisals. “Michiko, you bitchiko, you make us all so twitchiko!”
In the pipeline: You have to give it to prolific, prize-winning novelist Barbara Kingsolver. She usually comes up with a carefully constructed, realistic framework to hang her latest literary handiwork on. For example, 1998’s “The Poisonwood Bible” revolved around a missionary family who moved to the Belgian Congo in the midst of that country’s political upheavals of the 1960s, with each section narrated in the instantly recognizable individual voices of the mother and her four daughters. “Flight Behavior,” from 2012, took a young Appalachian housewife’s startling discovery of millions of monarch butterflies flitting about in her valley and turned it into a clarion call about the imminent dangers of global climate change. The co-recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2022, “Demon Copperhead,” was an unabashed recounting of the trials and ultimate triumph of the Charles Dickens character David Copperfield, reset, also in modern Appalachia, and drenched in the contemporary issues of poverty, class and social clashes and the opioid crisis. Now comes her latest novel “Partita” (HarperCollins, $35, 400 pages), which has an Oct. 6 release. The bold hook: It takes its title from the Baroque musical construct of J.S. Bach’s time that consists of a series of dance pieces with a recurring theme. Kingsolver’s plot weaves around a former music conservatory student stunned to receive a call from a former betrayer requesting a reunion; each section’s title mirrors a movement from a partita (Allemande, Fugue, Toccata, etc.), with seven numbered preludes connecting them. Of the book’s genesis, Kingsolver says through her publisher: “This novel started small. It would be about a young musician, I thought; a little love story. But it kept expanding as I wrote, opening and closing around itself like a set of nested boxes. ‘Partita’ is a story of a brief, passionate, life-changing affair, contained inside a bigger love story, all wrapped up in what might be the greatest romance of all: our eternal human longing for art and beauty.”
It’s a mystery – and a history: Whodunit fans who like stories served up with a twist from times past have a treat in store, courtesy of the Bay Area Book Festival’s “History and Mystery Author Panel” at 6:30 p.m. Sept. 10 at the Mechanics’ Institute in downtown San Francisco. Moderated by award-winning Bay Area author Gigi Pandian, creator of three different mystery series (the Accidental Alchemist, the Secret Staircase and the Jaya Jones Treasure Hunt mysteries), the panel features fellow crime writers Cara Black, Rob Osler and Naomi Hirahara. San Francisco author Black, known for her Parisian P.I. Aimée Leduc series (21 books so far!) has a new novel out set in post-war France called “Huguette” that features a young pregnant woman on the run who gets an important assist from one Claude Leduc, who turns out to be Aimée’s grandfather. Osler, author of the Harriet Morrow Investigates series, won the Left Coast Crime award for best historical novel for “The Case of the Missing Maid.” His second offering in the series that features the first female detective in Chicago in 1898 is “The Case of the Murdered Muckraker,” published in January. Edgar Award-winner Hirahara’s “Clark and Division,” her first historical mystery, features a Japanese American family that moves to Chicago after their release from the Manzanar wartime internment camp in California. She followed that up with her second A Japantown Mystery novel, “Evergreen,” and the third in the series, “Crown City,” published in February. Tickets for the panel, which is preceded by a 5:30 p.m. cocktail hour, are $10-$20, plus a small fee. They are available at milibrary.org.
Hooked on Books is a monthly column by Sue Gilmore on literary buzz and upcoming book events. Look for it on the last Thursday of the month.