A Walking Target: Dealing with Negative Book Reviews
“You must feel like you have a target on your back,” Van said to me as soon as he saw me in the hallway. I had just stepped out of an academic panel and was making my way to the next one on the schedule. The Association of Asian Studies was always hectic, with people dashing down narrow corridors, calling out to old friends, and trying to make new connections.
“What do you mean?” I asked, puzzled. Had I leaned back on wet paint or something? I twisted to try to look over my shoulder.
“Oh, you haven’t seen it yet?” Van looked uncomfortable.
“Seen what?”
I came to a halt right in front of him, my head cocked in bewilderment.
“Danly reviewed your book.”
“Really? Danly?” my heart soared.
Robert Lyons Danly was the author of In the Shade of Spring Leaves, a beautifully poignant biography of the writer Higuchi Ichiyō who died much too young. The biography was amplified by several of Ichiyō’s stories, elegantly rendered in English translation. No wonder it had won the National Book Award for translation in 1982.
Danly had been my polestar. I had set my own book, The Sound of the Wind: The Life and Works of Uno Chiyo, to follow in his wake.
“It’s not good,” Van said, avoiding my gaze.
“You mean, it’s a bad review?”
“Yes. What did you do to him?”
“What?”
“I mean, you must have done something to anger him.”
“I’ve never met him in my life!”
I began to search the furthest recesses of my memory. Had I ever had any interaction with Danly? And how would an unknown, untenured person like me even meet one of the leading lights of the Japan program at University of Michigan?
“He attacked you. Really, it’s practically ad hominem.”
I suddenly felt dizzy. My face flushed and my scalp tingled. I began to feel as if there just might be something on my back. I could feel the weight now, pressing in between my shoulders.
Van must have noticed my discomfort.
“Don’t worry about it. Look, your book is good. Who cares what Danly wrote?”
The next panels had started, and the corridors suddenly cleared. Van dashed into a meeting room, leaving me standing there alone with tunnel vision and ringing in my ears. I made my way back to my room in the hotel.
I can’t remember what happened next. It was 1994. I couldn’t just pull up a review on my smartphone or even on a hotel computer. I had to wait until I returned to my campus.
The wait was agonizing, even though Van and my other friends tried to cajole me. When I finally found the review in my university library, I was crestfallen. And once again my face flushed, scalp tingled, and I felt the target weighing on my back.
I must have written my former professor, Edward Seidensticker, about it. I have a letter from him dated December 12, 1994 in which he writes:
I hope that you do not worry hugely about the Danly review. It is the sort of thing anyone could say about anything, and of course his strictures against biographies of Japanese subjects presumably cover his own biography of Ichiyō. As to whether or not they are meant to cover mine of Kafū, I could scarcely care less. . . .
And when will the matter of your tenure be decided? I have a feeling, somehow, that your book will be adequate. Not at all dissimilar books are what got Danly…tenure…. I can think of plenty of publication records less substantial than yours that have sufficed. I wish you the best of luck, in any event.
Letters to the author from Edward Seidensticker
Hearing from Professor Seidensticker made me feel much better.
In the back of my mind, though, I couldn’t help but think that I deserved the negative review. Not that I believed my work was lacking. Rather, I thought the review was karma.
I was being paid back for a bad review I had written years ago.
In 1987 the Japan Quarterly ran my review of book that included a lively, highly readable translation of a 19th-century work along with an informative and carefully resourced introduction. It was a good book, but my review was inappropriately condescending and glib.
It was my first review.
I was a year out of graduate school and full of myself.
Besides, I was inspired by the snarky reviews I had been accustomed to reading in the Journal of Japanese Studies and elsewhere. In those journals, there were often wars of words among such luminaries as Donald Keene, Joyce Ackroyd, and others.
Of course, my mentor, Edward Seidensticker, was not one to pull punches either.
I thought a book review was supposed to be barbed.
And I went to town.
Given all the things I’ve saved over the years, all the letters and drafts of manuscripts, you would think I’d still have that review. I may. I just don’t feel like looking for it.
I’m ashamed of it. And I’m ashamed of myself for writing it.
The translator was rightfully aghast.
He wrote to the managing editor of the Japan Quarterly to complain.
I don’t have that letter, either, but I do remember he pointed out that despite all the petty criticisms I compiled, I actually seemed to like the book. And, he wasn’t wrong. I DID like it. I just didn’t allow myself to admit it. At least not effusively so.
“Who the hell is this Rebecca Copeland, anyway?” the translator asked in so many words. He wanted to know what qualifications I had to review his work.
It was a fair question.
The journal, though, stood behind me—and more so behind their decision to invite me to do the review—and refused the translator’s request for a redaction. They did not publish his grievance. And so he and I did not enter into the kind of public sparring I had witnessed between Keene, Ackroyd, and others.
That’s why when some of my peers suggested I take Danly to task for his overly critical review (he closed his comments by challenging me to “get a life”), I demurred.
It was karma.
I do not know what became of the translator. I always wished I had apologize to him.
I do know that I have made sure my graduate students know better than to follow in my footsteps. They all want to write book reviews—and editors are constantly asking graduate students and recent postdocs to do so—as they offer the opportunity to publish. (More established scholars often decline book reviews as they carry little weight when it comes to tenure decisions or promotions.)
It can be a dangerous proposition. Junior scholars can end up antagonizing a person who could conceivably head their hiring or fellowship committee or who might review their book manuscript for that coveted first book publication.
There is a silver lining here, though.
Laughing with friends over drinks at conferences, we regale each other with choice lines from our worst reviews. I mean, has anyone else been told to “get a life”?
Funny how we remember the worst, not the best.
Snark stays with you.
Bonding over our shared experiences, we venture to admit when our own reviews missed the mark. We were too green or too harried or just trying too hard to sound like a smart(ass) academic.
Seidensticker was right. Danly’s review did not end my career, and I still do admire his book, even assigning his translations in class from time to time.
I admit to enjoying a bit of schadenfreude, though, when a scholar I admire took Danly’s biography of Ichiyō to task recently for perhaps being a bit too inventive, too eager to “get a life.”
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