Just the Facts Ma'am

Okay, I'm in a little bit of a rant-y mood, but that's what blogs are for, right? Or so they tell me. I'm still on the subject of reviewers whose reviews reveal more about themselves and their own prejudices than about the book they're covering, but this time I'm venting at the so-called professional reviewers who write for accredited publications -- literary review -- and couldn't find their ass with both hands, even if they were looking in a three-way mirror in a Saks Fifth Avenue dressing room. If you're assigned a work of historical fiction to review, and history was never your best subject in school, don't damn the plot and the writer for including something you think is historically inaccurate unless you're sure of your facts. Otherwise you mislead the reader into thinking the writer (who spent months, if not years, of his or her life researching, writing, and revising the novel), hasn't a clue, or is rewriting history. I'm not talking about something egregious like sticking a war into the wrong century, which certainly bears critical mention and a caveat emptor that if something so obvious is wrong, who knows what else might be erronious; I'm talking about knowing whether the writer is right or wrong vis-a-vis the manners and mores, the sensibilities, the little touches that enhance the novel with the appropriate atmosphere and tone.

If this complaint seems like the opposite of my beef with literal Linear B-guy, in a way, it's approaching the same issue from either side. I've been referring to a genre called HISTORICAL FICTION. Literal Linear-B guy should remember that he's read a novel. FICTION, Mister. OF COURSE the novelist won't literally take out her stylus and scratch the story onto clay tablets in a long-dead language. In the contract between writers and readers, we tell the story and the readers supply their imaginations and accept that we're all PRETENDING that -- in the case of my book THE MEMOIRS OF HELEN OF TROY, the story wasn't written in English in the here and now. Just like th audience accepts that the man on stage playing Hamlet isn't REALLY going to kill the actor playing Polonius.

The reviewers who think the writer is inventing history in his or her novel, should remember that the book they read is HISTORICAL fiction and, unless there are grievous factual errors and the reviewer is certain of them, the reviewer should give the author the benefit of the doubt that they might actually know what they're talking about.

It boggles the mind.

What do you guys think?