Opinion Don’t press send

One powerful, not entirely worthy motive for encouraging writers to answer their critics is that it makes for excellent theatre. Writers who reply to reviews are invariably angry. (The flattered, happy ones keep their satisfaction to themselves.) An angry writer’s tirade gives the lie to the surface placidity of literary life and reveals the passionate enmities that roil beneath. Think of Martin Amis’s response to Tibor Fischer’s attack on his novel Yellow Dog: “Tibor Fischer is a creep and a wretch. Oh yeah: and a fat-arse.” Or Alain de Botton’s foot-stamping at Caleb Crain’s review of his book, The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work: “I will hate you till the day I die and wish you nothing but ill will in every career move you make.” Or Niall Ferguson’s protest against Pankaj Mishra’s review of Civilisation: “If he won’t apologise for calling me a racist, I will persecute him until he does.”

Exhilarating as these bursts of fury are for the general public, they are never, I think, very salutary for the writers themselves. Even when a writer troubles himself to engage in extended debate with a critic, it is his wrath, not his arguments, that leaves the lasting impression. And his retaliation, however well founded, inevitably helps to advertise the alleged calumnies to which he objects. (How many people were inspired to look up Caleb Crain’s review for the first time, after hearing about it from de Botton?) It may require intense discipline to stay silent when you are convinced that your work has been wronged, but the more unfair and meanspirited the criticism, the stronger the case for denying it what Margaret Thatcher used to call “the oxygen of publicity”.

Perhaps the most persuasive incentive for restraint in these matters is the fact that aggrieved authors so rarely get the tone of their retaliations right. Rage impairs style. I have sat up more nights than I care to admit, mentally composing responses to critics who I felt had treated me poorly. It is easy, in the delusion-prone small hours, to imagine that I am constructing brilliant and devastating ripostes. But come morning, the inventions of night-time are invariably revealed as peevish, self-important whines. A truly effective answer to a critic — one that isn’t hobbled by grandiosity or pettiness — should be funny. It’s hard, however, to summon up persuasively witty, insouciant prose when you are burning with offended pride. You either surrender to childish insult (“X is a moron!”) or you embarrass yourself with industrial-strength sarcasm (“Loath as I am to question the exquisite judgement of X, I feel that I must point out…”). Either way, you end up sounding like a dope.

It should be noted that this problem of tone is not avoided by having your buddies write letters of complaint in your stead. Friends, high on loyalty and outrage, unencumbered by considerations of modesty, are even more susceptible to humourless pomposity than you. Two recent letters to The New York Review of Books, protesting Terry Castle’s review of Siri Hustvedt’s novel, The Blazing World, are a case in point. The authors, both professional associates of Hustvedt, are gallant enough in their intentions, but they display such pursed-mouth solemnity, such dogged resistance to the idea of a joke, that one can’t help feeling Hustvedt would have been better off without their support.

Sometimes, of course, an author cannot stop himself from exploding, no matter how hard he tries. The provocation is too great, the longing for restitution too intense. He loses his temper, bashes out something vicious or pathetic and presses send. Even then, he must not despair. Art is long, and life is quite long too. There will be other books, other nasty critics, and with them, a myriad of other opportunities to maintain a dignified silence.

Heller is the author of three novels: ‘Everything You Know’; ‘Notes on a Scandal’ and ‘The Believers’ The New York Times