As to your later points — I understand Champion’s bugaboo. I’ve read my share of reviews, both of books and of film, where it would seem impossible that the reviewer actually participated with the work he’s reviewing.

These here, in this post, aren’t those reviews. There’s no misreading, deliberate or otherwise. There’s disagreement, that is all. Champion hasn’t made a solid case with this particular example of Vollman’s treatment by a variety of reviewers — most particularly Ms. Denfield, on whom he spends a considerable amount of time. What he has shown is that he very much likes Bill Vollman, feels that there is much in Vollman’s writing worth considering, but is unable to account for the fact that other people may not.

Sir please define a novel for me, for it is in my limited knowledge that a novel refers to a work of FICTION. The discussion centers around a work of …[here you fill in the blanks when you get my meaning].

Mr. Champion has a point about reviewing. If you’ve read his other rants about this topic (and in the last year the writers misinterpreted/understood has varied broadly); this is just another shot in the war against lazy reviewers and more specifically, lazy book section editors…

To whit: “Bad Monkeys” by Matt Ruff was reviewed in a Seattle newspaper with the writer concluding that she’d hoped that the author had gotten “it” out of his system ['it' being a psycho-science fiction thriller] and would get back to writing more like Ruff’s earlier “Set This House in Order”, a rather more mainstream (read: bookclub) novel. The point being Ruff has never written a book that followed his previous in style or subject, and an editor (or reviewer, doing a smidgen of research) would’ve known that “Bad Monkeys” would not appeal to fans of the former work.

I belabor the point; I know.

But fathom me this: Next time you read the NYTBR, look at all the fiction reviews, delete what is purely plot description, keep what is analytical (without spoiling storyline), and I guarantee a book review newspaper that could DOUBLE it’s fiction review if it enforced a stricter reviewer policy…

Yeah. I got that entirely wrong. I’d like to hide behind at least I got the ‘Sun’ part right — but a mistake’s a mistake.

I don’t understand what you mean by “literal from figurative zoology.” Or, rather, I don’t see the use of it. You wrote a really bad analogy; are you now trying to say that you wrote the bad analogy on purpose, under the guide of “figurative zoology”?

And I don’t know that your argument does stand for itself. You’ve done nothing but disagree with other reviewers for not liking an author you admire. You accuse others of willfulness in their misreading — when, perhaps, maybe all they’ve done is figurative reviewing. It’s like figurative zoology, only with fewer animals.

You accuse Denfeld of “deliberately twist[ing] Vollmann’s words around” — and yet I don’t see any twisting at all in the passage about Vollmann, cars, and prostitutes. You and she disagree about what Vollmann is writing, but that doesn’t make either of you right or wrong necessarily. The only thing that gives Denfeld a bonus point is that you haven’t shown she is wrong when you set out to show she was wrong. If that’s your best evidence, then there may be a problem. Where Denfeld does get the information wrong is that Vollmann says, in his passage, that the law will confiscate cars; Denfeld has the law confiscating Vollmann’s license. That seems a minor offense.

I also don’t understand the long tirade against Denfeld as a person. She doesn’t bring that into the review; you had to go to her website to find that information. Nowhere in the Oregonian review does she mention her wealth or philanthropy. However, you need that information to continue your ad hominem attack. (Also, how exactly does one “masticate upon”? Is that figurative chewing? And isn’t the preposition unnecessary? Unless this is a harkening back to your labored anaconda metaphor — but, of course, maybe you feel that figurative constrictors chew where literal constrictors don’t.)

You very much want us to believe that this is just you, as a reviewer, telling us like it is about how other reviewers got it all wrong. But really, this reads like a long whine against people who don’t “get” what you like. That’s not reviewing.

I might add a few more guidelines

1) no ad hominem attacks (or praise – ie don’t praise Hemingway’s writing about fishing just because he is a fisherman himself)

2) don’t be mean spirited, like, for example B.R. Myers’ recent hatchet job on Denis Johnson’s wonderful new book, “Tree of Smoke”, which appears in the December Atlantic Monthly – but it’s a complete waste of space so don’t bother with it. I can’t tell you the number of ways Myers is just plain wrong, but what’s worse is his snarky, willful misunderstanding of what he read. He is beyond ignorant: he is mean-spirited.

Hm, is this particularly insightful or original in its thinking? I haven’t read the book, but I’m not sure the quotes you’ve provided seem to indicate any reason to actually pick up the book (vs. say, RURD).

First off, it’s Eunectes murinus. When using scientific nomenclature, you capitalize the genus name.

It’s not clear why you use E. murinus in your example — unless it’s simply to draw unfair comparisons bewteen the snake and book reviewers you disagree with. The phrase “its scaly muscular husk” makes little sense and smacks of the overwritten; the snake, being aquatic, would seem better served by a different word than “husk” which sounds dry, withered, of the earth.

Later in that opening paragraph, you overwrite again: “where it then feasts upon the meat.” This smacks of bad contemporary poetry or the clogged essay. The snake doesn’t “feast upon the meat.” It swallows the animal whole. “It does this,” you try helpfully to explain, “because, while the boa does surface on land from time to time, the boa is more taken with the scummy agua. It does not know any better.”

I don’t think much of you as a literary critic — but I am even less impressed with your tries at zoological acumen. What a snake knows or doesn’t know is difficult to pin down. However, seeing as how these particular animals are very successful, it doesn’t make sense to claim that they’re in the water because they don’t “know any better.” They’re a mostly-aquatic species. They know enough to know that water suits their hunting just fine.

But you seem to want your opening paragraph because you seemingly feel that it does the best job possible in maligning the other reviewers that you take on in the rest of your piece. You’ve created a biological fallacy, and with this fallacy you hope to make clear the mistakes others have made — assumably because these reviewers, as well, don’t “know any better.”

I’m interested in your gripes against the other reviewers, especially after reading your own review in The Sun; or, actually, not so much a review as it is a synopsis of the novel. Your final paragraph attempts to provide a modicum of critical analysis, if only to say that, “The book’s slim size sometimes hinders Vollmann from fleshing out these interesting thoughts, or probe more fully into the question of why train-hopping is tolerated when it’s now impossible to get to a flight terminal without a boarding pass. ” But that’s as far as you go. You give no reason to read the novel; you don’t tell me what I will gain, save knowledge of train hopping, from this work. While you disagree with the other reviewers for their stance, they at least have a stance: they don’t like the novel. They don’t feel Vollmann has earned the insights he reports. They call him out as an uninteresting eccentric. This, at least, is information.