MY REVIEW | by E.A. Aymar

I was a reluctant crime fiction reviewer. I never rarely want to make another writer feel bad, and writing is a small world and feels like one in which every writer knows each other, particularly in my genre. And I know how much a bad review can bother someone. Some writers defiantly claim that they don’t give a fuck what someone thinks of their work, but not me. I absolutely give a fuck! I remember everything ever said about my writing. And honestly? I’m pretty sure other writers equally remember the praise and criticism they’ve received.

So, when the opportunity was offered to me, I wasn’t sure if I should accept the chance to write reviews for Washington Post’s Book World. For one thing, critics, man. Who wants to be known for either disparaging work or saying words like “unputdownable?” When Updike’s character Henry Bech went on a killing spree in Bech at Bay, targeting reviewers who had panned his work, I remember thinking, “I totally get that.” And I felt the same way after reading “Bullet in the Brain,” Tobias Wolff’s fantastic short story about a comically pretentious reviewer murdered during a bank robbery. But I knew my attitude was immature and unfair. I grew up reading Book World’s printed tabloid section every Sunday and, in criticism, have always found valuable insights about writing and literature. Most importantly, I wondered if this would help my novels, and decided it would. I’d be forced to read widely within my genre, learn to quickly, consistently craft concise essays, and place my writing in front of a national audience.

I was assigned a round-up – four reviews of books with a shared theme. The books were psychological thrillers written by women and, before I got to the novels, I opened with an impassioned screed about the strength of women-written psychological thrillers, which I often see as the pinnacle of the genre, and complained that their frequent disregard is a product of blatant sexism.

The editor replied to my review with a giant red X through the opening.

Stung, I complained to a friend that The Washington Post was apparently too milquetoast to publish my searing hot take, and my friend disappointed me by agreeing with the editor. “You’re talking more about yourself than the books,” she explained, and I grumpily realized she and the editor were both right. Not only that, but I’d broken a basic rule of writing, the premise of show versus tell. And the books suffered for it.

I killed the screed and instead focused on what made those four thrillers work, which echoed my original argument, but that argument was now in service of the novels. The revised review was accepted and published, and other opportunities came. Over the next pair of years, I wrote about writers I’d long admired, shared what I loved about the work of Attica Locke and William Boyle and Kwei Quartey and so many others. At its best, there was something spiritually vivid about this act, a feeling I remembered from reading Book World on quiet Sunday mornings, when I’d first heard writers praise literature, and I believed in what they said, devotedly followed their teachings.

My own reviews were appropriately thorough and I felt like they all offered some degree of insight…but I could never shake the sense that I wasn’t doing enough. When I’d read Book World in college, I could tell who had written each review without even looking at the author. Each critic’s personality shone through their words, and that trend had continued. Ron Charles, the head critic at Book World during the time of my reviews, was not only the best of the bunch, but one of the best in the country; a talented writer whose intelligence and humor made all of his reviews memorable.

I never felt like I reached that height.

I didn’t do the thing Ron did and, really, every writer should strive for, with every single tiny piece we have the glorious opportunity to write, no matter what that piece is – to have our words reread, spoken aloud, shared in digital and physical conversations, philosophized in classrooms and coffee shops, tattooed on forearms, remembered. Crassly and commercially, that’s how one book sells the next. In a purer readership sense, it’s a reminder of the days when we fell in love with a book and the way it was written, and we want to read more of the author’s work, all of it, everything, because we like what they have to say and how they said it.

Sometimes I wonder if that phenom is a happy accident, a mark of skill, or both. Or is it a matter of confidence, those rare times when what we write is exactly what readers want to read? I never had the chance to find out because, after I’d written over a dozen reviews, the billionaire owner of The Washington Post grew bored with his journalism hobby and, along with a slew of other sections, abruptly shuttered Book World. Consequently, I never felt like I found my true voice in criticism…but that disappointment did, wonderfully, inform the new novel I was writing. Constraint in one area often opens another. A wall suddenly gave way, and the right words tumbled out.

But that disappointment lingered.

I was doing an event months after Book World closed, and afterward a reader came up to me and told me she’d liked my first novel, an out-of-print thriller that I’ve always felt was published too early. Definitely not an example of my best work. I started to explain to her why that novel wasn’t very good, and she replied, a bit defensively, “Well, I liked it,” and I realized I was wrong.

After all, it’s not unusual for a reader to tell us that it was one of our side characters, rather than the protagonist, who won their affection. Or confide in us that they found comfort in our grief, beauty in places we hadn’t intended. We can only be thankful that they divined meaning in our writing. Reached that moment when our work truly matters.

We never know which of our words will remain, but they do.

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