The Salon portfolio of crybaby literati is a hall of shame that includes the mediocre, stalled career of “Jane Austen Doe”, the defensive posturing of Steve Almond, and the beat-to-the-punchiness of dog author Lee Harrington. To this unillustrious list, we can now add Michael Laser, who contributed an essay to the site last week bitching about his novel’s critical reception.
To wit, Publishers Weekly and Kirkus both panned Dark & Light, a double whammy Laser is convinced has destroyed nearly all hope of finding an audience. “At this point, a reasonable person might have taken a deep breath and considered the possibility that his book was flawed,” Laser writes, but since Salon only gets the writers that are left over after the reasonable authors have all taken freelance assignments from other places, he chose Plan B: “I simply lamented that my book had been assigned to two reviewers who didn’t get it, whose tastes apparently run to other sorts of fiction… I spend four years on this, and a pair of anonymous snipers (who for all I know prefer historical romances) toss it in the trash so fast that the wind ruffles the pages?” As somebody who writes frequently for PW, I feel reasonably comfortable saying that its review editors go out of their way to find readers who are both interested in and familiar with a given book’s genre or subject matter, precisely to avoid the sort of scenario Laser kneejerkingly describes.
Grabbing any possible lifeline to save his book’s reputation, Laser points out that his publisher (not identified, but it’s Permanent Press) must believe in the book, because they nominated it for a Pulitzer and a National Book Award. Well, that’s very nice, but he’d better hope that their marketing budget has a few more line items beyond the NBA registration fee. For that matter, he’d better be doing everything he can to promote the book himself… except, that is, whining about how the literary establishment screwed him over. We already have plenty of writers with similar arguments, many of whom are sufficiently deranged that their ravings on the subject provide much greater entertainment value than he’s mustered for Salon.
(One is sorely tempted to suggest that “the establishment screwed me/us over” is, in fact, the default argument of any article in Salon, especially the political ones, but one does try to stick to publishing-related matters here.)