Bad Book Reviews
Book reviews have become ubiquitous on book jackets, inside pages, and back covers, often eclipsing synopses altogether. Can a few choice words from a renowned author truly make or break a purchase? Are words about a book more meaningful than the sum of its contents? Not according to these bygone reviews, which inaccurately dismissed works we now consider to be classics. And so, from Jane Austen to Ernest Hemingway, here are the book reviews that have not withstood the test of time—some with inventive insults, and some that you may even agree with!
Ralph Waldo Emerson on Jane Austen in the Journal, 1861
I am at a loss to understand why people hold Miss Austen’s novels at so high a rate, which seem to me vulgar in tone, sterile in artistic invention, imprisoned in the wretched conventions of English society, without genius, wit, or knowledge of the world. Never was life so pinched and narrow. The one problem in the mind of the writer…is marriageableness…Suicide is more respectable.
Eugene Poitou on Honoré de Balzac in the Revue des Deux Mondes, 1856
Little imagination is shown in invention, in the creating of character and plot, or in the delineation of passion…M. de Balzac’s plate in French literature with be neither considerable nor high.
The Chicago Times-Herald on Kate Chopin’s The Awakening, 1899
That this book is strong and that Miss Chopin has a keen knowledge of certain phases of the feminine will not be denied. But it was not necessary for a writer of so great refinement and poetic grace to enter the overworked field of sex fiction.
The Manchester Guardian on Joseph Conrad’s Youth and Heart of Darkness, 1902
It would be useless to pretend that they can be very widely read.
Thomas Bailey Aldrich on Emily Dickinson in the Atlantic Monthly, 1892
An eccentric, dreamy, half-educated recluse in an out-of-the-way New England village—or anywhere else—cannot with impunity set at defiance the laws of gravitation and grammar…Oblivion lingers in the immediate neighborhood.
Thomas Carlyle on Ralph Waldo Emerson in his Collected Works, 1871
A hoary-headed and toothless baboon.
The Boston Evening Transcript on William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!, 1936
From the first pages of this novel to the last we are conscious that the author is straining for strangeness. He will say nothing simply. His paragraphs are so long and so involved that is it hard to remember who is talking or the subject which began the paragraph…We doubt the story just as we doubt the conclusion…We do not doubt the existence of decadence, but we do doubt that it is the most important or the most interesting feature in American life, or even Mississippi life.
The Saturday Review of Literature on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, 1925
Mr. F. Scott Fitzgerald deserves a good shaking…The Great Gatsby is an absurd story, whether considered as romance, melodrama, or plain record of New York high life.
The New York Times Book Review on Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, 1961
…it gasps for want of craft and sensibility…The book is an emotional hodgepodge; no mood is sustained long enough to register for more than a chapter.
The Dial on Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, 1926
His characters are as shallow as the saucers in which they stack their daily emotions, and instead of interpreting his material—or even challenging it—he has been content merely to make a carbon copy of a not particularly significant surface life of Paris.