| Original Message |
Claire Tristram (no login)
Posted Mar 13, 2007 4:55 PM
Chris, your message just came up on the forum, and let me say that many readers reacted negatively to the novel. My foreign rights editor shared with me that she never sold such a polarizing book. Editors would tell her, I -hate- this book, or I -love- this book, with nothing in between. I think it has to do with the expectations a given reader has for a work of fiction, not just my fiction but any fiction.
For example, readers expecting the novel to be "erotic," which is fair since every hardcover copy in 13 countries to date had a naked person on the cover (Japan being the only one with a naked man)--were often disappointed. Some reviewers complained "this is not erotic!" or "this book is only tepidly erotic!" which was strange to me, since it wasn't meant to be erotic at all.
Also many readers have a requirement that a novel have a sympathetic protagonist, so much so that, even though I have my character behaving in a manner that strongly suggests mental illness--from shaving her body to threatening to murder her lover to hallucinating her own self running down the beach toward her--the power of the sympathetic character trope is such that many reviewers saw her behavior as being volitional and redemptive, purging her of past trauma and allowing her to live on. Other readers felt snookered because they see the protagonist behaving in a less and less sympathetic manner as the novel progresses. This I did purposefully--I wanted to confound that particular expectation, and shift sympathy from one character to the other. This is in some sense not playing fair, and some readers disliked it a great deal.
Anyway, I think it's all right to dislike a book, and can even be useful to think about why a book doesn't work for you, especially when it's a short one. |
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