Hatchet job: the savaging of Dolly Alderton
Book reviews don’t tend to go viral – but one published recently proved an exception. In The Irish Times, Barry Pierce subjected Dolly Alderton’s debut novel Ghosts (Fig Tree £14.99) to what “might just be one of the most brutal critiques ever written”, said Claire Toureille in the Daily Mail. Alderton’s tale of a 32-year-old food writer venturing into the world of online dating was dismissed by Pierce as a “rehashed version” of Nora Ephron’s You’ve Got Mail, “without the charm, wit or timelessness”. The prose, he wrote, was “thick like mayonnaise”, while the “barbs and biting observations” were “as succinct as the tweets they were all recycled from”. Alderton’s skewering of dating apps, said Pierce, made Ghosts the “most culturally relevant novel of 2014”. The review prompted vigorous debate online, with observers torn between finding it funny and thinking it unduly malicious. “Not liking something isn’t the same as taking great delight in destroying it for effect,” tweeted Terri White, editor of Empire magazine.
“It was, admittedly, a fairly cruel piece of writing,” said Rupert Hawksley in The Independent. But to claim, as some did, that it should never have been published is wrong. “The critic’s responsibility is to the consumer, not the creator.” Above all, a review must tell you if a book is worth spending your time and money on – and Pierce’s certainly did that. It was also suggested that because Alderton was a debut novelist, Pierce should have reined in his criticisms – but this argument didn’t “quite stack up”, either. She is, after all, a well-known journalist and the author of a bestselling memoir (2018’s Everything I Know About Love) with a large, vocal social media following. Ghosts “has been marketed widely”.
There’s nothing wrong with hostile reviews, said Sam Leith in The Daily Telegraph. The hatchet job has a distinguished pedigree: Truman Capote on Jack Kerouac (“That’s not writing, that’s typing”) and David Foster Wallace on John Updike (“Just a penis with a thesaurus”). My problem with Pierce’s review wasn’t its bitchiness, but that it was “clumsily written, all about the reviewer, too obviously full of wannabe zingers”. It was no surprise to learn that Pierce is “still in the first half of his 20s”. The real problem, I think, is that Pierce was completely wrong, said Lucy Pavia in the London Evening Standard. Ghosts is far from a cynical exercise piece of chick-lit. It’s less about romance than “about the tricky transitional phase of early 30s life, when friendship groups splinter and shift”. Alderton tackles it “beautifully”.