Reviewers & Critics
Bethanne Patrick.
IF YOU’VE been on Twitter in the past decade, you have likely come across the popular hashtag #FridayReads, created by Bethanne Patrick in 2009. Patrick, who has more than 212,000 Twitter followers, has worn many hats within the literary community since the late 1990s—author, editor, book reviewer, interviewer, curator, and more. She is an avid champion of books and writers, always careful to shine a light on emerging authors as well as known personalities.
Patrick is a graduate of Smith College and received her master’s degree in English from the University of Virginia. She has held editorial positions at Pages, AOL, Shelf Awareness, Book Riot, and the Washingtonian and was a host of “The Book Studio,” an author interview show that ran on the PBS station WETA in the Washington, D.C., area for four years. Currently a contributing editor and columnist at Literary Hub, she reviews regularly for the Washington Post, for which she has a monthly column; NPR Books, for which she covers mysteries and thrillers; Virtuoso Life, with her column Carry-On Companions; and many other publications, including Time, the Star Tribune, and the Los Angeles Times. Her author profiles have appeared in the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, Poets & Writers Magazine, the Writer, and the Guardian, and her essays have been published online by Virginia Quarterly Review, Elle, and the Rumpus. She is the author of An Uncommon History of Common Courtesy: How Manners Shaped the World (National Geographic Books, 2011) and editor of The Books That Changed My Life: Reflections by 100 Authors, Actors, Musicians, and Other Remarkable People (Regan Arts, 2016). She is currently writing a memoir for publication by Counterpoint Press.
What is your reading process like?
I am naturally a fast reader and—mainly due to graduate school, I swear—I retain what I read in a near-freakish manner, which helps enormously when I’m working on a review. I can recall names, details, even the shape of paragraphs on a page. People often say to critics, “Oh, you get to read for a living. How wonderful.” The truth is that we’re always racing with the clock and the calendar. I have
to make sure I set aside reading time during the workday, and that’s difficult given phone calls, e-mails, and writing projects. Usually I block out two hours to read at midday, and I’m always reading in the evening, to a greater or lesser extent. Some of my colleagues swear off reading for pleasure or their own personal pursuits completely. I would burn out if I did that. On weekends and vacations I read anything I like. Often it’s still a frontlist title, maybe a juicy mystery I can’t wait to dive into but know I won’t be able to cover. But sometimes it’s history, biography, or poetry. My recent term on the board of the National Book Critics Circle gave me a thirst for those genres. Is there ever anything from the publishing side that raises your interest in a particular book or author—a sizable advance, notable blurbs, your relationship with an editor or publicist?
I spent a short time working as a book publicist, years ago, and while I was probably the world’s worst book publicist, it made me conscious of how much works goes into book PR—so I try not to ignore pitches that come from publicists I trust, publicists who are forthright, responsive, and smart about what’s genuinely good. Advances, blurbs, massive advertising campaigns—those things don’t influence me much. I’ve seen multi-seven-figure-advance titles I loathed and low-three-figure advance titles I loved. That doesn’t mean a huge advance isn’t newsworthy or that it doesn’t signal something exciting. And if I’d paid more attention to those things earlier in my career, that might have been good. Right now, though, I’m at a point where I can use my taste and experience to choose the books I review. Have you ever changed your mind about a book that you praised or panned years earlier? Has a piece of criticism ever changed your opinion of a writer’s work?
It is a critic’s right to change her mind, although I must say it’s usually on the negative side. I remain firm about books I reviewed negatively, but sometimes I see a positive review and know that I was a little too generous. Fortunately that’s changing as time goes by; I’m less nervous about my opinions, not just because I have grown as a critic, but because I’ve read so many reviews by now. Not one of them is “the answer.” Not one of us has “the answer.” Reviews, therefore, rarely change my opinion. However, longer-form works of criticism sometimes allow me to examine a writer’s body of work. Sometimes it confirms my opinion; witness Patricia Lockwood’s recent hilarious and learned consideration of John Updike in the London Review of Books. Sometimes it has me racing to read a writer I’ve ignored, as in the beautiful piece about Lucia Berlin by Lydia Davis in the New Yorker. What is your opinion of the value of negative reviews?
Dwight Garner, call me. Not for anything untoward—I just think we could have a couple of martinis and talk about the power of a perfect pan. For a few years I published my Bottom Ten Books, never disparaging a debut author but calling out laziness and poor editing in big, big, big authors’ works. If no one ever says what doesn’t work, we can’t decide what does—even if what does, in another critic’s opinion, is the same thing the first critic said didn’t work. In the past ten years I’ve seen more and more sloppy, rushed endings to novels. That’s inexcusable. Why do that to a reader? Negative reviews can alert readers, the people spending their money on books, to not waste their time. Of course all reviews, negative and positive, have another function as well. The best criticism becomes part of a culture’s conversation about itself, helps us to understand what we value, what we have put aside, where we want to go. Even though I haven’t done much long-form criticism, I think about that conversation as I’m choosing books to pitch and review. What’s my audience? Will I
be proud to have lifted this title and shared it in one small way with others? Has social media been helpful in your role as a critic?
I literally would not have a career without social media. I was a book blogger, then a corporate book blogger—AOL, Publishers Weekly, Barnes & Noble— then a Twitter personality, and finally a freelance critic. Social media doesn’t influence the books I choose to review, but social media helped me gain a toehold as a reviewer. Some publications wanted to leverage the community I grew; other publications wanted to stay away from that vibe. When I decided I wanted to focus on criticism, I had to gain the trust of editors, one review at a time, and learn a lot about how to write good criticism, too. It’s absolutely not the same as casual blogging, although some bloggers—Maud Newton, Mark Sarvas, Laila Lalami, Mark Athitakis, and Sarah Weinman, for example— wrote stunning criticism from the get go. You created the prominent hashtag #FridayReads on Twitter, and your popularity on the platform has grown considerably over the years. How valuable has Twitter been to you as a member of the literary community?
Like many of my writer colleagues I am, at heart, an introvert—even if I present as an extrovert. Twitter has been invaluable to me as a place that doesn’t make me leave my house, or even my chair, and also doesn’t require me to write a review or a blog post or an essay in order to participate. I put all of my writing energy into my published reviews and my work-in-progress, but that doesn’t mean I don’t want to chat about books, authors, writing, and publishing. Twitter, more word-centric than Instagram, is my preferred place to hang out, get the bookish news, share some laughs, and, increasingly, share my journey from lifelong depression into a healthy present. What books that you aren’t reviewing are you most looking forward to reading in the near future?
Whatever Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie writes next. Unfinished Business: Notes of a Chronic Re-Reader by Vivian Gornick—I’d love a book of her marginalia alone. Eimear McBride’s Strange Hotel. And the new Hilary Mantel, The Mirror and the Light.
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Read an expanded version of this interview and the previous nineteen installments of Reviewers & Critics.