Revenge of the Author
If the author is dead, they’re still as vicious and bitter as zombies.
Recently, author Alain de Botton responded to negative review of his novel from The New York Times Book Review. Directed at reviewer Caleb Crain, Botton wrote, “I will hate you till the day I die and wish you nothing but ill will in every career move you make. I will be watching with interest and schadenfreude.”
There was also the case of author Alice Hoffman, who took out her anger over a bad review in The Boston Globe on Twitter. She even went as far as tweeting reviewer Roberta Silman’s personal e-mail address and phone number, so fans could harass her. 27 tweets later, Hoffman deleted her Twitter account, hoping to escape culpability. It didn’t work.
Anyway, this reminded me of the way Michael Crichton dealt with criticism from an article by Michael Crowley, a political columnist for The New Republic. In his 2006 novel Next, Crichton named a character Mick Crowley, a child rapist. Seriously. Here’s the passage from the book (NSFW):
Alex Burnet was in the middle of the most difficult trial of her career, a rape case involving the sexual assault of a two-year-old boy in Malibu. The defendant, thirty-year-old Mick Crowley, was a Washington-based political columnist who was visiting his sister-in-law when he experienced an overwhelming urge to have anal sex with her young son, still in diapers. Crowley was a wealthy, spoiled Yale graduate and heir to a pharmaceutical fortune. …
It turned out Crowley’s taste in love objects was well known in Washington, but [his lawyer]–as was his custom–tried the case vigorously in the press months before the trial, repeatedly characterizing Alex and the child’s mother as “fantasizing feminist fundamentalists” who had made up the whole thing from “their sick, twisted imaginations.” This, despite a well-documented hospital examination of the child. (Crowley’s penis was small, but he had still caused significant tears to the toddler’s rectum.)
Mick Crowley doesn’t appear anywhere else in the book. The New York Times called it a “literary hit-and-run.” Sure makes Hoffman’s Twitter revenge look mild by comparison.
