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Now here’s a daily-blog double, and proof that googling yourself at 1 am when you should be doing work does yield results sometimes. A thoughtful review of Through the Pale Door is up at the Hipster Book Club, a featured review in fact.

This is the first review to explicitly (and fairly) point out some flaws. There will be no Alice Hoffman twitter revenge on reviewers in these parts, nor a need for it in this case. (For kicks, read a response to a response to a review by my novel’s reviewer). Now, a preface: In MFA land, we were all trained to play dead on workshop day as, one-by-one, our peers sliced open the cadavers of our stories and measured their internal organs. Then, sewn-up and jolted back to life, we could respond. Thus I think authors can and should address items in their reviews if they can do so in a civil manner.

Item number one that some readers may have noticed, the cell phone that returns from the dead:

Ray is simply inconsistent in his writing, as if he loses track of time and situation. During her mother’s funeral, for example, Sarah burns out her cell phone battery from overuse; miraculously, the phone vibrates two pages later. Whether such mistakes are the fault of sloppy writing or even sloppier editing is hard to decipher.

I swear on my mother’s grave (pun intended) that this issue was addressed at some point. I remember seeing this in the final proofs that came in around Thanksgiving. One of two things happened: I cut a line explaining the resuscitation because it sounded out-of-place; or I decided at some point “hey, my cell phone dies and comes back briefly sometimes, readers will understand…” But in 20/20 hindsight, it would’ve worked just as well for Sarah to turn off her phone and then discover Edgewood’s calls later on. Problem solved. Of course, even Steinbeck blows it once or twice in The Grapes of Wrath – one of the characters has a screw-top flask on one page; on the other the flask has a cork. Nonetheless, if this book ever goes into a second printing, it will suffer a take-no-prisoners copyediting.

Item number #2, exploiting otherness for laughs:

Though the main characters are fascinating, the minor characters feel like caricatures, and the one foreigner in the book is awkward and somewhat offensive in the way his otherness is played for laughs. Dr. Anjalu, Sarah’s vaguely Eastern European art teacher, stumbles over syntax and oddly seems to have a knack for idioms but difficulty with the accompanying word choice.

Indeed, I’ve fretted at times about Anjalu’s mannerisms and how they’d be perceived. I’d honestly like to write a book about this man. Although he’s a trip, plucked from Seinfeld or DeLillo, something else accounts for his eccentricities besides his heritage. Like Sarah, his aesthetic tends toward the Gothic and, hopefully, readers get the impression that bad things might’ve happened to him growing up as well. Granted, he could’ve used another few pages – or even paragraphs – of development. If the novel were 300 pages, as I sometimes think it should be, then Anjalu’s affair with Sarah’s mom would merit more attention – as well as his complex and perhaps disturbing relationship to Sarah herself. Creating Mr. Anjalu, I drew on stories about eccentric teachers as well as a few of my own eccentric professors. I also drew on Olivier Castro-Staal, Claire’s art teacher in the HBO series Six Feet Under, as well as Pnin in Nabokov’s book of the same name. Granted, the verbal play is exaggerated a bit beyond believability; I’ll consent that Anjalu’s character might suffer as the story toys with the sheer joy of bending and breaking commonplace sayings. Anyone who knows me, however, will note my own George-Bush-like knack for screwing up idioms.

Finally, a perennial problem for me exists in the consistency of characters. I had the opportunity to interview le thi diem thuy, author of The Gangster We Are All Looking For, a couple of years back. A few comments she made stuck with me and came up over and over as I worked on my own book. Regarding the inexplicable behavior of the father, she said it was very important for her to simply let her characters be – regardless of whether all readers felt they understood them or not. I’m of the mind that characters should be allowed to do strange things that won’t make sense and which the author won’t explain. My own life is filled with things that don’t signify. And yet this is a tough game to play with readers, who want their characters to make sense or at least can be justified in some way. One of the major unspoken events in this book is the death of the narrator’s younger brother. Thuy said she felt compelled to bury her characters’ responses to this event as deeply as possible. So the stoic-ness of Sarah seemed, at least to me, a very necessary element of her character.

It also happens that my favorite Shakespeare play is Titus Andronicus – a play many folks hate – Taymor’s adaptation of it an especially huge influence in my novel. It also happens, ironically, to be the man’s first play. (Compare myself to Shakespeare, you say? Don’t mind if I do!) Some might say a woman could never direct a film like that, just as many criticized Lina Wertmuller for her failure to depict women fairly in her films. Do I go to sleep at night dreaming that either of them will one day ask for rights to the novel? Of course not. Don’t be silly.

Probably best to cut things off here, lest this turn into a review essay of a review. But hopefully this counts as an exploration of the writing process. I always wonder what authors think of their own reviews. The standard responses like “I don’t pay them any attention” or “reviewers are entitled to their opinions” strike me as horribly shallow. And, of course, who could excuse people like Hoffman or Stanley Crouch for getting angry when experienced readers criticize them? Reviewers speak to readers, but they also speak to writers – who can use them to reflect on their craft and write better in the future.