What's the point of a bad review?

I interviewed the author of Fifty Shades, and now I think we all need to take a hard look at ourselves.

Literary critic Samuel Johnson reading Fifty Shades of Grey (portrait by Sir Joshua Reynolds)

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The In Writing Creative Hour returns this Sunday 2 July at 6pm London time. Here’s a helpful timezone converter to calculate what time it is for you – just put your location in the second set of boxes.

Here’s some more info on what the In Writing Creative Hour involves – it’s a writing session on Google Meet for paying subscribers. I hope you can join me – look out for an email on Sunday with the link.

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I was recently commissioned by Bustle to write a profile of E. L. James, author of Fifty Shades of Grey.

While I’ve interviewed plenty of novelists, this gig felt unusual because her most famous book, which I hadn’t read, does not have a great reputation in the literary world. (As I mentioned in the piece, at the peak of the novel’s success in 2012, Salman Rushdie felt the need to share this review: ‘I’ve never read anything so badly written that got published. It made Twilight look like War and Peace.’)

But a writer doesn’t need to be of interest to the Booker Prize committee to be of interest to me, or even impressive, and I did find James impressive. Interviewing her, which I did over lunch, was a thought-provoking, fascinating experience, and as I learnt more about what had actually happened to her, I found myself getting defensive on her behalf. She didn’t ask for any defence, by the way. I couldn’t help it.

We all remember that her work was widely laughed at in the press, and that there was an air of schadenfreude when reports emerged of tension on the set of the film adaptations (and reading those reports, it’s interesting to wonder who the sources were). Maybe we’re a bit more careful these days, but Fifty’s heyday was a time when the media could be flooded with unkind jokes about one individual, and nobody much objected. James was not a person who had sought fame – in fact, in 2012 she was offered her own TV show, which she turned down. She was just a person who had written a story that had become incredibly popular.

I mean, mind-bogglingly popular. James went from writing on fan-fiction forums to being a New York Times #1 bestseller in the space of a few months, without a major publisher (at that time) or a marketing budget.

She made her fans – hundreds of thousands of them – very happy. She created new customers for the publishing industry. She also brought in an astonishing amount of money, which will likely have allowed Penguin Random House (who acquired her books after she hit that bestseller spot) to publish more niche, literary authors on whom they otherwise couldn’t have taken a financial risk. Everyone at PRH in the US got a $5000 bonus in 2012, thanks to James’s story. That’s an awful lot of people having a slightly better year than they’d expected.

So while I appreciate that James also benefited hugely from the success of the books – she has nice houses in London, Cornwall and Los Angeles, and is able to pay for her mother, who has advanced dementia, to be cared for full-time at home – I think she also paid a huge price. When she told me that stress from the movies led to an episode of global transient amnesia, and that she can’t drive on the motorway any more without having panic attacks, and that she lives a very private life because she’s frightened of putting her family at risk – I didn’t feel that she deserved any of that for not being ‘critically acclaimed’.

James’s work wouldn’t have been commented on much beyond Goodreads if she hadn’t been exceptionally successful. Literary critics don’t review everything, and they don’t usually review erotic romance, though I noticed that when James’s The Missus came out this month, all the mainstream press did.

I think critics are important, when they work for the intended customer. If you’re poised to spend hard-earned money on something, it’s reasonable to want to know if it’s worth the price, and a good critic will tell you. But performing an assassination for an audience who wouldn’t have bought the book anyway – for an audience who already know it’s not going to be their thing, because they’ve seen a hundred other headlines and jokes about it – that’s gratuitous.

Of course, criticising a famous writer is also a money-spinner. As a journalist in need of a living, I know I’ve written mean-spirited things that I hoped readers would find funny. I don’t feel good about that. I’ve also had editors repeatedly send copy back to me, asking me to add in another joke about whichever celebrity we were needling, until eventually I made the piece spiky enough to run. It’s tempting sometimes to believe that journalists are horrible people, and maybe a few of them are – but it’s a job that really tests your integrity, especially as there are now so few journalism jobs to go around. And as consumers we click on the scathing headline about the wildly successful novel, and we click on the gossip, and we show up to hear an intellectual make fun of that popular novel, and all of these things make money for someone and pay wages, and that’s what’s happening there.

I do find it interesting though that there’s a sense in the literary world that certain things belong in a bookshop and others don’t. There is an uneasy clash between the art of literature and the business of literature – but if you don’t pay attention to the latter, then the former suffers, because great artists need to survive and for that there has to be money. So just as it’s generally best to live and let live, I also think we should just read and let read. And when a woman entertains a lot of people with some books that you don’t like – well, don’t buy them.

You can read my profile of E. L. James for Bustle here.

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Now for something completely different. I’m very honoured to be working this summer with the charity PEN International, who defend freedom of expression and support writers at risk around the world.

PEN have teamed up with The Pillowman, the Martin McDonagh play that’s currently on in London’s West End, and I’m hosting three post-show Q&As to talk about some of the issues raised by the play. On 4 July I’m interviewing writers Mona Arshi and Ben Okri; on 18 July, lawyer Stella Assange and novelist (and President of PEN) Burhan Somnez; and on 17 August, writer Lemn Sissay. You can find all the info about the events, the interviewees and the tickets here:

(I’ve been thinking a lot about freedom of expression recently, thanks to watching The Pillowman, working with PEN, and simultaneously reading Naomi Klein’s forthcoming book Doppelganger, which I’m not allowed to say much about at the moment – but it’s very readable and very alarming.

This stuff has been challenging to me, because in recent years, talk about freedom of speech has often been co-opted by people whose views I despise. I’m realising, though, that backing away from the issue is a bad idea. I hope to write more about this soon.)

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That’s all for now. I look forward to seeing some of you on Sunday! Good luck with your writing until then.