on Jennifer Weiner, criticism, and what makes a woman

By now, everyone knows about Sarah Dessen and how her unhappiness made somebody who didn’t like her books very, very much unhappier, and how many of her fellow authors jumped to her defense, as if she were a cringing child instead of a very rich, very popular author. And everyone knows that Jennifer Weiner, another very rich and very popular author, made the biggest fool of herself.

However, not everyone knows that Weiner predicted the situation in her own books. I swear it’s true; the story is called Everyone’s a Critic, and the publisher says it’s Donna Tartt crossed with Stephen King and Shirley Jackson. Not quite, but it is a look into the mindset of a woman who equated the opinion of an English major from Aberdeen, South Dakota to the sexual assault of 250 children. 

The plot: Laurel Spellman, a book critic for an eminent but money-losing newspaper, is enlisted to lead tourists around Paris for a week or two. One of the tourists is Tess Kravitz, a romance writer who loves to promote her books and keeps pushing a copy on Laurel, to the point where the book starts showing up even when Tess isn’t around. Laurel eventually is driven mad by the book, hallucinates, and falls off a hotel balcony to her death. It turns out that Tess and her agent (who may be the devil, although I’m probably making the story more interesting than it’s meant to be) colluded to madden Laurel and push her off the balcony, all as revenge for a bad review that Laurel wrote of a book by Tess’s mother. 

Laurel is a grotesque–a friendless, drunken, pill-addled bitch who’s simultaneously frigid and a slut and who is subject to an escalating series of physical and emotional humiliations during her sojourn in Paris. (Weiner describes Laurel’s urinary tract infection with prim relish, referring to the character’s aching “privates.”) Laurel is a grotesque because she is a critic, or as she puts it, someone who champions “interesting” books. Actual interesting books do not exist in Weiner’s universe–there are literary books, which can only be written by thin white men, and genre works, and anyone who reads the former does so out of pretense alone. In turn, Laurel is interested in “interesting” works because she’s predatory (she trades good reviews for sex with thin white men) and snobbish. 

To emphasize Laurel’s sins, Weiner flashes back to a scene in Laurel’s youth, during which she tells her mother that the Thorn Birds is silly and that books should be challenging. In response, her dying mother tells Laurel that she’ll die alone and unloved, without a partner or children. This is presented as a normal sort of thing you’d tell a child who made fun of your book, instead of absolutely deranged, and of course it comes true. (The good women in this story are all self-effacing, cooking, cleaning mothers or, if not mothers themselves, devoted daughters who buy sweets for the people around them.)

The hate curdles the story to the point where time collapses. Our antiheroine, who is pushing seventy, remininces about her early career days, in which she somehow was a Manolo Blahnik-wearing Sex and the City imitator. Characters who despise the Internet somehow know and use the word “sheeple.” A woman who’s been dead for 50 years is recalled as complaining about The Corrections. 

The rest of the characters are just as blurry as the timeline. Flight attendants, maids, the young–they all exist to humiliate Laurel and enjoy the company of her nemesis. One of these characters is a young woman who’s on the Paris trip with her family. Weiner doesn’t bother to give the girl a name, but we do know that she’s pretty, and that she openly wonders why Laurel hasn’t reviewed more women, and that she carries a tote with a “Read More Women” slogan,  and that she announces that she’s going to write her thesis on the unjust treatment of female authors by the literary establishment. In short, in the eternal war between boring books by men and easy books by women, she’s on the side of the angels of the house (and they really are–the good women mother and cook, or at least buy people pastries, while the bad women buy expensive clothes and drink by themselves).

I think that we can extrapolate from this story. Weiner assumes that this is what a good young feminist woman is and does–look pretty and defend womanhood, which in this case means her avatar. She doesn’t judge by content, but by class, or rather by family–the big family of women, who all look out for each other, as long as they play by certain social rules.

The idea that an actual young woman might do otherwise must have come as a terrible shock, so much so that Weiner couldn’t comprehend her as a woman, but as some sort of creature poisoned by masculinity, unable to partake in the pleasures of real teenage girls, and out to pervert young minds. A woman who judges turns out to be no woman at all–and worthy of murder, if not in real life (alas!), at least online.