Waxx. Nevertheless, I knew he was the most influential book critic in the country.
“And?” I asked.
Olivia said, “Why don’t you read it first, and then we’ll talk.”
“Uh-oh.”
“He favors boring minimalism, Cubby. The qualities he dislikes in your work are the very things readers hunger for. So it’s really a selling review.”
“Uh-oh.”
“Call me after you’ve read it. And the other two, which are both wonderful. They more than compensate for Waxx.”
When I turned away from the telephone, Penny was sitting at the table, holding her knife and fork not as if they were dining utensils but as if they were weapons. Having heard my side of the conversation with my editor, she had sensed a threat to her family, and she was as armored for the fight as the Brunhild whom she had once been.
“What?” she asked.
“Shearman Waxx reviewed my book.”
“Is that all?”
“He didn’t like it.”
“Who gives a flying”—she glanced at Milo before finishing her question with a nonsense word instead of a vulgarity—“furnal.”
“What’s a flying furnal?” Milo asked.
“A kind of squirrel,” I said, fully aware that my gifted son’s intellectual genius lay in fields other than biology.
Penny said, “I thought the book was terrific, and I’m the most honest critic you’re ever going to have.”
“Yeah, but a couple hundred thousand people read his reviews.”
“Nobody reads his reviews but geeky aficionados of snarkiness.”
“You mean it has wings?” Milo asked.
I frowned at him. “Does what have wings?”
“The flying furnal.”
“No. It has air bladders.”
“Do yourself a favor,” Penny advised. “Don’t read the review.”
“If I don’t read it, I won’t know what he said.”
“Precisely.”
“What do you mean—air bladders?” Milo asked.
I said, “Inflatable sacs under its skin.”
“Has any review, good or bad, ever changed the way you write?” Penny asked.
“Of course not. I’ve got a spine.”
“So there’s nothing to be gained from reading this one.”
Milo said, “It doesn’t fly. What it must do—it must just float.”
“It can fly,” I insisted.
“But air bladders, no wings—it’s a squirrel blimp,” Milo said.
“Blimps fly,” I said. “They have an engine and a big propeller behind the passenger gondola.”
Milo saw the weakness of my contention: “Squirrels don’t have engines.”
“No, but once it inflates its bladders, the furnal kicks its hind feet very fast, like a swimmer, and propels itself forward.”
Lassie remained poker-faced, but I knew that she had not been convinced by my lecture on the biology of the flying furnal.
Milo wasn’t buying it either. “Mom, he’s doing it again. Dad’s lying.”
“He’s not lying,” Penny assured him. “He’s exercising the strong and limber imagination of a fine novelist.”
“Yeah? What’s the difference from lying?”
As if curious about her mistress’s reply, Lassie leaned forward in her chair and cocked her head toward Penny.
“Lies hurt people,” Penny explained. “Imagination makes life more fun.”
“Like right now,” I said, “I’m imagining Shearman Waxx being attacked and killed by a flying furnal with rabies.”
“Let it go,” Penny advised.
“I told Olivia I’d call her back after I read the review.”
“Don’t read it,” Penny warned.
“I promised Olivia I’d call her.”
Mouth full of pancake, Penny shook her head ruefully.
“I’m a big boy,” I said. “This kind of thing doesn’t get to me. I have to read it. But don’t worry—I’ll laugh it off.”
I returned to my study and switched on the computer.
Rather than scroll through Olivia’s e-mail on the screen, I printed out her opening comment and the three reviews.
First, I read the one from USA Today, and then the one from the Washington Post. They were raves, and they fortified me.
With professional detachment, I read Shearman Waxx’s review.
The syphilitic swine.
In New York, my editor, Olivia Cosima, had delayed going to lunch until I called her.
Slumped in my office chair, bare feet propped on my desk, I said, “Olivia, this Waxx guy doesn’t understand my book is in part a comic novel.”
“No, dear, he doesn’t. And you should be grateful for that, because if he realized it was funny, he would have said that it failed as a comic novel.”
“He thinks a solid metaphor is ‘ponderous prose.’”
“He’s a product of the modern university, Cubby. Figures of speech are considered oppressive.”
“Oppressive? Who do they oppress?”
“Those who don’t understand them.”
“What—I’m supposed to write to please the ignorant?”
“He wouldn’t put it that way, dear.”
Staring at my bare feet, I decided that my toes were ugly. Whatever inspired Penny to marry me, it hadn’t been my feet.
“But, Olivia, this review is full of errors—character details, plot points. I counted eleven. He calls my female lead Joyce when her name is Judith.”
“That was one we all missed, dear.”
“Missed?”
“The publicity letter that accompanied each reviewer’s advance-reading copy mistakenly referred to her as Joyce.”
“I proofread that letter. I approved it.”
“Yes, dear. So did I. Probably six of us proofed and okayed it, and we all missed the Joyce thing. It happens.”
I felt stupid. Humiliated. Unprofessional.
Then my mind cleared: “Wait, wait. He’s reviewing the book, not the publicity letter that went with it. In the book, it’s Judith.”
“Do you know the British writer J. G. Ballard?”
“Yes, of course. He’s wonderful.”
“He reviewed books for—I think it was The Times of London. Years after he stopped reviewing, he said he’d had a policy of giving only good reviews to books he didn’t have time to read. Would that everyone were so fair.”
After