Why the Praise for Mediocre Books?

The first rule of book reviewing tends to be Praise the Book as path-breaking and timely and wonderful. The exception is books written by people the reviewer doesn’t like, the hit review, in which the book is eviscerated as violating some sacrosanct principles.

Consider Khaled Hosseini’s novel And the Mountains Echoed. Unless you have been living under a rock, you know Hosseini is from Afghanistan and burst onto the scene with The Kite Runner and followed that up with A Thousand Splendid Suns. Timing is everything and Hossein benefited from his first novel coming out in 2003, when events you might have heard about were happening in Afghanistan.

So, Hosseini is a celebrity author and this third novel was awaited with anticipation. When the book was published, predictably gushing reviews followed. After all, who is going to trash a novel by the famous author from Afghanistan?

How good is the novel? Therein lies the first major problem. This is not a novel at all. It is a collection of short stories. So, why does everyone call it a novel? Do novels sell better than short stories? There is some attempt to pretend that this is a set of interweaving short stories, but they really aren’t interrelated at all. You could rip out any one of these chapters and read it as a stand-alone story and not miss a thing. There are some characters who show up in multiple stories, but you don’t have to read the earlier story with a character in it to understand the later story with the character in it. The sole possible exception (and it is only a possible exception) is the second chapter which tells the story of a brother and sister and the very last chapter in which the same brother and sister meet again when they are old. Maybe the second story hinges on the first, but it isn’t really clear even in this case that is does. But, I imagine this let many a reviewer breathe a sigh of relief that they could now pretend the whole book is interweaving stories or even a novel.

The stories themselves are fine. The book wasn’t torture to read or anything, but other than a couple of events here and there, the stories are mostly forgettable. You might care about a character or two in the book, but whichever character you care about is really only around for a single short story.

So, if you were imagining what the review of this book should say, they would note it is a collection of short stories, and the reviewer would tell you about the stories that worked particularly well or not. Then the reviewer would tell you whether the good stories were worth reading and, even more importantly, made reading the book as a whole worth your time.

What do the reviews actually say?

The New York Times review (by Michiko Kakutani) begins: “Khaled Hosseini’s new novel, And the Mountains Echoed, may have the most awkward title in his body of work, but it’s his most assured and emotionally gripping story yet, more fluent and ambitious than The Kite Runner (2003), more narratively complex than A Thousand Splendid Suns (2007).” That sounds really impressive. If you read either of his earlier books, you now want to read this one, right? A couple paragraphs later, we read that while the earlier novels were a bit “sappy” and “melodramatic,” this one: “Mr. Hosseini’s narrative gifts have deepened over the years, enabling him to anchor firmly the more maudlin aspects of his tale in genuine emotion and fine-grained details.” Must be a good book, right? Ah, but then at the end of the review, we discover:

In recounting these tales, Mr. Hosseini shamelessly uses contrivance and cheesy melodrama to press every sentimental button he can….In the hands of most writers, such narrative manipulations would result in some truly cringe-making moments. That Mr. Hosseini manages (for the most part, at least) not only to avoid this but also to actually succeed in spinning his characters’ lives into a deeply affecting choral work is a testament both to his intimate knowledge of their inner lives, and to his power as an old-fashioned storyteller.

Gotta love that “for the most part, at least.” Here is the question: how can a book that “uses contrivance and cheesy melodrama” simultaneously be a “deeply affecting choral work”? Well, it can’t. The reviewer is accurately saying the book is cheesy, but then wants to conclude with a positive sounding review.

Or consider NPR (Maria Russo). There we get a fairly early note, “If at times some threads of the story don’t quite match the heft of the rest, the effect of the whole is both unsettling and moving.” Indeed, the fact that the first and last stories have the same characters is “what holds the novel together.” But, there is a “wave of something” that lingers. That sounds like praise, doesn’t it? But, it is a bit, well, vague.

One final example, The Guardian (Alexander Linklater): This is the closing paragraph:

And the Mountains Echoed charges its readers for the emotional particles they are, giving them what they want with a narrative facility as great as any blockbusting author alive. Perhaps there is some hokey emotional chemistry at work here, but, in the process, Hosseini is communicating to millions of people a supple, conflicted and complex picture of his origin country, Afghanistan.

If you can figure out what that means, I am impressed.

What intrigues me about these reviews of a book I just read is that they are all obvious attempts to sell a book that quite honestly nobody will be reading in 20 years. Indeed, there is really no reason anybody should bother with this book in the next 5 years. It’s not terrible, it passes the time, but I honestly have a hard time imagining anyone has read this book and would genuinely recommend it to another actual person. I can imagine not telling people to avoid it, but I suspect the following has never been uttered: “You know what you should really read? And the Mountains Echoed! You will love it.” Yet, the reviews of the book are over-the-top in sounding positive, despite the fact that they all have the discordant notes in them that leave you suspecting the reviewer really didn’t like the book all that much.