Best American Mystery Stories 2008 hit shelves last week, and it's been pretty well reviewed so far. My favorite review so far is Kate Stine's in Mystery Scene Magazine, in which she called my story "A Day Meant to Do Less" (quite generously) "the prize of the collection."It's praise I eat up eagerly, because of all the stories in In the Devil's Territory, "A Day Meant to Do Less" is the one that I feel least sure about. In one very public sense (it was chosen by one of my heroes, George Pelecanos, for Best American Mystery Stories), it is my most successful story on worldly grounds. And it has regularly been singled out for praise by critics, would-be agents, readerly correspondents, and old teachers, and was the reason, in fact, that Dzanc first approached me talking book contract. But it has also been a target for the other kind of criticism, earning the repeated derision of a trusted graduate school teacher and the disapproval of the anonymous Publisher's Weekly reviewer who seemed to feel that its inclusion marred my collection. The three objections of these readers: (1) that it opens so slowly,(2) that the middle section contains so many mini-scenes and so much exposition and cover such a broad swath of time, and (3) that one of the point of view characters is a preacher. The first two choices were necessary, structurally, for the story's purposes (if you haven't yet read the story, the ending will show you why), but both worry me, as a fiction writer deeply concerned with being courteous to the reader. The third seems to lump me in with other writers who took preachers for focal characters, and since the list includes Nathaniel Hawthorne, Flannery O'Connor, Isaac Bashevis Singer, and Alice Munro, I'll suffer it gladly.
One month from the publication of In the Devil's Territory, I wonder what other writerly insecurities will rise from the talk other people will talk about my stories. Will it impact the way I approach future work? Will I be able to separate the helpful criticism from that which merely appeals to my pride or my self-doubt?
The pat answer is that one ought not read one's reviews. That's not really an option, given my voracious desire to find out how readers are reading the book. So what I've settled upon is another kind of self-protection. I've finished an advanced draft of my next book, and I'm furiously revising right now in hope that I can let it go before the November 1 release date of the last one, so that the talk about one doesn't unduly effect the writing of the other.
