My book, Wives and Sisters, received a rather excoriating review from The Salt Lake Tribune, which ran in this Sunday’s edition. I suppose this would have been disheartening, had I been expecting a good review. Given the current atmosphere at the newspaper, which has changed radically since I left, I wasn’t.

I’m not going to go into all the whys and wherefores of the Trib sale and purchase by media magnate Dean Singleton, but suffice it to say he would say or do just about anything the LDS Church wanted. Since Historian Will Bagley wasn’t reporting faith-promoting stories about Mormon Inc.’s past, and rather just telling the cold hard truth, whammo: He was fired. Tom Barberi, Utah’s voice of reason (a Catholic telling the truth about life in Utah): whammo. Fired.

The Deseret News had been complaining for a long time that the rival Tribune was being mean. Mean, mean, mean, just like a big bully. Oh, the owners weren’t Mormon either, so it made them hard to control. When The Trib went up for sale, they engaged in some rather shifty and amusing manipulations so they could get exactly what they wanted. Editorial control over the Trib.

Now don’t get me wrong. I don’t THINK that Dean Singleton told Martin Naparstack to pan my book. I’m not that stupid. But a positive review on a novel that is considered an “anti” rant just wouldn’t go with The Trib’s new image, now would it?

Naparstack’s biggest complaint seemed to be that my characters speak like real people and that I don’t hint around at bad things happening. Somewhere along the line, did he miss that this was a THRILLER?

We also get characters who talk in a way that isn’t hard to understand. The narrator, Allison Jensen, at one point tells a would-be lover, Frank, “I don’t do nice guys.” And when she argues with her father about religion, she says, “You can take your church, and your temple, and all your blessings and endowments and shove them up your ass. I never want to see you again.” Subtlety is not part of Collins’ dialogue.

Can someone please tell me what is the COMPLAINT here? So my characters speak in a manner that you can understand. This is a minus in fiction? Go figure. I’d better tell my agent. He’d rather they speak in cliches and innuendoes and dance around the real truths, so that you have to spend twenty minutes interpreting dialogue that is supposed to be written in English?

There isn’t a page in the novel that wouldn’t benefit from a generous dose of subtlety.

Let me subtly say that this is a gross overstatement. Perhaps the reviewer should take his own advice.

The rest of the review pretty much goes on like that. I don’t make it a habit of refuting reviews. Of course, I haven’t HAD to since this is the sole negative review I have received on this book.

Of course, it could have been worse. He could have called me a jackass, which is what happened to writer A. J. Jacobs, who is an editor at Esquire and the author of The Know-It-All: One Man’s Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World. The reviewer of his book actually called him a jackass!

I was quite amused with the rebuttal essay written by Jacobs.

In the end, the only useful lesson was a simple one: As a writer, I have to accept the lack of control. Publishing a book is like having a child. You can do everything right — feed him, clothe him, show him Baby Kierkegaard videos — but a bully at kindergarten can still make him eat clumps of dirt. You have to come to terms with that. And you have to appreciate that your child is able to run around the playground at all, and is even having fun on the jungle gym when not being pummeled. Oh, and you can make sure the Amazon ranking for the bully’s new book is much, much lower than yours. Which it is.

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