Shocking the reader

After waiting several months with anticipation and then disappointment, I have finally found a review of my book How I Adore You. Marcy Sheiner reviewed it in The Spectator, 14 Jan 2002. This is the first real review of the book, as far as I know, and I'm glad of it.

I've met Marcy several times, and she's been supportive, if critical, of my work. I disagree, of course, with some of her opinions and her mostly negative evaluation of my book. I sense in her review, though, that she continues to support and respect my work.

I wanted to respond to one of the points she made in her review. She says:

The title story is one of two in the book written in a woman's voice, something Pritchard pulls off fairly well. The story begins with a promise: "It's not going to be top and bottom between us, Susan. It's just going to be real." Unfortunately, what follows is more shocking than real. Pritchard in fact revels in the art of the shock: I was on a panel with him once when he flung the most offensive material in his repertoire at a class of confused college kids. Not for nothing was the 'zine he used to publish called Frighten the Horses. No doubt, many radicals equate this ability to shock with some kind of revolutionary agenda - but I'm not one of them.

She goes on to discuss another piece, "the most shocking story in the book," Prom.

Both stories contain violence. In How I Adore You, the narrator tells about a past relationship where the play violence got out of hand. And in Prom (not "Prom Night" as she has it), the violence is out of hand pretty much throughout the story.

I deal with the outré aspects of Prom in both the book's afterword as well as in my comments on the story on this website, so I won't go into it at length here. Suffice it to say that I did not write this story simply to shock readers. Of course, I knew while I was writing it that people would find it shocking. I found it shocking while I was working on it, and many times I asked myself if I really wanted to go through with publishing it. But I felt the writing was good and that the story was genuine self-expression. Sheiner does not accept this reasoning -- she says she finds no redeeming value in the story at all -- and I respect her opinion while disagreeing with it. But I feel compelled to point out that the story also has a satirical element, which she ignores. I believe this element of satire, if nothing else, gives the story redeeming value, not just from a legal perspective, but from a literary one.

The title story is more complex and quite different in tone. It does surprise me that Sheiner was shocked by parts of this story. She doesn't say which parts, but I'm guessing they are the parts where the narrator recalls a past relationship in which committed acts of violence on her lover. While these incidents, depicted in flashback, involve extreme behavior, they don't come out of the blue. They are foreshadowed, and they are recalled in the context of an s/m scene happening in the present tense. By the time they are revealed, there's already been a lot of serious tussling between the two characters in the story, both physically and emotionally.

It is true the violent incidents in How I Adore You (the story) are calculated to give the reader a start when they are revealed. But that's different from them being gratuitous -- a charge Sheiner doesn't make explicitly, but implies. It's essential for the reader, and for Elena (the character the narrator is doing the scene with in present tense) to know about these events. If they're not revealed, the narrator would just seem a little neurotic and silly. Once we realize what sins she's committed in the past and what she's still capable of, Elena's unconditional love for her goes beyond a romantic conclusion of the story and becomes genuinely moving.

At least I think so. That story really means a lot to me, and I'm kind of disappointed a reader didn't connect with it. Oh well.