Dear Grape Eater,

I have a question I hope you can answer. My friend, an old war buddy, has been feeling down ever since the Battle of Austerlitz. He mopes around his family’s estate, mingles with untoward relations (of the middling sort, you know the kind), and worst of all, has written a bunch of short stories. Don’t get me wrong, I love reading, everything from Pushkin to Chekhov. I’m actually fairly well-traveled as a bibliophile, have devoured all of Gogol, Turgenyev, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky. I’m pretty flexible in my tastes and usually don’t have a hard time finding something nice to say about a piece of writing. Babel, Gorky, Nabokov, while not favorites, do have their place on my bookshelf.

The problem is, my friend’s stories stink. I’m not a literary critic, but feel that his writing lacks the depth of suffering and redemption I’m looking for. I’ve read forty-six of them so far, and of those, I can count on one hand the number of times he’s adequately captured the gloom of St. Petersburg, the earnest simplicity of the muzhik, the guilt of a superfluous man. All he ever writes are these postmodern ennui stories about retired wrestlers who seem weirdly well-versed in Foucault.

I just can’t connect. And now he says he wants feedback. What do I do?

--Ivan Headachenikov, Moscow

Thanks for writing, Ivan.

Giving good feedback is definitely a challenge, especially, as is often the case, when giving it to a friend. I sometimes write about friends in Grape Eater, and in those cases, I usually try to avoid anything that comes too close to critique. It’s easy to step on other people’s feelings, even when you don’t mean to. An artist, by necessity, pours their whole self into what they make. So we can understand why picking apart stories, or paintings, or whatever, even when well-intentioned, can hurt.

The classic format for friendly feedback is the Compliment Sandwich. Start by piling on whatever praise you can think of. If nothing is forthcoming, stick with the basics-- Nice worldbuilding, Good atmosphere, Love the comma use, are all safe bets for short stories. After you’ve built up their confidence, sneak in your real feelings. Keep it tight though. Too much criticism and they’ll start to wonder if all the praise from earlier was genuine. Finally, for the bottom slice of bread, end with a vague and overblown piece of encouragement. Something like, It really is a fantastic piece, and I’m glad to see you’re keeping up the momentum. In fact, just go with that.

Here’s the thing about compliment sandwiches though, they don’t taste good. It doesn’t matter how much bread you pad on either side of a slice of charred rubber, they still have to bite through. The real secret to giving feedback, and to discussing art in general, is honesty. But it’s trickier than it sounds.

Often when we say honesty, what we mean is venting. Telling it like it is. Speaking our truth. A type of brain-to-mouth operation that seeks to jettison our feelings, often yuckier ones, out into the world. It can be a useful catharsis sometimes, but it’s not really the type of honesty we need to connect with art. It doesn’t take much effort to stand in front of an Andy Warhol Brillo box and make a joke about how art is a money laundering scam. There’s no more common response to Gertrude Stein than to call her pretentious and retreat back to familiar territory. Even if these are your honest opinions (they are mine), they’re not really honest in the way that I mean.

Whether we’re serving as critics or simple viewers, and there’s not really a difference between the two, art requires honesty that cuts both ways. If Warhol or Stein leaves you feeling cynical, yes, it is worth asking where the artist went wrong. But it’s also worth asking where you did.

And so, Ivan, If you’re repulsed by your friend’s art, or bored by it, or envious of it, saying so is a good place to start. Maybe not directly to them, but gently, to the universe: Wow, I hate this.

That’s step one. Step two is to ask, just as gently, to no one in particular: Why?

Hopefully, you can find more than one answer to that why, both inside and outside of the text. Are the characters underdeveloped, or do you just have a harder time relating to female protagonists? Is the plot directionless, or are you feeling grumpy this morning because they were out of your favorite pistachio syrup at Starbucks? They won’t all boil down to such clean either/or formulations. The point is that if your questions point in more than one direction, you’re more likely to hit something useful.

And ultimately, if the two of you really are good friends, and you really can’t stomach their work, you’ll have to fess up eventually. The only other option is not to, and watch them chew your slice of rubber.

Hope that helps.

Saturday

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