Camilla Long's scathing review of Cusk's memoir Aftermath draws most blood in contest for the best bad review
Camilla Long's comprehensive shredding of Rachel Cusk's memoir of her divorce, Aftermath, has won her the Hatchet Job of the Year award for the best worst review of the last 12 months.
Cusk took 160 pages to detail the end of her marriage, and how her life fell apart "like a jigsaw dismantled into a heap of broken-edged pieces". Long, in a review for the Sunday Times, takes just over 1,000 words to pull Cusk's memoir to bits, writing the novelist off as "a brittle little dominatrix and peerless narcissist who exploits her husband and her marriage with relish", and who "describes her grief in expert, whinnying detail".
Judges Lynn Barber, John Walsh and Francis Wheen chose Long's write-up ahead of Zoë Heller's dire review of Salman Rushdie's memoir Joseph Anton – "an unembarrassed sense of what he is owed as an embattled, literary immortal-in-waiting pervades his book", wrote Heller – and Craig Brown's rejection of Richard Bradford's The Odd Couple as "a triumph of 'cut and paste'" as their winner. The Hatchet Job of the Year prize was set up by the Omnivore website to "raise the profile of professional book critics and to promote integrity and wit in literary journalism". Long, a journalist for the Sunday Times, takes home a golden hatchet and a year's supply of potted shrimp.
"I thought what was wonderful about Camilla's review was that it totally hatcheted the book, but in such an intriguing way that I then thought I must read Aftermath – and did, and loved it because it was just as weird as Camilla said," said Barber. "So a hatchet job isn't necessarily a turnoff."
Aftermath, wrote Long last March, "is crammed with mad, flowery metaphors and hifalutin creative-writing experiments", including "hectic passages on Greek tragedy" in which she compares herself with Clytemnestra and Oedipus. But, points out Long, despite her mention that she "got into Oxford", Cusk manages repeatedly to give the wrong name for Antigone's brother: he is Polynices, not Polylectes.
Long is also unimpressed with Cusk's tendency to overdramatise: "can a tray of vol-au-vents really be 'steeped in rejection'? In Cusk's world, even the canapes are victims," she writes, while the author is sent into an "existential frenzy" by a haircut, according to Long.
What really bothers Long about the memoir, however, is the lack of narrative detail – Cusk never explains why she split up with her husband, and instead, "we have acres of poetic whimsy and vague literary blah, a needy, neurotic mandolin solo of reflections on child sacrifice and asides about drains".
Long joins last year's inaugural winner of the Hatchet Job prize, Adam Mars-Jones, who took the award for his excoriating dismissal of Michael Cunningham's novel By Nightfall in the Observer.