A novel that sums up the problem with the publishing industry.

The Writer's Retreat by Julia Bartz : the wokest murder mystery you'll ever read; that's if you finish it.

As a writer it’s poor form to go in too hard on other people’s books. However, some books trot into your life with such entitlement of accolades that the temptation to contribute a more balanced view is overwhelming. The back cover of The Writer’s Retreat by Julia Bartz is so festooned with praise it’s hard to see past the fact there’s no blurb. It has an excellent title, which suggests a whodunnit blast involving writers having won a competition held by the successful novelist Roza Vallo. As anyone who has played Cluedo, or indeed read any decent murder mystery, will know, it’s important to have varied and well-defined characters; mainly so that you care when they’re offed, or can at least identify them. Julia Bartz evidently has never played Cluedo. 

Without wanting to give too much of the plot away four, (or is it five? They’re so indistinguishable), characters win a Willy Wonka ticket to a month long writing retreat at the house of a successful writer who wants to plagiarise their ideas. When the hapless writers discover her secret she starts to kill them. 

It’s so obviously written with film adaptation in mind that Julia’s work on it was probably interrupted by googling Oscar gowns to wear. However, the novel reads as though either she couldn’t be bothered to hone a script, or an 8-hour elevator pitch. Julia leaves most of the characterisation to the future B-movie’s film stars’ haircuts, with a token black woman to distinguish her from the others. The cast is entirely women, which might sound like a woke readdressing of a male character monopoly in literature, if there is one of course, which is doubtful, but she doesn’t let that get in the way of a social justice artifice that serves to present the author as a champion of the suppressed and therefore a good person first and an author second. The women inhabit these pages like millennials aspire to linger in coffee shops; with a sort of carelessness that only appears contrived. All of them seem able to pursue their aspirations of being a novelist without any need for money, or indeed any interesting characteristics. They also love sharing their pronouns without using a sick bucket.

The cover quotes should have been adequate warning. Every single one was from women with their own novel to flog. It looks like a cover quote reciprocation party. It was the usual guff: five star, compulsive, etc. Someone called Megan Collins even claims it gives ‘full-body chills’, which can only be explained by Megan having installed a heat pump that is ineffectively warming her New York brownstone in her commitment to Net Zero. Another suggests the novel is ‘the very definition of a page of a page turner’ whatever the hell that means. It can only be speculated that the lack of male praise was because they were too busy flinging the book at the nearest wall to be find time to write anything, or that Julia is such a man-hater that she no longer knows any men. 

The only character it’s possible to find any affinity with is the sociopathic lesbian (obvs) killer. She’s as charmless as the other chancers, but at least it’s easy to see how the solution to misguidedly filling your house with self-absorbed, self-congratulatory, talentless, knob-end, self-PR girls is to lock them out of sight in a dungeon. Here they are forced to write to her demand, yet even the protagonist’s novel within the novel is shit, which is quite an achievement. They’re all killed so dispassionately that it’s almost funny, and it makes you wish more of these navel-gazing conceited New York writers had been accepted on the retreat to be similarly dispatched. 

Most oddly is that it reads as though a novel written for a bet using a limited vocabulary. It’s the least memorable writing I’ve encountered for a while; as though written by a committee in BLM lanyards. However, my biggest mistake was reading the acknowledgments last, where she cowers to the social justice movement in thanking her Sensitivity Reader - yes, if you’re wondering where the heart and soul of contemporary literature went, it’s in the buckets beside the sensitivity readers’ desks. It’s sensitivity readers who are the modern Victorian nanny, arbitrating what is suitable for us to read or not via butchering PG Wodehouse, Roald Dahl and Mark Twain, to save their darlings from feeling offended; wait until they hear they’re going to die. 

Anyway, Julia Bartz blurs the line between gratitude and self-flagellation by acknowledging her sensitivity reader Ariane Resnick at Salt & sage books for ‘taking the time to point out some of my blind spots, which - as a white cis woman - are many. This snivelling self-hatred at the woke altar actually reveals Julia’s internalised prejudice towards straight white people that fills her pages as clearly as the absolute absence of men. And it’s a shame that rather than simply put a red pen through elements she disapproved of - and let’s be clear that this results in a novel that only Ariane might want to read - that she didn’t point out the weak spots of a novel without a twist, uninteresting characters so careful to not offend anyone that at times the wallpaper is more memorable, and a cliched location. 

It’s easy to see how apoplectic Julia and her considerably sized team of young women keen to remould the world might react to discovering Society of the Snow, the new remake of the film Alive, based upon the 1972 Uruguayan rugby team plane crash in the Andes, being almost exclusively men, although they might approve of their need to eat one another in order to survive. 

Of course there’s nothing wrong with novels involving nothing but women, but they need to be a lot more likeable than this. Admittedly far more women read novels than men, but based upon this it’s easy to see why. It’s hard to imagine a book more deserving of being chucked into passing traffic, or at the nearest sensitivity reader.