On Christmas Eve, with deep snow over New York and every flight to San Francisco cancelled, a novelist stranded alone in his Greenpoint apartment receives a five-dollar payment from the critic who destroyed his career. The memo suggests it is for eggnog for one. He sends five dollars back with a joke about skating alone. She answers with a single syllable, then with a link to an essay about a neglected writer they both happen to love, and for the better part of a week neither of them stops writing. Bad Words by Rioghnach Robinson is sold on a premise built for headlines, a public feud between the novelist Parker Navarro and Selina Chan of City Magazine, but its heart lies in this private exchange between two people who are lonelier than either would ever admit in print.
The Public Feud Is the Least of Bad Words
The public quarrel is set up briskly. Selina’s pan of Parker’s lavish debut sank it, her pan of his second book followed, and a confrontation at a publishing party, two cocktails in, was filmed and shared everywhere. Overnight his sales climb and her magazine’s subscriptions spike, so both are nudged by the people who pay them to keep the fight going. The novel is sharp about what that does to a person. Strangers online decide who Selina is from a few seconds of footage, and the version of Parker that thanks every well-wisher is plainly not the one who sits up at night rereading her reviews.
What turns the book is a scene during the blizzard. Parker interviews a revered, reclusive novelist named Juliette Liao at a small Upper West Side shop, in front of an audience of seven, and Selina turns up in the back row in a red knit hat. When she reaches the front of the signing line, the most feared critic in New York stammers like a teenager. Juliette, whose flight has been delayed, insists on taking them both to an empty diner where Christmas jazz plays to a single coffee drinker, and assumes they are friends. Later Parker quotes a line about family he believes came from Juliette’s novel. It came from Selina’s review of it. She notices, and says nothing.
The bond that follows rests on a shared, slightly obscure enthusiasm. Both discovered Anna Kavan’s Asylum Piece, a fragmentary 1940 collection about breakdown and confinement, through the same old City review, and each had assumed nobody else had read it. Bad Words by Rioghnach Robinson is very good on that particular jolt: finding out that a private enthusiasm, carried around since adolescence, was never as private as it seemed.
What Selina Keeps Behind the Door
Selina is the real achievement of Bad Words by Rioghnach Robinson. She grew up in a Minneapolis suburb as the bookish, friendless daughter of careful immigrant parents, went to Columbia as a prelaw student, and switched to English. Her parents stopped paying her tuition, she finished on more than eighty thousand dollars of loans, and they did not come to her graduation. When the feud reaches the news, her father calls for the first time in two years, and his first concern is what his colleagues have seen.
Robinson gives her a life of deliberate, ordered solitude that never reads as a pose. Selina spends her evenings sanding decades of bad paint off the baseboards of a rent-stabilized Bed-Stuy apartment. Her holiday traditions run to skating at Rockefeller Center and an ambitious dinner cooked for one. Her refuge is a neighbourhood dive called the Slippery Cork, where a bartender named Nadia asks no questions and an eight-foot wooden Santa stares out at the drinkers as though he has witnessed something unspeakable. The two people who see through her, her college friend Jacob and his wife Cassie, have a toddler, a cheerfully chaotic loft and no patience for Selina’s evasions.
Her editor gets one quietly lovely moment. He tells her about a furious four-page letter an author sent him in 1988, threatening his career, and the advice his own editor gave him then, which was to keep writing as though he had nothing to fear. Bad Words by Rioghnach Robinson understands that a critic’s composure can be a kind of armour, and that Selina’s honesty about books has made it easier for her to avoid honesty about anything else. The book’s argument is that her severity and Parker’s eagerness to please are the same defence wearing different coats.
Parker’s Side of the Glass
Parker gets his own reckoning in January, on a short trip home to his mother’s mint-green house in Daly City. She has cleaned for days and laid out every snack of his childhood. He walks to the independent bookshop where he spent his teens hiding from his parents’ arguments in a battered leather armchair, and finds the windows dark and a farewell notice taped to the glass after forty-two years. A younger brother, newly out of work, picks the same evening to vent a long-buried resentment about money. Parker ends up in a gas-station convenience store, staring at a wall of sour gummies, and the only person he can bring himself to tell is Selina, who asks plain questions, offers no comforting noises, and pays him five dollars to buy himself something nice.
It is the most tender scene in Bad Words by Rioghnach Robinson, and it shows exactly why these two work. Everyone else in Parker’s life needs managing. Selina is the one person who does not want him to smooth anything over.
Where Bad Words Lets Its Voices Blur
The two narrators are meant to have opposite relationships with language, she spare and exacting, he lush and evasive, yet on the page they often sound alike. Both reach for an elaborate simile every few lines, and both catalogue each other’s hands, hair and scent with identical breathless attention. A reader opening the book mid-chapter would sometimes need the chapter heading to know whose head this is, and in a novel so concerned with voice that is a real cost.
The structure has other soft spots. Selina’s estrangement, built with patience across three hundred pages, is resolved largely through a single email. The closing chapters then settle nearly every professional problem at once, which sits uneasily beside a first half so clear-eyed about the economics of a dying magazine. The physical relationship, when it arrives, is written explicitly and at length, a shift some readers drawn by the literary framing will not expect. Depression, a history of suicidal thinking, racism, online cruelty and family estrangement are all part of Bad Words by Rioghnach Robinson, and they are handled with candour rather than melodrama.
Where It Leaves You
The book that remains is a romance about being read correctly, which is a stranger and more interesting subject than its viral premise suggests. Readers who enjoyed the professional sparring of Book Lovers by Emily Henry will recognise the pleasure of two people who argue about sentences for fun, and Great Big Beautiful Life by Emily Henry makes a good companion for anyone drawn to rival writers circling the same story. Bad Words by Rioghnach Robinson is warmer than either and sharper about the business of books than both.
Five dollars, it turns out, can buy almost anything. Including a second reading.