I think it can be OK to condemn a book without having read it. Of course, you then need to be very clear about not having read it.
A couple of examples:
- A novel where sex between a 14 year old enslaved girl and a 44 year old man who owns her is described as romance, not rape.
- A romance novel where the romantic couple is a jewish concentration camp prisoner and a SS officer who is running the concentration camp. (And where, adding insult to injury, the jewish woman converts to christianity before the novel ends.)
(Yes, both these are real novels, published recently by real publishers.)
For both these books, I have no qualms about condemning them and saying they never should have been published, based on nothing more than a very brief synopsis of the plot.
The book which the Vulture article is about doesn't seem to be in that clearly horrible category. On the other hand, that article seems very biased. I looked around a bit, and found
this one, which is more nuanced, and explains what the reviewer found problematic.
Hoyt's article didn't impress me.
Quote:
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Originally Posted by Sarah Hoyt
And I’ll be honest, absent magic, I can’t understand how someone reading a book, or even making a book a bestseller — EVEN IF THE BOOK IS BIGOTED AGAINST A GROUP OF PEOPLE — hurts anyone. Dan Brown didn’t cause the Catholic Church to collapse in a heap. Oh, sure, it lent some fire to pre-existing hatred of the Catholic Church among Protestant denominations. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion haven’t caused Judaism to go extinct. Sure, they lent ammo to some very idiotic people who ALREADY wanted to believe the worst of Jews. Both bits of hatred pre-existed the books. Reading them or making them bestsellers didn’t physically run out and kill people or even cause people to say mean things.
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Say it with me, ladies and gentlemen: no book ever on being read reached out and PHYSICALLY hurt any marginalized (or none marginalized. Or purple with stripes and three heads) people.
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Stories have power. Of course stories don't physically hurt people. And of course a single story doesn't have a lot of power on its own. But stories contribute to how we see the world, how we interpret people and events.