In last week's e-mail to the media, Clark seemed dangerously unclear on the purpose of negative reviews, or for that matter, all reviews. The treatment he received from P.W. was, he protested, way out of bounds: "I do not object to unfavorable reviews," he said, but this one seemed intended "to persuade anyone within earshot to steer clear of my book."

Still, offering the bounty is a stroke of originality. Perhaps not since cheeky novelist Leslie Epstein made New York Times reviewer Michiko Kakutani a character in his novel "Ice Fire Water," then took out tiny classified ads on the front page of the Times imploring Kakutani to take notice of his book, has an author broken the fourth wall between reviewer and reviewee so creatively. (An upset Kakutani later had the paper's advertising department nix the ads.) But it's still unclear what, for all his Wild West bravado, the irate Clark intends to do if he finds out the reviewer's name. Since he did not respond to an e-mail asking about his plans (and his publicist did not return a phone call making the same request), we can only hope that a really, really, really angry ABM was the extent of it.

But who knows? Clark may have had a change of heart and decided simply to let the grievous insult pass. Maybe he took another of Fussell's suggestions and got back to work on his next book instead of fussing over how the world was responding to this one. In any case, he should take comfort from the critic who fielded the phone calls at home from Kogan: His own first book got a terrible review in P.W., too, and he remembers the sting the day he read it. "But at a certain point a writer has to realize," he says, "that you put your work out there for other people. Expecting to control their responses to it is a willful refusal to be in the world of grown-ups."

Maya Angelou reads from "The Heart of a Woman"