The good, the bad, and the unputdownable

by Miriam

One of the assets of a pricey liberal arts education is that you can turn on the literary pretentiousness with the best of them and then tuck down with your popcorn title of choice, feeling confident in the fact that you know the difference between what’s great and what’s the intellectual equivalent of a Twinkie. Aside from the days of suffering through various soporific graduate school seminars, I’ve never really spent much time agonizing over my literary tastes. I pretty much read from every category of fiction and nonfiction and can find value and entertainment in all but the most execrable writings.

Which is why I like this piece by Laura Miller in Salon. Sure, Dan Brown, Stieg Larsson and James Patterson* may not be on same artistic level as Jonathan Franzen, Ian McEwan, and Ann Patchett, but as their legions of fans will attest, you can’t put down their books once you’ve started them. You may hate yourself in the morning, but you’ll stay up way past your bedtime to get through every last page—full of clichés, awkward character development, ridiculous plot twists and workmanlike prose though they may be. Thing is, a good story is a good story is a good story. And, there is craft (and sometimes genius) in telling a good story whatever the author’s writing abilities. There is a great deal of bad writing in my life that I am grateful to have read. And, I hope there’s a fair amount of it left in my future. As long as it’s good, of course.

What are your examples of good bad writing/writers?


*Whose work I’ve excoriated for years—‘cause, you know, I’ve got that pretentious lit-major-followed-by-a-career-in-publishing thing to live up to.

Picking your battles

by Jim

As Jessica discussed last week, authors Jodi Picoult and Jennifer Weiner have been vocally irritated by the raves for Jonathan Franzen’s new book, Freedom. They’ve lashed out at the New York Times for focusing too much on white male authors but also for their almost complete discounting of all commercial fiction. These are points that lend themselves to ample debate. I’ve mentioned before that I think fiction across categories and types can be brilliant. And I have ample concerns about the blinding whiteness of the literary landscape (which is a topic for a whooooole other post). So why do I find myself so irritated by the articles coming out?

First of all, it’s a little tough to stomach the argument when it’s coming from two of the bestselling authors in the country. Why are they so angry they aren’t getting reviews? Can’t they just dive into their money a la Scrooge McDuck whenever they need to feel loved? I’d find this a lot easier to stomach coming from someone straddling the commercial/literary divide who hadn’t broken out and needed reviews to break through.

Second, did you catch this in the Guardian article? “Picoult also criticised Kakutani's use of the word ‘lapidary.’ ‘Did you know what [it] meant when you read it in Kakutani's review? I think reviewers just like to look smart,’ she tweeted.” Oh no, she didn’t… Mocking someone for using a “smart” word is already ignorant. But coming from an author? That’s disgraceful. Working with language is what you DO. If you want to understand why people don’t take you seriously, you probably shouldn’t indicate that you yourself don’t take the language that seriously. Not knowing the word? Totally fine. It’s not like I don’t make regular stops at dictionary.com. But Picoult’s tweet is just anti-intellectual and insulting.

Mostly, though, I’m annoyed because these articles are linked to a novel by someone whose last effort, nine years ago, was a masterpiece. People aren’t excited about Freedom because it’s by a white man. They’re enthusiastic about getting to dive back into the landscapes of the person who created The Corrections, one of the best written, most deeply moving novels of the past decade. Pick on someone divisive like Jonathan Safran-Foer or someone whose output is uneven like Jonathan Lethem. Hell, they even have the same first names and all live in the same borough of New York City. But attacking Franzen…you’re just sabotaging your own arguments.

I’m probably exposing all sorts of biases here. What do you all think?

Gender bias?

by Jessica

Apropos of Miriam’s post on the euphoric reception to Jonathan Franzen’s new novel, at least two novelists have cried foul. Not about Franzen’s book per se, but the case, advanced by Jodi Picoult and seconded by Jennifer Weiner, that the NYT Book Review favors writers who are “white and male and live in Brooklyn.” Good news for this fairly sizeable demographic; Brooklyn boys with literary leanings can now rest easier knowing that their eventual literary efforts will receive proper critical attention.

I’ve followed the ensuing discussion over the last week with interest. In the Atlantic, Spiegel and Grau editor Chris Jackson weighed in with “All the Sad Young Literary Women.” A female colleague asked him to name some female novelists whose work he had read recently, and he confessed that for a moment, he couldn’t think of any (turns out, however, that he had read at least one). This prompted me to go through my own recent reads, seeing how I measure up.

I tend to read plenty of books by women authors, but I’ve never bothered to quantify or implement a quota system. In the last couple of weeks I’ve been in something of a Y chromosome rut, reading Evelyn Waugh, whose books, aside from Scoop, I’ve not read before—Brideshead Revisited, his World War II Trilogy. Fine writer, that Waugh, but something of a snob. I did, however attempt to balance the scales by reading some Muriel Spark, in order to get a female perspective on the foibles of British bluestockings.

How about you? What do you think of Picoult’s charge? How does your own reading compare?

From the Vault: Literary v Commercial

Happy summer, everybody!  For the next while, there are going to be some absences from the blog as we take vacations, but we'd hate to leave you guys hanging.  It's no secret that we blog much more now than when we started this baby, and there are far more of you reading than there were way back when.  So we thought we'd bring back some blog entries of days gone by that you may have missed if you just joined us in the last year.  If you have any favorites you think your fellow readers might enjoy, give us a shout below!

by Jim

It didn’t surprise me when someone asked me recently what the differences are in how I handle the projects I love and the projects I work on for money. It did, however, irritate me. The question came loaded with the insinuation that there are two kinds of books—the ones people should read and the ones they actually do. Often, I find that literary and commercial fiction are pitted against each other, as though they’re totally different beasts that serve entirely separate purposes. But is that really the case?


Too often, category fiction is treated like the bastard stepchild of the written word. But, frankly, I’m a whole lot more likely to pick up Stephen King’s new book than dive into Thomas Pynchon’s latest doorstop. Which isn’t to dismiss literary fiction, either.

Years ago, I was getting a ride to a train station from an MFA student in Massachusetts, and we talked about the challenges of fiction writing and writer’s block, not to mention how competitive the marketplace is. And then he unleashed this on me: “I could knock out the sort of mystery novels that sell hundreds of thousands of copies, but I’m better than that.” If he weren’t behind the wheel of the car, I would have smacked him upside the head. I mean, really. Do you honestly think the only thing holding people back from becoming bestselling authors is…integrity?

As I patiently explained to him (who am I kidding? I sounded like a howler monkey in heat), it takes a lot of talent to write a fantastic mystery, just as it does to write an amazing literary novel. They just happen to be very, very different talents. Anyone who thinks that just because someone is a wonderful writer means they can pull off working in other genres clearly hasn’t read Michael Cunningham’s Specimen Days. I recommend they keep it that way.

And let’s not get too far without mentioning that literary and commercial are not exact opposites. There are plenty of authors who mix the two forms freely. One can see this by reading the stunning, bleak mysteries of Dennis Lehane or the thrilling horror of Clive Barker. And is it just me, or is the award winning Cold Mountain as much a retelling of The Odyssey as it is a historical romance novel?

What I’m saying is, let’s let the snobbery go. Reading Madame Bovary can be as entertaining as reading Valley of the Dolls and vice versa, and there’s nothing wrong with that. To those people who consider genre fiction to be “guilty pleasures,” let it go. I grew up on a steady diet of Stephen King, Charles Dickens, Jackie Collins, and Victor Hugo, and I’ll happily debate the merits of Lucky Santangelo and Esmeralda any day. I’m the guy on the subway reading The New Yorker and Romantic Times.

The lines for me just aren’t that sharply drawn. So whether I’m pitching a new cozy mystery or a collection of interconnected stories previously published in literary journals, you can know one thing links them: I love both.

Originally posted in June 2007.