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| Hearsay: |
What makes a bad book bad? I know what makes a guy bad: leather jacket with many zippers, a nose you could cut cheddar cheese with, and bits of tape on his fingertips. But I digress. The Guardian’s dreamy reporter Allison Flood looks at “bad” around a recent American Book Review top 40 bad books list, which was obviously designed to provoke these kinds of responses.
Laying into Ian Fleming because his Bond books “consist entirely of clichés” is hardly revolutionary, but the 007’s creator is not the only author to come under attack from a group of US academics asked to describe what constitutes a bad book for the latest issue of the American Book Review.
The Great Gatsby is, apparently, “incredibly smug about its relationship to the traditional realistic novel”. Women in Love reads “like someone put a gun to Nietzsche’s head and made him write a Harlequin romance”. Revolutionary Road fares little better: “I am as illuminated as I am by a college essay decrying drunk driving,” says its selector, while All the Pretty Horses gets Cormac McCarthy compared to Jackie Collins. He “wraps his characters in half-truths and idealised anecdotes, much like Jackie Collins does, only his are about the Lone Star state, the border, and its cowboy myths,” says Christine Granados from Texas A&M University, adding that “McCarthy uses clichés and derivative characters to sell millions of copies”.
This is all a bit say-something-controversial-for-the-hell-of-it for my taste. There’s such bad writing out there (do I have the energy to bring up Dan Brown and Stephenie Meyer? No, not really) that it feels mean-spirited, even arrogant, to pick on the classics.
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March 17th, 2010 at 12:25 pm
I agree that the list is a bit over the top, but that comment about DH Lawrence is HILARIOUS. I’m reading ‘The Rainbow’ write now, and I can’t stop laughing at how conceivable it is that each and every line was written by Neitzsche under duress — even under duress though, Neitzsche is still pretty good.
March 17th, 2010 at 1:08 pm
Sparkly vampires: automatic qualification for “bad.”
I just had to go there.
March 17th, 2010 at 5:16 pm
Anything with Dan Brown in the title maybe?
March 18th, 2010 at 1:44 pm
anything with the phrases “heaving bosom” or “throbbing manhood” makes it bad as well. (that doesn’t mean that i didnt spend a considerable amount of my teenage years reading things like that under the covers).
March 18th, 2010 at 4:50 pm
Don DeLillo
March 18th, 2010 at 8:41 pm
Well, sometimes the “classics” are the ones that really need some deflating.
March 22nd, 2010 at 8:04 am
Was it Robert Harris, in Ghost,who said that good books are all different but bad books are all the same–they don’t work. . . ? I like that.
March 22nd, 2010 at 12:53 pm
good books all the same…good books all different…Everyone please stop butchering Tolstoy…
March 22nd, 2010 at 1:43 pm
Who mentioned Tolstoy ? I was butchering Harris. The actual quote from Ghost is this:
“All good books are different but all bad books are exactly the same.[..] And what they have in common, these bad books, be they novels or memoirs, is this: they don’t ring true. I’m not saying that a good book is true necessarily, just that it feels true for the time you are reading it.
March 22nd, 2010 at 8:30 pm
@Jamie: Harris’s aphorism could be taken as a twist on the first line of _Anna Karenina_:
‘All happy families are alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.’
March 23rd, 2010 at 8:40 am
Jamie: Sorry for being prickly. Schneiderman used “Good books are all alike; every bad book is bad it its own way” in the Bad Books link George provided. See L.S.’s comment re: Anna Karenina. I read a similar bastardization earlier in the day from another source and was feeling a general lack of originality in thought (aimed toward Harris- not you).
J.