At last weekend’s New Yorker festival, Salman Rushdie ventured the opinion that the inexplicably popular 50 Shades of Grey “made Twilight look like War and Peace.” I don’t like Twilight, I’ve never read 50 Shades of Grey, and still some defensive antenna of mine shot up. Not to pick on Rushdie too particularly, of course, his statement was hardly original or surprising. It’s just that there is something thoroughly frustrating about the way a certain kind of book person talks about a certain kind of book, which is to say the kind of book that not-book-people read. And which, to continue down that confusing path, is the kind of book that most people actually buy.
We want to say that on the one hand are the good books, the hard books, the books that require dedication of the reader, of the work readers do. The books that Real Writers (apparently a self-selecting class) write. And then there are these others. Yet it’s a strange thing to watch book culture, which is itself in a perpetual stage of fear about its own decline, slice off pieces of its very own flesh.
If you don’t believe that we are all one body here, try this on for size: Of all the details D.T. Max dug up on David Foster Wallace’s life for that original New Yorker profile of his, the one that has always haunted me most is taken from the time Wallace’s mother had to come and pick up her broken-down son in Tucson.
They rented a U-Haul and took turns driving and reading aloud a Dean Koontz novel during the sixteen-hundred-mile trip home
There you have it: the most allegedly “difficult” novelist of our generation spending time with a crap paperback thriller. You could say that Wallace, here, was just doing the same kind of thing he did when he spent hours watching television, a medium he once likened, in its pure embodiment of desire, to “sugar in human food.” But he seemed to think there was something else there. In his syllabi, which are all over the web, it turns out he assigned these books to his students. He assigned Joan Collins and Mary Higgins Clark and Thomas Harris. And he cautioned students: “Don’t let any potential lightweightish-looking qualities of the texts delude you into thinking this is a blow-off type class. These ‘popular’ texts will end up being harder than more conventionally ‘literary’ works to unpack and read critically.”
Even if we are not talking “literary merit,” whatever that is, the soothing effect of getting lost might in itself have critical value. Some people, when they’re lost, read the Bible; others go for a walk; still others houseclean. Me, like Wallace and his mother, I read an allegedly “bad” book, often one I’ve read before. For this purpose trade paperbacks generally feel too fancy, although mass-markets are no longer as easy to come by, which means that I end up selecting from my ancient collection of Kings and Irvings, Koontzes and Ann Rules.
I understand why, among writers, who are usually endless-appetite readers as well, the reading of books other than Real Books is a vaguely shameful activity. We all live on borrowed time, and there’s DeLillo and Nabokov and Pynchon I’ll never get to because of the hours I’ve spent reading… well, I’m even afraid to tell you their names. You can and will judge. But I do it anyway because sometimes I just need the comfort of falling into something that is ready to catch me. I need it to hold me. That feeling of is a little sacred to me, actually. I guard my escape quite jealously, because there are times when I need it to go on.
That vaguely religious feeling about books is not as silly as it might sound. That attachment, the faith they can inspire, it is an important thing on more than a personal level: it is crucial to the future of books. It is the thing that will keep people reading a thirty-page story in the face of the 140-character limit. It is the thing that will make them think twice about buying from Amazon, if indeed it’s shown that Amazon is killing the book industry.
Oh, but you might say, but there are other purposes to literature than that comfort. There are other goals than bathing anyone in warmth. It’s not your job; you are the novelist. And even Wallace said, as quoted in the Max book that you should all buy, “The crux, for me, is how to love the reader without believing that my art or worth depends on his(her) loving me. It’s just about that simple in the abstract. In practice it’s a daily fucking war.”
Wallace, of course, was talking about the author’s relationship to his own readers, rather than readers writ large. But what I am trying to say is that the way you feel about a person who reads you can’t wholly be divorced from the way you feel about every person who loves books. In other words: if you want books to be the grail, the thing that makes us feel less alone, and you have to want that, I think, as a writer: you have to be okay with letting people come to books themselves. You have to realize that the crucial part is not the leading to water. It’s the drinking. If they don’t drink in the first place, we’re already gone.
Last week I was at the New Yorker panel on Wallace, and in the Q&A a young woman stepped up to the mic and asked whether one really needed to love the reader at all.
Mary Karr fixed her gaze firmly on the questioner and said something like, “Well, tell me: what’s the Plan B then? Help me to understand.”
And the woman looked at Karr, and opened her mouth, and left her jaw hanging. The look on her face was of someone who just could not think of anything to say.
Animal covers via jovicke at Flickr on a Creative Commons license; Dean Koontz spines photo via -Wink- at same.
14 responses
I fully agree with your main thesis. I even question whether people who judge escapist reading can really love reading all that much, if they only appreciate it in an abstract, intellectual way.
But I don’t think this applies to Twilight and 50 Shades of Grey! They are in a very different category than Stephen King or John Irving. I haven’t figured out myself what’s so awful and disturbing about them, but it’s more than that they’re merely “unsophisticated”, and I remain unconvinced that they need or deserve to be defended from criticism.
This reminds me of that Martin Amis quote from a while back:
“I want to give the reader the best glass of wine I have, the best food in my kitchen. Some writers clearly don’t feel that way at all.
When you visit the later James Joyce, you knock on the door and there’s no one there. Eventually after you have wandered around for a bit you hear him in the other room mumbling to himself as he prepares a snack of two slabs of peat around a conger eel and some homemade cider that is absolutely undrinkable.”
I’ve not read any of Amis’ work, but I have read a lot of Joyce, and despite him appearing to be a huge snob, I don’t think that’s the truth of it. He’s waving that peat-eel sarnie around for his reader’s amusement. Not everyone will take to it, but there you go.
I think you’re absolutely right about how reading is almost a sacred ritual regardless of what’s being read. In fact, everyone is reading a different book, even if the covers are the same. We are reading to be less alone, even as we are totally alone and individual in the doing of it.
and to think i felt guilty about reading Gone Girl
That was fantastic… and so true.
I know exactly what you mean. You see, I have a large collection of Toilet Books. Toilet Books are cheap paperbacks that sit in a stack in your bathroom that you read when, well, when you are on the toilet. These are books that I wouldn’t carry around to read or keep by my bed or on my bookshelf next to “literature.” However, these books are fun.
Some are suprisingly good; some are good good, some are so awful they’re good, and some are just awful. The just awful ones I’ll put away forever, but the good ones will often leave the bathroom with me or cause me to sit, reading, until I can’t feel my legs.
When I was getting my undergrad I was reading some pretty heavy stuff so it was a relief to relieve myself with an X-Files novel or “Revenge of the Crabs!”. The latter is a sequel to a novel about giant, rampaging crabs that also stars giant, rampaging crabs. It was hilarious.
I also agree with Joanna in that “Twilight” and it’s ilk are in a different, slightly upsetting category. Even I couldn’t read it. It was awful. Not even fun awful. Just awful.
It’s worth remembering that the literary sources for “Twilight” and 50 Shades” – the work of Bram Stoker and de Sade, had subversively political cores. Bram Stoker was an Anglo-Irishman and didn’t have to look far for his models of a parasitic nobility draining the lifeblood of a terrified peasantry. De Sade was an awful human being, but few others understood as he did the potential for human equality contained in the French Revolution, and much of his work bitterly satirized the hypocrisies of French society. The problem with derivatives like “Twilight” and “50 Shades” is that all we get is the titillation.
Twilight and 50 Shades of Grey have brought many people who did not consider themselves to be readers through the doors of the library where I work. One patron who came in for The Hunger Games trilogy has recently read The Virgin Suicides and Middlesex and is asking for more “good” books like those. I myself went through several Danielle Steele novels in my youth before I found A Yellow Raft in Blue Water, after that I couldn’t turn back. I have to believe that those Twilights and 50 Shades are helping the book industry by introducing readers to the concept of getting lost in a good book. I believe that for many of them, their concept of good will evolve.
I work in the book industry and stuggle with this literary elitism myself. But to me, the fundamental truth of it is that when I sneer at other people’s book choices, it is only, and purely, because I am an asshole.
People are entitled to their own tastes, to choosing what to consume and what to enjoy, and to make their own decisions about what they like. It may fill my throat with acid to watch the numbers climb, climb, climb for the Da Vinci Codes, Twilights and 50 Shades of Greys of the world, but the only reason it embitters me is because it is a choice that is different from my choice, thereby invalidating my own taste.
And yet, I am SUCH an asshole that there is a tipping point: if a book I love is recognized and celebrated it makes me feel satisfied, but if it becomes immensely popular, it sours me on the whole experience and I begin to question and deny my original love for the work, as well. My experience may not be everyone’s, but I do think there is awidespread smugness among booklovers, that we are not just content to see people reading books, but must also judge their book choices to feel superior.
Among writers, among readers, this snobbishness does little good, and it remains true that some people with as much right to be here as I will prefer a bucket of KFC to filet mignon. They know what makes them happy.
So there is a place for it all, really.
A book dealing with a light/pulp/improbable subject isn’t necesssarily badly written. Romance novels, one of the most derided genres in fiction, can be barely grammatical crap or well researched, neatly plotted and contain vivid characters. Sometimes a reader wants to be engaged but not challenged – there’s nothing wrong with enjoyment for enjoyment’s sake. 50 Shades of Grey is not a well written book. I take issue with a reader who picks it up because it’s cool to be seen with it but would never consider reading that genre and it’s myriad other well written titles otherwise.
I feel like most of the reader’s her drawn toward What I Haven’t Read and Ought To (just no starting DeLillo with his short story collection). I would love to just browse until I stumble across my next Patrick O’Brien or remember to pick up again Jack Whyte’s Camulod Chronicles it just never seems to happen. Books written for the pleasure of the reader need not be bad books, although I would not more grudge someone there love of Dean Koontz than I would apologize for my love of Dr. WHO (Darleks, anyone?) or the short-lived space-western Firefly.
I think we tangle ourselves up in Bad Book and Good/Deep/Difficult book too much. I just finished Against the Day and found it as comically rewarding as one of my favorite books since childhood, The Gang Who Couldn’t Shoot Straight. If you don’t decide you have to understand the math or the back story of Tesla v. Edison on an academic level, ATD is for me a perfect beach book, Pynchon at his most hilarious, a book as serious as Gravity’s Rainbow without mantle of Seriousness that book assumed from publication.
Relax. If you like O’Brien or Whyte recommend an author I’ve been walking past on my rare forays into Barnes & Noble (a much more serious issue of snobbery of which I am entirely guilty). I could use a break before I finally tackle Infinite Jest.
Total rubbish, life is too short to read crap.
We should remember that the Twilight series was written for kids. Fifty Shades of Gray started out as fan fiction for Twilight. These were never meant to be the insane successes they’ve become, and we should give the authors, and the readers, a break.
In my opinion, Twilight got young women to start reading. That’s a good thing. Fifty Shades got stay-at-home moms reading again. That’s a good thing. Escapism is a good thing. Fun is a good thing. If these books get a person who hasn’t stepped into a bookstore for awhile to buy a book or two, that’s a good thing.
Sometimes I feel like reading something intelligent and literary. Sometimes I feel like reading something stupid and funny. Both choices are valid choices. Whatever I’m reading, the point is, I’m reading. That’s a good thing.
I think that Beth makes an extremely good point, but I also agree that “crap” books have gotten more people reading. Friends of mine who have always found my bookishness absurd, finally understand somewhat where I’m coming from when I get into my nerd mode about it.
As a creative writing grad, and aspiring poet…reading is heaven to me. If I could do it 90% of my day, all day, I would be more than happy to, but that is not the case. However, I fall into Beth’s asshole category. I am 100% a book snob and not ashamed. If you’re reading Twilight and telling me how much you love it, my opinion of your intelligence decreases slightly. My mom and aunts, who read a lot of genre fiction (Koontz, Steele, Higgins Clark, King, etc) always get on my case about reading the books I choose to read–Nabokov, Dostoevsky, Cormac McCarthy, Saul Bellow, Joyce, Hemingway, Marquez, Kundera…the list goes on and on haha. Essentially books that, I feel, are making a larger statement about the world we live in, or at least the world that THEY lived in that is not too far removed ours.
Granted, I have read all of Harry Potter and The Hunger Games. I loved American Gods by Neil Gaiman, and I am preparing to fall into Piers Anthony’s land of Xanth in the near future. Escapism has it’s perks. After four hard years of “serious” reading, relearning why I started to LOVE books in the first place has been more than welcomed. I like to intersperse my “intellectual literary” reads, with smut in between.
Maybe this method will help me appreciate Anna Karenina more, once I finally get it finished.
@MICHELLE DEAN: great topic! I especially like the line “Real Writers (apparently a self-selecting class)”. So true.
But I would like to add the second selectors: PUBLISHERS and BOOKSTORES.
PUBLISHERS: I am Canadian, and we have a national book snobbery. I only ever bought pocket book paperbacks, because they literally fit in my pocket for the Metro. But Canadian publishers only publish Canadian authors in trade paperback (“Classy”) and never in mass market (“trashy”). SO I have read far less Canadian lit than I ought. Also: trade paperbacks are $24 here, while a mass market paperback in the U.S. is under $10, so I can read 3 trashy books for every ‘quality’ one.
BOOKSTORES: I am a horror fan and it always amused me that Thomas Harris escaped the “Horror” section of Chapters (Canada’s B&N) whereas poor Stephen King remains in the “Horror” section. Why? Thomas Harris’ Silence of the Lambs is universally well reviewed and fantastically well-written, but is a hybrid of 2 devalued genres: detective and horror. Stephen King’s The Shining is also universally well reviewed and has a much more ‘literary’ plot. So why? I would say the snobbishness against entire genres (Horror, Fantasy, Sci Fi) that are not ‘quality’ genres (Contemporary fiction, historical, magical realism) by Real Writers, Publishers and Bookstores is a shame for all concerned.
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