Popular writers considered hacks? (Brown, King)

Cafe Society
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I go out of town for a couple of days and we’re still stuck debating over the same points?

What’s even stranger is that in the thread that spawned this one, I wondered if there was something special about the Internet that precluded people from ever typing the words, Sorry, I was wrong. And now we’re back to that point in this thread.*

So it’s with real pleasure that I commend InternetLegend for a post that strikes right to the heart of the matter. Bingo. Well said. It’s one thing for a high school student to be reading something rather than nothing, because that may lead to deeper reading in the future. It’s quite another for adults to binge on junk foods their entire lives and justify it on the basis that otherwise they wouldn’t eat at all.

I’m a professional science fiction writer. Nobody would allow me the privilege of being an intellectual snob about literature if I wanted to be one. I’ve read thousands of sf stories, and just about as many mysteries. Hell, I have a first rate collection of humor books and those are even held to be a lower form of literary life than either. Oh yeah, I own several thousand comic books. You don’t have to sell me on the pleasures of storytelling or reading for fun.

It’s only when you stand up and same that all reading is equal that I call a halt. All reading is not equal. All writers are not equal. All opinions are not equal, either.

*Chuck, thanks for defending me in my absence. It’s a hopeless cause, but I’m glad you said it.

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Many readers are intimidated by books that are considered “literature.” They might look at critical reviews, literary analysis full of terms they don’t understand, and think the book must be difficult.

Good fiction doesn’t have to be dense, deep, and difficult, but a lot of readers think it is, so they don’t even try.

It’s the crap that’s hard to read, not the good stuff.

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Huh?

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Worthy of engraving!

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Exapno picked a set of bestseller lists (NYT), and then performed his analysis on two out of seven of those lists. I’ll do the same for the rest of the lists if you’d like, and we can merge the results.

This is the crux of the matter, and it’s clear you haven’t been reading my posts. My first post in this thread (#51) pointed out that we needed to define our terms. Since then I’ve shown through direct quotes that the OP and Exapno Mapcase specifically did not restrict discussion to novels.

This branch of the discussion was kicked off by post #4 in this thread. Please read it and tell me where it restricts the definition to novels. The statement that “Bestseller writers do tend to be hacks” doesn’t look ambiguous to me. It says “bestseller.” Not “popular novel.” Not “bestselling novel.” Just “bestseller.”

No, no, no! Read what I’ve posted. I never said anything even remotely like that. Let me clarify here:

If we’re talking about bestsellers (the subject of the Exapno’s post #4), then I refute the claim that the majority are written by hacks. That does not mean they have any pretension to be literary at all (e.g., Freakonomics wasn’t written by a hack, but it’s far from literary).

If we’re talking about novels and only novels, then I already agreed with you. Go back and read post #72, where I said that “having your book on a bestseller list doesn’t make you a hack, although I’d be willing to concede that there’s a strong correlation for novelists.”

Huh? Have you actually read anything I’ve written? I gave specific examples of bestsellers that aren’t written by hacks. I analyzed the lists. Nine out of ten of the Amazon bestsellers aren’t even novels! You’re arguing a completely different question than I am.

If we split this into two separate issues (“Are many popular novelists hacks?” and “Are most bestsellers written by hacks?”) then we can probably resolve things pretty quickly.

I agree with you on question #1. We’ve agreed on that since the beginning.

Would you like to discuss question #2, or are you going to keep misrepresenting everything I say without reading it?

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It may be worthy of engraving, but it certainly isn’t universally true.

War and Peace
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Brothers Karamozov
even the latest translation of Don Quixote
and not to mention the granddaddy Ulysses
and on… and on…

A list of hard-to-read “good stuff” is lengthy indeed.

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Agreed.

But there are at least as many accessible good books as difficult good books.

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Wrong. I was speaking of the bestseller genre, which by definition is novels. The rest of your misinterpretation is merely redundant.

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I think the “problem” is a combination of the “popular = bad” thing others have mentioned, AND the “genre = bad” theme.

While reasonable people can disagree about the merit of writers such as King, there are some folks whose criticism does whiff of snobbery. As literary critic Harold Bloom said when King won a Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Book Awards:

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<aurelian comes to a screeching halt> Whoa, what? You’re comparing Don Quijote with *Gravity’s Rainbow? *
Don Quijote was immensely popular from the moment it was published. It was translated into other languages and developed a sort of “cult following” in America, despite being banned. (There were Don Quijote festivals in America in the 17th Century.)
I could somewhat understand the argument that DQ is difficult because of the cultural and linguistic context; a good version must have a rather extensive glossary/ appendix. But I wouldn’t describe it as a difficult read: the majority of the book consists of vignettes, embedded stories or episodes that last a couple of chapters, then cut back to the main plot. It’s a physical book - poor Sancho spends most of his time being hungry, eating or getting beaten up.
While the first few chapters or wholly depressing (to my mind, Cervantes hadn’t quite figured out what he wanted to do with Don Quijote yet), the book is funny and clever.

Also, there seem to be vague wisps of the “snooty tweed-jacket-wearing (complete with leather elbow patches) pedantic elitist English professor” stereotypes floating around this thread, and I would like to add, as someone who has been in college for ten years (good god) and plans on staying, that this is not a fair stereotype. Oh, of course there are the snobs, the territorial academics. But there is a lot of innovation. The same professor who taught us Melville and Hawthorne (blegh) also introduced us to The Viriginian and Jon Krakauer. I’ve watched many modern Spanish movies for my classes. And just because a book is 200 years old doesn’t mean it’s necessarily high literature.

Lastly, as Orwell said, you write and speak what you read. One cannot be well-spoken without being well-read, nor can one be a real craftsman of language without reading. It’s practice.

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alkq3re32r24ufh

Sorry about that. As soon as you mentioned Ulysses I reflexively fell asleep and my head hit the keyboard.

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No question. I can wholeheartedly agree with that statement.

<grin> Well you got me there. Sort of. I still say that to the modern reader, Don Quixote is rather difficult to get through. As you say, whole sections are quite humorous and move along nicely. On the other hand, there are other whole sections that are tedious or confusing.

But we’re not here to argue whether or not DQ is difficult or not.

After I posted my listing of some excellent literature that is difficult to read, I realized that perhaps my list was a bit unfair. After all, most of them are translated works. And many of them quite old. And Gravity’s Rainbow and Ulysses are off the scale of reasonable difficulty so it is a bit disingenuous to include them.

I can’t seem to think of a modern novel that is pretty universally considered “good”, yet is also difficult to read (for the average reader). Ideas anyone?

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The Name of the freakin’ Rose by Umberto Eco!

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The Sound and the Fury?

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Well, I am just slightly biased given that I’ll likely be including some of Cervantes’ work in my dissertation…
But if (generic) you haven’t read DQ, you should! There’s a pretty good reason it’s considered one of the best novels ever written. Ok, I’ll stop preaching. :wink:

That’s tough…I would also nominate Faulkner - reading As I Lay Dying was, no pun intended, an excruciating experience.

I think it’s a difficult question because we haven’t really canonized works beyond say, the 1940’s. While I can easily think of books most anyone would agree are “important” from the 30s and 40s, I have a hard time doing so for say, the 60s. There’s so much more fragmentation.
Hence, one of the first works that comes to mind is foreign (and translated, again): One Hundred Years of Solitude. It’s been several years since I read it in English, but I would describe it as a challenging read (but undoubtedly worth the effort).

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When I had the misfortune to read the Da Vinci Code, on the recommendation of several people who should know better, and finished the book (because it’s written in such a way that you can’t not finish it) I was appalled to see on the sleeve notes that Dan Brown teaches classes in literature at some buttfuck academy. How could such a dire and incompetent prose artist teach literature?

After a few hours’ consideration, though, I realised that, since he wrote one of the most successful novels of the past few decades, of course he’s got something to teach. He can teach how to write a book that might (or might not) sell gazillions of copies, regardless of quality. Which, I think, fits in well with Exapno Mapcase’s statements about the “bestseller” genre.

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I’d echo aurelian in that Don Quixote is a must read for anyone serious about reading. I put it off for years (nay, decades) until I saw the new translation by Edith Grossman. I bought it. I read it. And I highly recommend it.

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Aye mate. Thar’s the rub.

If it’s written in such a way that one can’t not finish it, then odds are it’s headed to the bestseller shelf.