(Great. Now I've got Weird Al's new "Confessions Pt. 3" running through my head. Excellent.)
I thought I'd try to keep up a side list of the books I've been reading, just for fun. This should be accompanied by a warning: I no longer read much ... um ... "serious" literature. I've found it impossible to read anything requiring concentration during my lunch breaks, because I'm constantly interrupted. At night, I'm usually too tired to try anything harder. Thus, I read a lot of literary candy. My biggest vice: Chick Lit.
There. It's out. I have to admit that the more high-fashion upperclass escapism is in the book, the more I enjoy it. The Devil Wears Prada? Hilarious. I'll one up you and suggest Everyone Worth Knowing, also by Lauren Weisberger.
However, my absolute favorite author is Rafaella Barker, of Hens Dancing and Summertime. Hard to find, worth the trouble.
As bad a rap as Chick Lit gets, though, the content (at least most of what I've read) isn't bad. A lot of these authors (all female, however much Nicholas Sparks wants to join the club) are incredibly well read, can string together a decent sentence and have a marvelous knack for voice and pacing. They can research what background they need, or else they know to keep their subject matter limited to what they know. The materialistic subject matter is, by and large, handled with an addictive satire. These women know their stuff.
Trouble is -- and you former English majors can take a deep breath and get ready to scream now -- I find myself more and more comparing the range and subject matter to those of Jane Austen. Let's face it -- there's a reason the Chick Lit authors continue to rip off the mighty Austen's plots.
So here's the issue: Austen and Leo Tolstoy(i) are considered "serious" literature. What makes their work more important than, say, Bridget Jones' Diary? This question is not meant to offend -- I honestly wonder about this. I especially find it hard to understand why the likes of Jack Kerouac and Earnest Hemingway are so all-fired worth our time. Sure, Kerouac was "experimental," but most of the experimenting had to do with drugs -- the typewriter just happened to be handy, and now high school students must suffer. Don't even get me started on John Updike. I'm starting to think the only thing cringe-worthy for (most) Chick Lit is the often garish cover art.
For further research, I'd recommend:
Rafaella Barker
Lauren Weisberger
Marion Keyes
Sophie Kinsella
Haven Kimmel
Sarah Mlynowski
Jane Green
Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez
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7 comments:
I like chick lit too. I've even read some decent romance novels. But most people blame that on the same thing they blame for my liking John Updike, Mad Magazine, and country music-- I apparently lack a good sense of taste.
I, of course, think I have a fine sense of taste. "Having good taste" has always seems to me to mean "I've bought white academia's definition of what a person is supposed to like and not like," so I don't want to have good tastes. I'm happy with my tastes being merely acceptable and pleasing to me.
Odd you should bring this up as I've just had the strange experience of picking up Hemmingway for the first time (because it was something I *should* read) and actually enjoying him. Indeed, I would say I am able to comment on his stuff as I was heavily biased against him before I started reading his stuff.
I too have thought about what distinguishes 'Literature' from 'Candy'; why Austen is the former and Helen Fielding the latter. The basic elements of each are the same: plot, characters, setting, conflict etc. And indeed, as you pointed out, on the surface level, on the level of the basic story, they are very similar.
What I think distinguishes them though, is their depth. Although I have read both Bridget Jones books a couple times apiece with great enjoyment, they do not satisfy the way Austen or the Brontes do. The reason is that when I finish an Austen or Bronte I feel slightly bigger, like I've grown a little bit. I feel like I understand myself or other people better than before I started, or that some 'truth' has been expressed in a way that helps me to understand it better or makes me think about it in a new way. While Fielding, Clancy, Crichton, O'Brian, and Grisham amuse me, and may even educate me, they do not deepen me.
I generally think of 'Candy' as being a good story, and Literature as being truth expressed in a good story. This is a very subjective definition, but generally I find most books to fall pretty easily into one of the two categories. I also find that, in general, what is considered 'great literature' by academics falls into my 'Literature' definition. The one point where I often disagree is in 'experimental writings' or writings where the style is the only notable feature. Such writings are interesting if you are intregued by the technicalities of writing but are usually pretty bad stories.
And of course, one of the main reasons it's easy to read the Candy and more difficult to read Literature, is that in order to extract the truth out of Literature one has to work harder, whereas with the Candy there's nothing really to extract but the story itself.
Besides the fact that I think amusement and education are just as valuable as this arbitrary property of "deepening," I think the subjectivity of finding things like "depth" and "truth" make those things useless for sorting "hard vs. easy" or "candy vs. literature" or "story alone vs. truths."
You can argue all you want in favor of correspondence, how many people find truths in some writing but not in others, but that doesn't tell you much. There's still a major question to answer-- does writing get classified as "high" or "low" because of inherent properties that make some writing better or because people are taught to trumpet certain things and not others?
Call me Thomas Kuhn (I prefer to be called Paul Feyerabend), but my answer is the second. I find no "truth" in Shakespeare but I do in John Grisham. Does that make me weak minded or simply place me outside the literary establishment? The establishment, curiously, has repeatedly told me the former, not the latter. Why isn't Grisham worth an exposition while Shkespeare is still giving people advanced degrees? Beats me. I must be defective. That makes me think it's all some kind of academic turf issue rather than a debate that should have any consequences.
It's nice if you find "truth" and "depth" where the academics do and you don't where they don't. Pat yourself on the back and celebrate-- the establishment will accept you! But don't ever make the establishment's mistake of going a step farther. Subjective ideas like "I find truth in Book X but not Book Y" are great, and we all learn something if you share because we might not have seen it ourselves, but you can't go past "To me, Book X is great literature and Book Y is not" and on to "Book X is great literature and Book Y is not." In other words, if these things really are objective, find objective language to do the sorting. If they are subjective, mind your cakehole.
Gosh, Nate, you are pure evil. I'll be praying for you. :-)
Amusement, education, depth, and truth are the literary equivalent of peer review, and, as such, are pretty good at spotting themselves in the mirror. It is a tad barbaric to let such an unobjective jury be judge of objective bluebloods like 'greatness'; but subjective, analog emotions are better suited for the varying forms and levels of response that literature induces. In many cases, the books themselves function as arbiters, forming spiderwebs of homages, allusions, 'borrowings', and other more and less blatant forms of theft. Thefts, especially ones committed over the course of centuries, are some of the best indicators of value that I know of.
As an adherent of Northrop Frye's archetypes, I posit that the 'objective language' you're (not) looking for forms the books themselves, from the syllables up; that there is greater, more complex and more varied archetypal density in 'a great book' than in Dan Brown's latest. Shakespeare is just goofing off a lot of the time, but sometimes he gets deadly serious and his words run into the nearest phone booth to change from middle-aged, half-drunk golfers into ape-shit, scalpel-wielding ninjas. If you could put his mouth to metal, he'd be assembling fleets of battleships in bottles. Now there are big words* and big ideas in Johnny G, too: he can do ninjas like Quentin Tarantino, and he's done golf like Tiger Woods. It's just that he rarely does both simultaneously. (The trick is getting the ninjas to golf. If you get the golfers drunk enough, they'll believe pretty much anything you tell them.)
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Snippets from the death-match between John Grisham's The Summons and Shakespeare's King Lear:
Wm Shakes. attacks with evil sisters Goneril and Regan; Jn. Grish. counters with meeting of lawyers aboard a yacht.
Shakes.: old, king gives away kingdom, goes mad; Grish.: old judge takes cash, dies, sons go mad.
Shakes.: gouging out eyes; Grish.: arson. [Is it just me, or does all literature about the South involve burning down things?]
Shakes.: greed vs. love; Grish.: greed vs. greed.
Shakes.: old man Lear takes off all his clothes in thunderstorm; Grish.: wrinkled secretary buys new red dress, brings cleavage out of retirement.
Shakes.: blank verse with occasional couplets; Grish.: comma splices with occasional complex sentence.
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Conclusion: As far as John Grisham goes, Shakespeare is good literature, & perfectly good for 'borrowing'.
* [Lest I equate lexicographical novelty with good story, there's what Hemingway called his best work:
"For sale: baby shoes. Never worn."]
So if someone "steals" an idea then the work it was stolen from is somehow better? I don't even want to touch that one. But I will.
The past always has a hand up if you put it that way. I see around me in Pennsylvania beautiful farmlands. I write about the beauty. Oh, wait, Updike mentioned it first! He was getting at truth, but I'm only copying Updike. I realize that people have a dark side within and a light side within, and I make characters to match, set in a touching coming of age story in the British Isles. Oh, wait, Shakespeare covered that one! I'm merely copying him. Not because I am copying him, of course, but because he came first.
Kind of silly, huh? Well, of course you won't say yes. But I think you should.
What I still don't get is why people go around saying things like Chris said-- "And of course, one of the main reasons it's easy to read the Candy and more difficult to read Literature, is that in order to extract the truth out of Literature one has to work harder, whereas with the Candy there's nothing really to extract but the story itself"-- without bothering to question whether the reason "truth" isn't found in the "candy" is because people are either too lazy to go deep enough to find it (which would make the candy all that much better as "literature" then, wouldn't it?) or are taught not to bother looking there (my pet theory, because I get giggles out of spouting it).
I'm willing to call a book I like a book I like and a book I don't like a book I don't like. What gets me all hot and bothered is being told that one set is worthy and another isn't, only because other people say so. I have no problem with people studying Shakespeare or not studying Shakespeare. (Poor boy gets my ugly stick, I know. I really mean all the "great literature.") I have problems with people calling Shakespeare superior.
I did not ever say, nor even imply, that education or entertainment were unworthy in any way. I merely stated that they are not enough to warrant classifying a story as Literature (although Literature usually contains both). I like lots of stories that I wouldn't consider great.
Of course the problem with something like writing is that everything about it is subjective. So classifying it one has to rely on some subjective criteria. However, that does not mean that such labels have no meaning or value.
Authors of potential Literature are trying to express 'truth' in a new or an enlightening way. If he succeeds, the reader has a subjective experience of enlightenment. If many readers share this experience then he has succeeded many times.
Now Nate, you said: "You can argue all you want in favor of correspondence, how many people nfind truths in some writing but not in others, but that doesn't tell you much. There's still a major question to answer-- does writing get classified as "high" or "low" because of inherent properties that make some writing better or because people are taught to trumpet certain things ad not others?"
The inherent property is the ability of the work to induce the subjective response or deepening. That requires two things about the piece: it must contain ‘truth’ and it must be expressed in a meaningful and accessible way. Both of these are qualitative of course; truth can be trite or profound and it can be expressed in a beautiful or obscuring way.
So far I’ve identified three marks of great literature: its ability to communicate truth, the value of that truth, and the quality of its expression of truth. All three of these are qualitative and dependant on the individual reader so how do we go about ranking books? Also how do we avoid the bias of current academic trends/academic snobbery?
The answer to the first is to simply see if most readers after reading the story find that they have been enlightened, that the truth conveyed was profound, and was the expression of the truth was effective and moving (and in particular more effective and moving that other expressions of that truth). If many people find this to be the case then the work may be a piece of great literature.
There is of course a caveat to this: the reader must be qualified to comprehend the work. Every story requires some level of understanding from the reader and some require more that others. Shakespeare, for example, requires the reader to be able to understand Elizabethan English, have a level of knowledge about Elizabethan culture, and have a decent background in mythology, history, and religion. A reader who lacks this background will simply be lost. You may cry foul as this allows ‘the establishment’ to say that anyone who disagrees is merely ignorant, however it is a valid point. As a child I attempted to read books, ‘Oliver Twist’ is one that springs to mind but there were others, that were too advanced for me. I lacked the ability to understand them so I found the book boring, plodding, or incomprehensible. However, when I re-read them as an adult I found them to be interesting, exciting, and profound. Thus, looking back, my decade of ragging on Dickens merely expressed my ignorance and lack of life experience, not anything about the value of Dickens. If you want a science analogy we only consider comments on grant proposals or manuscripts to be worthwhile if the reviewer is qualified to understand it.
The answer to the second problem of bias it the one that Mary gave: time. Good Literature will meet the three above requirements within a particular time/culture. Great Literature must be able to communicate its message so well that it overcomes the boundaries that time and culture put up to understanding. If a book passes muster in a time when its style and contents are out of fashion, it must be pretty good at communicating its ‘truth’ and be an exceptional example. This is why great literature is usually at least 50 and even more frequently more than 100 years old. I certainly don’t trust ‘the establishment’ when it comes to books that are younger than that because current fashion is such a strong force.
This system actually works pretty well. A book that has made it into the ‘cannon’ is one that many people over a long period of time have found to be profound, enlightening, or beautiful. And I would argue that this constitutes evidence that such a book is an exceptional piece of art that is strong. Because it is a subjective thing some people will always disagree, but I suggest that if one doesn’t find anything in such a work, it’s more likely the fault lies with the reader than with the work.
Of course the way this system works, some works that are worthy of being called great may, and indeed almost certainly are, missed. However, it makes it highly unlikely that any unworthy work will be included.
Chris, I didn't mean to say that you find them unvaluable. I meant to say that there is no reason to exclude them from defining good literature. Sorry about that.
You could have made that last bit a lot shorter-- "Of course, Nate, I'm going to argue for and from correspondence. And I'm not going to touch the points and questions you pose, either answering them or explaining why they don't matter." Your fingers would have appreciated it.
Thank you also for adding yourself to the ranks of thsoe who call me ignorant. I won't say any more because my wife says I'm supposed to be nice to people. Actually, I'll say one thing. Get off your enlightenment high-horse. If you don't understand why I say that, posh on you for being ignorant about your own writing here.
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