Of good books and pretty pictures

Cluefon
    By Dan Dudis

This summer, the academics and authors who com pose Random House's Modern Library voted Ulysses the greatest English language novel of the 20th century. This award was given in spite of the fact that the book is perfectly unintelligible to most readers.

One might ask, what kind of literary criticism allows for such an unreadable novel to be considered so great? Let me suggest that it is the overly-intellectual, angst-ridden brand of analysis we're stuck with today, a variant of which states that in order for literature to be significant, it must be written in such a complex and illusory manner that the work is likely to leave the average reader dumbfounded.

At the Yale Club of New York City's Thursday night happy hour this summer, I formulated my alternate theory of literature on a napkin (many great and not-so-great theories have a way of beginning as scribble on a napkin). After a few of the Yale Club's bloody strong martinis, it came to me: rank a book on a scale of zero to 100 based on three criteria.

1) Entertainment value. is the book an "easy read"? Does the book keep the reader entertained, the writing style never interfering with the story-telling? While the entertainment value of a book is a somewhat subjective judgment, most of us can recognize when a book has the potential to be entertaining to a large segment of society, even if it does not succeed in captivating our own attentions.

2) Writing élan. how is the book written? Is the writing simplistic and clumsy, or is it effortless yet elegant?

3) Critical acclaim. how has the book been received by the literary establishment? After assigning the book scores of zero to 100 for each of the three criteria, the final overall cosmic greatness of a book would be arrived at as follows: 0.6(entertainment value) + 0.3(writing élan) + 0.1(critical acclaim) = literary merit. Perhaps this equation will be the beginning of my nascent math/lit double major. At any rate, it should serve to put the focus back where it belongs: on the plot--the "story" that the author is attempting to tell.

Over the past century, the arts have largely forgotten their primary purpose: to entertain. A simple linear plot line with a beginning, middle, and end has been thrown out the window for labrynthine writing styles, magical realism, phallic imagery, and numerous other literary fads. It used to be that people debated whether or not a book was "good," that is, whether or not it kept them entertained. Similarly, people used to argue over paintings--was the picture created appealing?

While entertainment value and visual aesthetics are both subjective, at least criticism based around the ideal of the "good" book and the "pretty" picture represented a debate formulated around the central purpose of each art form. Modern literature has largely run away from this basic tenet of good writing. It is no accident that television and film, the two artistic genres still largely committed to entertainment, are simultaneously the most popular and the most critically scorned.

It's high time that literature followed television's lead and got back to the business of entertaining the masses. Once again, to Ulysses: I spent so much time trying to decipher Joyce's convoluted writing that the story became lost. I'm not alone; I would be quite surprised if the number of people who were truly entertained by Ulysses topped 10,000; there is definitely something to be said for the page-turner. Under my theory, Danielle Steele is in fact a better writer than James Joyce. Her entertainment value score easily beats his, more than canceling his higher critical acclaim score, thus giving her overall superiority.

Which is not to say that I advocate the introduction of "English 169: The Pot-Boiler. From Danielle Steele to Judith Krantz. Explores the genre that climaxed with Fabio" to the venerable Blue Book. To be great literature, a book needs to be more than a page-turner. I've spent many hours on the sand with Anne Rice and her vampires--while the pages do indeed fly by, her literary élan is nonexistent.

One hot June day two summers ago, my sister and I were lying on the beach. I was devouring To Kill a Mockingbird; she had just started The English Patient. Susie hadn't been reading long when her angry voice interrupted my Southern dream world. She proceeded to read me some long-winded and entirely unintelligible passage from the critically-lauded novel. Too distracted to respond, I slipped quickly back into Harper Lee's Pulitzer Prize-winning masterpiece. My sister went swimming. I didn't. Miss Lee's novel had succeeded in trumping this consummate beach bum's yearning for the cool waters of the Atlantic. No small feat, I might add.

The truly great writers like Harper Lee know how to write books that are both beautifully written and enthralling to read. Lee won the 1960 Pulitzer Prize in Letters for To Kill a Mockingbird. If it were written today, I suspect that Lee wouldn't be given the time of day by publishers. To Kill a Mockingbird would be rewarded with the scorn of the literary elite--"Why, isn't that a children's book?" Lee doesn't waste her (and her readers') time with opaque writing and elaborate literary devices. Instead, she manages the singular act of capturing an entire time and place, of giving her readers a story told so beautifully they become immersed in her tale of Maycomb and its mockingbirds.

"Mockingbirds don't do one thing but make music for us to enjoy. They don't eat up people's gardens, don't nest in corncribs, they don't do one thing but sing their hearts out for us. That's why it's a sin to kill a mockingbird." Perhaps the same could be said of Miss Lee and her "good story." I can only hope that it's not too late for today's mockingbirds.

Danielle Steele included.

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