STIEG LARSSON & THE BLOCKBUSTER NOVEL

To all us kulture vultures, the highest value in our lives would be to make a living doing the art we love.

For a serious writer, that is almost impossible. I don't know anyone who has done it successfully without compromising something.

Bend over, and you can be successful.

Cormac McCarthy, our greatest living American writer, hit it big only with a piece of schlock, "No Country For Old Men." It's pretty bad, a potboiler full of guns and drugs and unlikely events. But it made a fairly good movie that was commercially successful.

I don't want to talk trash about commerce. We all need money. We just don't want to sell our souls to get it.

Old Cormac came about as close as anyone to making real money off real literature. Not very close, not very literary.

That brings me to my subject today: the blockbuster novel, nowhere better represented than by Stieg Larsson.

In case you've been living under a rock in the Mojave Desert, Stieg Larsson is Swedish, rich, famous, and dead. Not a good combination. His brother and father, I hear, are scooping up the millions as they roll in.

But is Stieg's stuff literature? Is it art? (One of my favorite questions.)

To me, his first book, "The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo," tried to be a good beach read and didn't succeed. Too much exposition, too boring, too hard to plow through. Not fun.

But there was a good story buried under all that crappy prose, and it made a damn good movie. Like the old Hollyood saying goes, "Bad novels make good movies."

But Stieg's second book, "The Girl Who Played With Fire," is much better, as a beach read. It's more fun, it's easier to read, and it has a stunningly intricate plot, so far. I'm about 115 pages in. I'll let you know what I think as I go along.

But is it art? Is it real literature?

Hmmm. That's a hard one.

It certainly is pop lit (popular literature). It has all the earmarks of a beach read: The characters are larger than life. Lisbeth Salander is quirkier than anyone I've ever met, and she was abused to an extreme I've never heard of in real life. 

Her male counterpart, sometime lover and co-hero, Mikael Blomkvist, is maybe a bit more realistic. He does bed every babe in sight, and he is extremely brave, and he does get rich writing for a magazine. That is all pretty far-fetched. 

So the characters are larger than life.  

And the stakes are high. Everything you can think of is at stake in both these novels. As my friend Adam would say, you have to do that in a big page-turner. These big, bestselling crime novels "have really high stakes -- outlandishly so, often, but it's your job to make the stakes high AND believable."

And the characters have to take both emotional and physical risks. Their hearts have to be on the table, and their heads have to be near the chopping block.

Old Stieg does all that, and he does it in spades.

But is it art?

No, I don't think so. But it sure is fun to read. And it takes virtually no effort, which is another sign of pop lit.

More later, as we go along.

Welcome to the first post of my new blog, Kulture Vulture.

-- Roger

Copyright 2011, Roger R. Angle

THE POWER OF ESCAPE

Why do people want so badly to escape from their own lives? Are their days so full of tedium and disappointment? Are their lives so bleak?

Are the women so unloved? Are the men so lonely?

Is that why the bestselling novel is so popular? The last one I read all the way through was "The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo," which was a real chore. The movie was great fun. Fast and furious and exciting. It had everything a popular movie should have.

But the novel was full of exposition, meaning it was mostly telling, not showing. It was slow and difficult to slog through. I would estimate that 80% of it was boring back-story. You know, how all this began, what the character was thinking years ago, old dry information, an interpretation so the reader doesn't have to think. Explanation without action. Like reading an encyclopedia.

Good novels don't have any of this. Good writing trusts the reader. Good writing is full of imagery and meaningful details, so the reader can picture what's going on and figure out what it means.

Why do many readers seem to prefer bad writing? Why would people rather read trash?

The answer, I believe, lies in the power of escape.

Most people don't want to think. They don't want insight into the human condition. They don't want to face themselves or face people like themselves. They want to pretend to be James Bond, or, in the case of the Dragon Tattoo books, they want to admire and sympathize with Lisbeth Salander and pretend to be Mikael Blomkvist. Or vice versa.

The popular novel, I believe, is not very different from the medieval romance, in which a knight in shining armor charges bravely into a dark cave to fight a dragon and rescue a princess. 

As Michael Ondaatje says, "There is nothing more seductive to a man than a woman in distress.” 

Years ago, the bestseller lists included "Presumed Innocent" by Scott Turow, an exceptionally well written popular novel. The story was much like the medieval romance, only instead of a dark cave the hero ventured into the inner city. Instead of a dragon there were black men with guns and various criminals. Instead of being a knight in shining armor, the hero was a middle-class white lawyer.

You get the idea. The hero represented the reader, who could identify with the hero and pretend to be him.

In the Dragon Tattoo books, the "knight" is a crusading reporter. The "dragons" are heartless, greedy rich men, and one of them is also a vicious serial killer.

The power of escape. We become that knight in shining armor. We fight the dragon, and we risk our lives, at least in fantasy, to do the right thing.

And when we finish the fantasy, we don't want to return to our humdrum lives. We want to go on living the thrilling life of the knight in shining armor.

After I finished reading the first Dragon Tattoo book, I had profoundly mixed feelings. On the one hand, I couldn't wait to read something good, something without all that boring exposition. On the other hand, I wanted to keep living the fantasy. I didn't want to return to my own life.

It was a strange feeling, and I fought it for about two weeks, when it finally went away. Even I was susceptible. Even I, who hates to read trash, wanted to buy the next two books and keep on being Mikael and saving Lisbeth or having her save me.

Well, guess what? I finally did it. I finally gave in and bought the books, back when I wanted to research bestsellers and learn from them. But I've got them now, and I plan to read them. Just hope I can eventually return to real life and good literature.

Wish me luck.
I'll need it.  

It's hard to resist the power of escape.

Copyright 2011, Roger R. Angle

BESTSELLERS OR JUST CRAP?

Today, I went to the library to study bestselling novels, hoping I could learn something to use in my own work.

I browsed the shelves and got out six or eight books and sat down to read a page or two. You can tell a lot right off the bat.

The first one was by John Grisham. I think it was called "The Associate" or something like that. It started out about a law student coaching an inner-city boy's basketball team.

God, it was boring. I could hardly wade through six or eight pages of the first scene. It about wore me out.

The guy sees a cop or federal agent watching him. OK, big deal. Then later he gets outside and two FBI guys hassle him about an old rape charge.

Why should I care about this guy? I don't. This is a bestseller? You can't prove that by me.

Then I tried books by John Sandford, James Patterson, Richard North Patterson, Ridley Pearson, and three or four other big-time bestseller writers.

To me, they were all pretty much the same. These books are supposed to be thrillers, but I was not thrilled. I wasn't hooked. I wasn't even interested. They were unbearably dull.

This isn't the first time I've done this. In the past, I've tried Lee Child and Dean Koontz and Lisa Gardner and John Locke (whose stuff BTW is notable for its extreme use of cliches).

Years ago, I picked up a used copy of a John Sandford novel, and the first chapter was surprisingly good. It was about a group of high-powered biz execs who went on their annual deer hunt.

At the end of the first scene, somebody shoots and kills the chairman of the board. OK, so far, so good. Then the author says, "It was a real bad day for the chairman of the board." Or something like that. 

Yargh! I threw the book against the wall. That authorial intrusion ruined it for me. I couldn't read any further.

I even read a whole John Grisham novel once, "The Firm." It was so repititious and badly written that I vowed I'd never read another one.

This was typical. These bestsellers are almost uniformly horrible. Poorly written and boring. I can't even read that crap, let alone write it. Trying to read it is a form of torture. Yargh!

So I made a decision: I will pass on the bestsellers. Who cares? If I was doing this to make money, I'd become a pimp, or sell life insurance, or go to law school, or become a hit-man. (Joking now. Har-har.)  

From now on, I'm just going to write the best novels I can, by my own criteria. Travel my own road, and see that road by my own lights.

That decision feels right. It puts me in charge, the captain of my ship, the master of my fate.

For one thing, I can study the novels I love, the great books. You know, Tolstoi, Faulkner, Cormac McCarthy, James Joyce, Hemingway, Melville, Camus, F. Scott Fitzgerald.

No more crap.
Whew, what a relief.

I don't know if I'll ever be a bestseller, or even publish a novel, but at least I'll be doing what I love and doing it my own way.

Wish me luck.

Copyright 2011, Roger R. Angle

BAD WRITING, GOOD MONEY

Today I'm debating with myself about good writing and bad writing, and about the state of book publishing, specifically mystery and crime novels.

I'm reading "A World The Color of Salt," a crime novel by a friend who is truly a great writer, Noreen Ayres. She has published three novels but as far as I can tell has not made a million dollars.

I love her writing. She is literate, sensitive to the language, and creative. There is a lot of poetry in her prose.

On the other hand, look at the big bestsellers. Take, for example, Tana French. I tried to read one of Tana French's books, “Faithful Place,” and I found it to be boring, trivial, diffuse, and unengaging. The first ten pages had exactly one interesting line.

Look at all the bestsellers: James Patterson, John Grisham, Lisa Gardner, and even the so-called literary writers, like Jonathan Franzen. Their writing is less than admirable, I would say, to be kind.

Why does weak writing make more money? Is it that the book-buying public is illiterate and poorly educated? Maybe.

Whatever reason, the fact that great writers languish while crappy writers make millions is an example of Unbearable Crap.  

One novel by a famous mystery writer was so illogical that it gave me a headache. Now that same writer has published more than a dozen novels to world-wide acclaim.

To me, everything about Noreen Ayres's book is better: the story, the setting, the characters, the underlying logic, and of course the writing.

I give you two quotes by the poet Ezra Pound:

"A man reading ought to be a man intensely alive. The book ought to be a ball of light in his hands."

"The public will buy a certain amount of poetry if you give them their striptease.”

And, from Ernest Hemingway, mocking Ezra Pound:

“In the end, the age was handed / the sort of shit that it demanded.”

(Pardon my French. But I assume you speak French.)

It breaks my heart.

And there is this, from the most famous mystery writer, Raymond Chandler:

“As I look back on my own stories it would be absurd if I did not wish they had been better. But if they had been much better they would not have been published.”

I don't know if that is true.

I hope it isn't, but I fear that it is.

And one last truth:

“There's many a bestseller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.” -- Flannery O'Connor (1925-1964)

Amen to that.

Copyright 2011 by Roger R. Angle.