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

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.