THE AGE OF CRAP: GOOD VS. BAD FICTION

What do we want from fiction? Do you read novels and short stories? I do. If so, why? What do you get from that? What do you want?

I myself want several things:

1. I want first of all to be transported out of my own body and away from my own surroundings. I want to live in a fictional world for awhile. I want to escape the bounds of boring reality and live in a more interesting, more exciting and more meaningful world. I want to go somewhere I have never been and experience something I have never experienced. The word novel after all means something new.
2. I want to learn something about human nature, to gain some insight or series of insights into the human condition, to learn something about myself that I didn't know. To come away feeling like I know myself better. This is what it is like to be me. Now I know. This is what happens to people like me if we do that.
3. I want to learn something about the world at large, to gain some insight into a place and a people that are new to me. A new vision that is meaningful. Not mere escape.
4. I want to have an aesthetic experience while I'm doing all this. To revel in the use of language, to read exciting and perhaps deathless prose.
5. I want to feel comfortable in the hands of this creator, this writer, this author, who knows his world and perhaps loves it.
6. Last but not least, I want to come away feeling like a better person, uplifted, full of knowledge and insight and purpose. I want to feel good about being human.

Is that too much to ask? It may seem like a lot, but I don't think it is.

The great writers do this: Shakespeare, Faulkner, Melville, Tolstoi, Joseph Conrad, Cormac McCarthy, James Joyce, Jorge Luis Borges.

But alas, the vast majority of modern American writers seem to have no clue. Someone, I think it was a NY Times drama critic, said most of the plays you see on the stage today are junk.

The same thing is probably true of most art, most cinema, most novels, most poetry, almost any art form. It is certainly true of most published fiction, at least the stuff I see reviewed and recommended.

This long rant was prompted by a little one-paragraph blurb in Parade Magazine (9-25-11, Pg 7) recommending "A Trick of the Light" (nice title) by Louise Penny.

I went to Amazon and read the first few pages.
(Link:) http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_ss_i_5_9?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=louise+penny+a+trick+of+the+light&sprefix=Louise+Pe

My God. It's not even clear. I was not transported, I was appalled. What a mess. This is a bestseller? Lord save us.

As Flannery O'Connor said, “There's many a bestseller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.”

Do we live in age where junk is praised? Is that the best we can do? If so, that is very sad.

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

-- Roger

Copyright © 2011, Roger R. Angle

NOVEL TROUBLE

Novels always give you trouble. Right now, I'm about 90 pages into the current rewrite, and it doesn't seem suspenseful enough or mysterious enough.

For suspense, you need to have dramatic questions that drive the story. For a sense of mystery, you need to have important things that need explaining.

I'm feeling like I don't have enough of either one, so I'm introducing a new character who is going to go up against the scariest character I've ever invented and see what happens to him. He's just a college kid, too. Poor guy.

I think of Hamlet, who comes home to find his father dead and his uncle married to his mother. He suspects his uncle killed his father. Dum-dee-dum-dum.

Raymond Chandler said that when he had trouble, he would just bring in a new character with a gun in his hand. This may be just the opposite. A gun implies power, and this kid has little of that.

Wish me luck. And him, too.

-- Roger

© Copyright 2011, Roger R. Angle

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

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

LITERARY THRILLER?

I've been a starving writer most of my adult life and have made a living in journalism, teaching and PR. That hasn't been a bad life. I'm not complaining.

I enjoy those things and think they can be valuable, especially journalism and teaching. After all, journalism and school are where most people get their understanding of the larger world, outside their family and friends. (Or should.)

But my passion has always been fiction. I've tried before to write big literary thrillers, and my goal has been to make enough money so I could quit my day job.

In 1996, I had a novel that almost went big. A publisher was talking $500,000 and a two-book deal. BTW, that makes it cheaper for them; they get two for one. Half a million is enough for a break-out book, and I was hoping to be able to write full-time.

But the deal fell through, and I'm back at it again. Am studying bestsellers, first to see if I can find any that don't make me puke, and second to see if I can adapt any of their methods to my own work.

I've read "The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo," part of the greatest publishing phenomenon that I know of--the three books in the series have sold more than 40 million copies worldwide--and I'm planning to study John Grisham, John Sandford and other big bestsellers.

I don't know if this is even possible. Obviously, lots of other writers are trying to do the same thing. Even some non-writers. It's not easy.

But some people have succeeded. There are new writers on the bestseller lists all the time. Of course, most of their work is ridden with cliches and full of outrageous plot devices.

But my theory is that you don't have to write crap for money. I don't know if my theory is correct. After all, most of the big-money books are pretty crappy. But then, so are most so-called literary novels.

Anyway, I'm on a quest to make money writing fiction, and I don't want to write crap.

I'll let you know how it goes.

Wish me luck.
I'll need it.

Copyright 2011, Roger R. Angle

WEAK, CRAPPY WRITING

Praising weak writing is almost as bad as publishing bad writing. Here is an example of great writing:
"All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." -- Leo Tolstoi

Later we'll talk about weak writing. In this space I usually talk politics. I complain about our leaders and the fact that they don't listen to me. Hell, they don't even call me.

But here is a different issue, and it is fundamentally important: literature. This art form helps shape civilization, and helps shape our society, and helps shape our concepts of good and evil, and our ideas of moraltiy, and our notions of cause and effect. Indeed, literature helps create our very concept of self.

Since literature is so important, I wonder why it has fallen on hard times. I am tired of seeing praise, in newspapers and magazines, for weak writing, for literature that doesn't fulfill its mission to enlighten us.

Recently (Oct. 21, 2010) I wrote a letter to the managing editor of the Los Angeles Times, in reaction to a book review of his:

Dear Davan Marahaj:

I was surprised when you wrote, in the Book Review Oct. 17, that the following line [from V.S. Naipaul] is famous and is from a masterpiece:

"The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it."

Of course the world is what it is. What else could it be? That is so obvious it is not worth mentioning. Indeed, it goes without saying. And many men in the world are nothing, because they lack the courage or motivation or family connections to become something.

Here, Naipaul is a keen observer of the obvious. The sentence is bland and boring and offers no insight into the world or into human nature.
So why is the line famous?

Sincrerely,
Roger Angle

Of course, I have received no reply. I didn't expect one.

Now, let's compare the V.S. Naipaul line, the opening of "A Bend In The River," with the Tolstoi line above, the opening of "Anna Karenina." Tolstoi gives us some insight into human nature right off the bat. He tells us the truth, and probably a truth that we had not ourselves observed. So he fulfills the first mission of literature, to give us insight into ourselves.

The Tolstoi novel that follows this line is one of the great novels of modern civilization. Someone once asked William Faulkner what three novels one should read, to learn how to write novels. Faulkner, argubly our greatest American novelist, answered, "Anna Karenina, Anna Karenina, and Anna Karenina."

Where are the great writers now? Where are the Tolstois and the Faulkners? I read widely and I don't find them.

What we get instead is praise, in a major American newspaper, for weak writing. I have also seen such praise in the New York Times and in The New Yorker, two of my favorite publications.

I don't think these editors are stupid.

So why do they do it? Has literature come to this?
Praise for weak writing is another form of crap.
Perhaps it is bearable, but it should not be.

Copyright 2010 by Roger R. Angle