Hildegarde

For those of you who liked the title but didn’t get the reference to The Addams Family…um.

But it’s a little earlier this morning, and I may be a little more coherent.

The question of what makes a bad book of fiction is more difficult than the question of what makes a bad book of nonfiction, for this reason:  it’s more difficult to come to some kind of agreement about what a novel is for. 

Nonfiction books are of several types–how-to, argument, informative, polemic.   There are more, but you see what I mean.

Each of these categories has an internal logic.  A how to book that didn’t teach you how to do anything is objectively a bad how to book.  Even if we enjoy the book enormously, it has failed to do what it set out to do.

 I’m not sure we have the same kind of consensus about what a novel is for. 

Even genre novels, which at least theoretically have boundaries on what should and should not happen within them, turn out to have fuzzier borders than any of us notices at the beginning.

What makes a good mystery novel? 

I tried to make a case for the idea that the standard should be the mystery, specifically the fair play mystery–but most of the readers of this blog rejected that, in favor of more general standards having to do with character and plot that could really be applied to any fiction.

In some genres, there seem to be almost no established boundaries at all.  I’ve come to the conclusion that a novel is “science fiction” if its writer and its publisher say it is.  Beyond that, there doesn’t seem to be a lot to work with in the way of intra-genre definition.

But even the more general standards–characterization, plot, not being pulled out of the story–don’t help much, because we’re still left with coming to some consensus of what the novel is for.

If the novel is for the enjoyment of readers–if the novel exists for no other reason than to make readers happy–then even the most general of standards are useless. 

Bad grammar?  Bothers some people but not others.  Cardboard characters?  Some people positively adore them.  Plots full of holes?  Think of the fifth Harry Potter novel–it sold 850,000 copies in hardcover.  Anachronisms?  Hell, most readers won’t even notice them.

If the only purpose of a novel is to produce a subjective experience in a reader, then no novel can be called “bad” as long as it produces that subjective experience in some reader somewhere. 

My father called any mystery novel whose solution he could figure out before he reached the end “bad,” but I almost never care if I can figure the thing out.  It’s not what I’m looking for.   What was a “bad” mystery to my father was, very often, a very good one for me.

The problem goes farther than this.

Assuming that a novel is “for” giving the reader a subjective reaction, we can’t even say a novel is “bad” if readers get a different subjective reaction than the one the writer intended them to have.

For one thing, we’re in the same position with the writer’s intent here as we often are.  Writers think the intend things and subconsciously intend others.  Writers have died and their intent can no longer be divined with certainty.   Writers do things they didn’t intend that turn out to be much more spectacularly impressive than anything they did intend.

Milton was of the devil’s party and didn’t know it–and whether he intended it or not, he produced one of the most vibrant and compelling characters in the history of literature while doing it.

This is why, in the formal study of literature, the work always begins with definitions.  Before anybody can talk about “good” or “bad” books, they have to know what the book is supposed to be doing.

I think a lot of the arguments here about whether we can say that one work of literature is superior to any other are really arguments about what the novel is for–what it exists to do.

 My favorite expression of what literature is for is still Kesey’s:  it’s the truth, even if it didn’t happen. 

I used to think that was pretty clear, until I started writing this blog.

In the meantime, of course, I think I can define lots of things that would make a novel “bad.” 

Highest on the list for me would be clunky, awkward, or leaden prose.  In the end, the music of the writing will always be, for me, the most important part of reading fiction.

But I can’t even look to formal literary studies for support on that one.  There’s a lot in the canon–not just the “required reading list,” but the books that have survived for generations without benefit of English Departments–that seem to me to be leaden as hell.  Think of Middlemarch.  Or anything by Thomas Hardy.

As we go down the list, I tend to agree with most of you that anachronisms and other inaccuracies are a Bad Thing, but I’ve been told in no uncertain terms, by readers elsewhere, that that kind of thing doesn’t matter at all as long as there is  a “good story.”

But I don’t think we could even agree on what makes a “good story.” 

Looking through the openings people sent me to check out, the only one that grabbed me was the beginning of The Elegance of the Hedgehog, and that was the only one I was really interested in reading, but I’d be willing to bet that that wouldn’t be the choice of most of you here, including most of you who are here because you read the books I write.

For a long time, I reacted badly when people told me that what was important was “a good story,” because what they seemed to mean by that was a book where lots happens! people go running around having action!  shots ring out!  cars explode!  aliens land!  everybody goes rushing around madly and never thinks about anything!

Anyway, if you want to know what I think makes a novel “bad,” ones that do that stuff are the top of the list.  And the use of that particular definition for a “good” book is common enough so that I can be pretty sure that if people start telling me it’s a “really good story,” I’m going to hate it.

If the purpose of the novel is that people should (subjectively) like it, then there can be no standard of good and bad. 

People will like anything.