Bad Books

What makes a book bad? It gives me small joy to hear the judgment pronounced, even by me, since the effect is always stifling, regardless intent. Underlying it is an insinuation that we know what's lacking, that spread-eagle badness restores our faith in norms. Not that bad books aren't legion. Christ!!! But after piling on, I always need a bath. E. M. Forster pronounced Gertrude Stein bad, and it would be pleasing to retort that the joke's on him, but who is reckless enough to explain why? In truth, no book has ever made a difference to me that someone whose judgment I respected didn't find execrable.

Genre books aren't bad. They are the paradigm of good books. If any writing can be justified, romances and Westerns and mysteries and pornography can, being like the stain on a napkin, exactly the size of themselves. Hasn't everybody on occasion wished for badder books? Roland Barthes famously remarked that he wrote books because he didn't like the books he read. When younger I thought he must be talking about the books reviewers called bad, but later I realized books like that rarely inspire anybody. Is badness, at bottom, more like incompetence or like evil? Ronald Sukenick once confided to me his ambition to write books no one would know how to judge either bad or good. I feel that.

I dream of the book so horrendous it denies me peace, tracks me down in my haven, and compels me to vomit rejoinders. To think that the author of How It Is (1964) won the Nobel Prize! Bad writing has its muse, its geniuses.