A Bad Book

Bad novels, like unhappy families, are bad in their own ways. Take Herman Melville’s Pierre (1852)—so extravagantly mannered as to be barely readable, and yet so exquisitely conceived, so archly comic that you can emerge from its pages at last and think that the whole assemblage is pretty good; somehow the fact that the book is bad becomes either irrelevant or else important in a whole new way.

Or consider Theodore Dreiser's The Genius (1915). I taught it once, and recalled to the class T.S. Eliot's great judgment of Henry James: "a mind so fine that no idea could violate it." Dreiser, we might venture, had a mind so crude any idea could violate it. And yet who could not somehow honor his wooden conceits as well as lumpish sentences? Not H. L. Mencken, who both loved them and loved to lambast them. Not even my students (though all were relieved to move on with the syllabus).

Of course, off as well as on the syllabus, most novels are bad. Bad, that is, in the words of the celebrated adage of the science fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon, "ninety percent of everything is crud."

Their characters are dull, their themes hackneyed, their narratives derivative. They're scarcely bad in their own ways. What else to say?

Off the syllabus: nothing. On the syllabus: plenty.

To me, the most interesting examples of badness take place within approved academic discourses. Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), for one example, is wondrously bad: stylistically precious, lavishly sentimental, ludicrous of characterization (poor Janie), incoherent of theme (poor Janie, who yet manages to all but literally kill two men). But the great thing about the novel is that none of this matters!

Whether from the point of view of feminism or African American culture, Their Eyes is a damn good book. How churlish now not so much to disagree as to intervene with other considerations altogether! Indeed, I feel so bad right now that I'm prepared to admit it's me that's bad, not Hurston. I should be picking on somebody who has either a more secure reputation or none at all.

Can we conclude today that there are no more bad books, only bad readers? Such readers don't know how to make even the worst books productive. Making them productive won't make them better. It will just take the whole category of good vs. bad off the seminar table, on which are stacked confident piles of Their Eyes.