A Bad Book

A Bad Book

Terry Caesar

San Antonio, Texas

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 cel-ebrated adage of the science fiction writer Theodore

Sturgeon, “ninety percent of everything is crud.” Their characters are dull, their themes hack-

neyed, 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 bad-ness 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.

The Bad Staggers On

John Domini

Drake University

A handful of parody responses occur to me, such as a Euclidean proof of why one of my own books is bad. But to play it straight, we should ask, why isn’t “bad” in the eye of the beholder? Why should a reader go with anything other than his or her gut? What’s the use of a critic? The challenge is everywhere these days: on reader-centric websites such as Goodreads (which I quite enjoy), and on too many blogs to count. To see into the truly bad takes training; one needs to discern what a book’s assumptions are and how it betrays them—usually by falling back on ghost -gestures, some mimicry of the passions long since leached of value. But the crisis of so much contemporary criticism, especially in the mainstream review forums, is that the old ges-tures are the only ones most of the mighty Brahmins understand. Most reviews these days seem written by a software program, with inserts selected off an all-too-familiar menu: click, “vivid settings,” click, “tormented characters.” Thus, bad staggers on, propped up by dunderheads. Small wonder readers doubt the worth of a review such as this (which I couldn’t live without).