Buckets of Peanut Butter

Suspect

Carol Guess

Western Washington University

Heather Lewis’s second novel, Notice (2004), is a work of genius. Underrated, rarely discussed, the book belongs with contemporary classics. It is perhaps the most disturbing book I’ve ever read, and among the most compelling. It illuminates the state of female, specifically lesbian, subjectivity under contemporary American regimes by deconstructing genres that have failed to capture women’s experi-ences: pulp, noir, mystery, romance. It subverts these genres, yet never falls prey to the directives of political correctness.

Notice was published posthumously. Its narra-tive voice was so unique that no press would touch it until Lewis committed suicide at forty. Her suicide allowed the book’s publication; now she was dead, and sufficiently chastened for examining experiences that mainstream culture attempts to suppress.

Before she killed herself, Lewis wrote one more novel, The Second Suspect (1998). This book was published and reviewed during her lifetime. It was bought, and it was read.

The Second Suspect is a terrible book. But it’s not just a bad book; it’s so much more. It’s a bad book riffing off the author’s masterpiece. The Second Suspect is a rewriting of Notice, but minus everything that makes Notice literary. The Second Suspect takes plot, characters, and themes from Notice and reduces them to formulaic drivel.

The Second Suspect is the work of an author who understood that her masterpiece had been cen-sored, tossed aside, misunderstood. So she sat down and rewrote it. She made it bad, deliberately bad. And the public loved it.

Buckets of Peanut Butter

Kim Herzinger

University of Houston-Victoria

We don’t know the really bad books. The really bad books, most of them, were never published. They’re out there, though, hundreds of thousands of them, in drawers, in a box in the garage, in publishing house dumpsters worldwide. Some of them, perhaps, are buried deep in the dumpsters of vanity press publishing houses. Perhaps there are books so unre-claimably bad that even the money the author was willing to put out for publication just wasn’t enough. Perhaps, once, even a vanity press house turned in shame, refunded the money, and bandied the words “it’s just not for us” around the room. Perhaps.

Perhaps the people who are writing us emails from Nigeria, telling us we are heirs to 2.35 million dollars if we would only allow them to deposit it in our accounts (enter your routing number and account number, please)—perhaps they are writing books,
too. What would they be like? They would, I believe, be bad. Really bad.

But of course what we are talking about here, I think, are the bad books that have been published. Better yet, we are talking about the bad books that have—at one time or another—been thought by a significant number of people to be good. These buck-ets of peanut butter—Donald Barthelme’s phrase for bad books—sit sadly on the shelves of every used bookstore in the world, hundreds and hundreds of bad books, wretched books, books once produced by gleeful publishers and bought by hopeful readers, books which await new company from the buckets of peanut butter now sprightly lining the shelves at Barnes & Noble and Borders.

But what we are really talking about are bad books which have been seriously acclaimed as good books, even great ones. Or, at least, bad books written by writers who have been acclaimed as good, even great. With this we enter into a more joyous world, a world of laughter and tears. Across the River and Into the Trees (1950), Grimus (1975), The End of the Affair (1951), half of John Updike, the bad William Wordsworth, the bad Percy Bysshe Shelley. And now, big danger: Pamela (1740), the poems of James Joyce, Frankenstein (1818).

I am in trouble now, so I will get out of it. Frankenstein is a book made great by its badness. We cannot do without it. Nor can we do without one more book, the greatest bad book in the English language. It is not great in the way that Frankenstein is great, of course. It is great because it cannot but deeply entertain us with its earnest vigor, its invin-cible belief in its own genius, its merciless craft, its transcendent obliviousness. I give you this, if you have not already heard: Poetic Gems by William McGonagall, poet and tragedian.