Who’s Bad?

Phelan goes on to say, “There will, I’m sure, be no consensus about what constitutes badness or whether it belongs to the book, the reader, the situation of reading, all of the above, or none of the above,” though he’s almost wrong there. The list is pretty varied, from the morally-bankrupt to the so-bad-it’s-good varieties, though generally the harshest judgments come against fussy stylists and purple prose. Cormac McCarthy gets singled out, by name and illustration, multiple times.