The American Book review’s new feature on “bad books” is a great read: a few dozen scholars and literary types choosing, based on purely personal criteria, a new canon of garbage. Some predictable (but still fun) classics-bashing can be seen in the selections of The Great Gatsby and Huckleberry Finn, though by and large this is a funny and good-hearted exercise, and I side with participant James Phelan: “It’s good that ABR wants to promote the discussion of the bad—another sign that it’s once again safe to talk about better and worse when we talk about literature.”
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, and even though I stand in awe of Blood Meridian (and enjoyed Pretty Horses and No Country), it’s always heartening to see a critical darling get ribbed in public. 
Of course no list of this kind exists but to incite argument and elicit taste-based showdowns, so I’ll list the most recent and surprisingly bad book I’ve read. It’s the kind of book that gets plaudits for supposedly showing “the dark heart of the American dream” or some such nonsense, a book so stylistically mannered and thematically limited that it begs the question of how its author was capable, before and after, of writing incredible, naturalistic essays that teem with life and emotion. This book is throw-it-on-the-ground-in-the-middle-of-a-chapter bad, and the chapters are only about 3 pages each. It’s bad not only because the metaphors are overwrought, the protagonist is hateful, and the entire point of book seems to be, “Look how hateful this protagonist is”–it’s bad because one is forced to wonder what a waste of talent it was for Joan Didion to have written a novel as cold and unenjoyable as Play It As It Lays.
You know what really wasn’t very good? The Diving Pool: Three Novellas by Yoko Ogawa. I have no idea why that book got as much attention as it did.
But you know what made that book look like an entirely pleasurable and even occasionally transcendent experience? What Can I Do When Everything’s On Fire? by Antonio Lobo Antunes. My God. I’ve never seen such an overblown style put to such useless effect. And I’m someone who’s extremely sympathetic to what a guy like Lobo Antunes is trying to do.
Hate is a wee bit strong, but I read “Stoner” by John Williams hearing many wonderful accolades (and still do from people I respect) but I found it to be dull, one-dimensional, utterly depressing and not worth the time it took to read. Of course, I could be wrong…
I hate anything Faulkner. I’ve never tried so hard to love something I hate so much.
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Bonsai by Alejandro Zambra is not the gem that people say it is. Looking around, I realized that I have thrown away or given away almost every book I’ve never liked.
(I loved Blood Meridian,too, John.)
Jim: Ahhhhhhh! Nooooooo!
Jeff: Not with you on Bonsai, with you on McCarthy.
Where to start? Snow by Orhan Pamuk surely is a good book but I have quitted reading it the other day. The Black Swan – The Inpact of the Highly Improbable by Nassim Nicholas Taleb should also be listed here, the same with Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky.
Treasure Island, Moll Flanders, Catch 22.
Like I wrote, I enjoy a public flaying of an accepted classic as much as anyone… but surely the flayer has an obligation to at least state why they think, say, Catch-22 or Crime and Punishment are bad. Let’s really take these books to task, people!
When I heard a new Antonio Lobo Antunes was coming out in English, I ordered it in Spanish translation right away. I’m a big Antunes fan and wanted to prepare myself to review it. Boy was I surprised. That book’s a dud. Try The Inquisitor’s Manual.
[...] Books Bad BooksShareWe discussing books we love to hate over at The Constant Conversation. Which, if you’re me, means What Can I Do When [...]
[...] books and the reader/writer Over at The Constant Conversation, they’re having a discussion on bad books. It made me start thinking back over my reading history and trying to remember what were some bad [...]
I tried with What Do I Do When Everything’s On Fire? I really did, but alas, I gave up. There was a moment when I realized that life is too short to wade through something so dense (especially if it afforded little pleasure). A part of me admires that book for being the way it is, though that admiration does not mean I have to read the damn thing.
Also, I really can’t stand just about anything by Thomas Pynchon. I just don’t get the hype. Oh, and I thought White Noise was pretty awful.
I would think that what is considered “bad” is categorized as such in opposition to the aesthetic values that are in formation during an era. So, Charles Dickens is often easy to dismiss since Modern lit began, but reading the historical novel, Drood, I was surprised to see Dickens being described as the “Shakespeare of his age” by the ostensible narrator, Wilkie Collins. While I love Dickens personally, I always say it a little apologetically because I know that many readers consider him too sentimental to the extent of being maudlin for our post-Modern sensibility.
Reading the article, I loved the concept of the baad bad. The author that immediately pops to mind is Hemingway at his worst.
I once took a memorable class on Politics in the Postwar American Novel, and one of the books we read was Gravity’s Rainbow. I was the only person in the entire class to even half-like it. But the classic that stood out to me in that class as straying into “bad” territory was All the King’s Men, for the reason that Robert Penn Warren the ruminative poet wouldn’t go away and let Robert Penn Warren the novelist write a readable version of the story. By the way, one of the real classics of this kind of takedown is the absolute evisceration of James Fenimore Cooper by Mark Twain.
I was really put off by the new Joshua Ferris book. “The Unnamed” just completely fell on its face. Part of my disappointment was probably due to my keen interest in the organizing idea – man cannot stop walking – and the nearly complete failure to do anything remarkable or interesting with the premise. Part of it, though, was the was the characters were fleshed out. Or not fleshed out. If there was a Razzy award for “Worse Supporting Character in a Novel” I would nominate the detective…
I hope his next effort is better. I’ve enjoyed his other work.
“The Lovely Bones” is probably the worst book I have read. It’s a sentimental trap. It is unbelievable–I’m gonna catch this serial killer by sending my daughter to his house and see if she can dig up dirt to prove he killed my first daughter. And then let us neatly end this charade of prose by killing the serial killer with an icicle. Worst Book Ever.
Nausea, by Sartre, is an awful novel. It fails because of its didacticism and Sartre’s inability to create complex characters with any emotional depth that might bely his philosophical convictions. In comparison, The Plague, by Camus, is a great book, nondidactic, it’s reflections of existence emerge organically through emotionally and intellectually complex characters, who are alive, actively searching for meaning, depite the facts.
Moby Dick. That book was terrible.
Frankenstein, too. And not because the language may be difficult. It’s just not very good.
Catch 22. I can’t understand why it was sooo popular.