No—I’m not talking about bringing more fantasy and magical realism to your bookshelf, though it might mean that. I felt called to write this after scrawling through reviews for Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles, and seeing reader after reader preface their review with disclaimers such as “This was trash” followed inevitably by “but I enjoyed it.” Why do we feel the need to excuse our pleasure? What’s more, why do we assume entertainment is not worthy? Some books might impart little insight, but of all books I have seen generate reader shame, this one irritated me the most. Anne Rice’s atmospheric Vampire Chronicles dealt with questions of suicide, existential emptiness, grief, and the shadow self, as well as their place within theology. It isn’t her fault that her vehicle for these ideas was this folkloric archetypal monster that haunts the shadows, nor that these turned out to be such engaging stories that connected with readers. On the contrary I would have thought it a sign that she was a master of her craft. She redefined the vampire myth and connected with readers on a deep, archetypal level, revealing the shadows of our collective unconscious.
In the 19th century, good writing was popular writing. Dostoyevsky, Dickens, Tolstoy, and Dumas all published their stories as serials, and readers wanted more and more. These were not stories that centred magic but they were engaging and their prose simple. It wasn’t too different from the way we binge Netflix series today. Admittedly they were often a little on the long side, bloated with what now might be considered filler content (I remember scenes of pastoral life getting tiresome in Anna Karenina, in particular), but we have to consider that they were paid by the word or line—and that their words were in great demand. Still, Tolstoy and others like him demonstrated an ability to say a lot with a little in tight short stories such as The Kreutzer Sonata, and The Death of Ivan Illych. It is hard to write a story where you know the heart so well that the prose can narrow in scope. Think of the those books in the careers of modern writers such as Cormac MccCarthy’s The Road and Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go; both got so close to the heart of the matter there was no need for superfluous lyricism. But beauty shines through their semantic richness. The words alone are just words. They do not self-describe as wordsmiths or lovers of words, as if words were shiny things like gold, diamond and titanium we can mine from the ground. But few words, strung together, can convey deep meaning. The writers who have been described as masters of their craft, such as Jhumpa Lahiri, use prose sparingly and to great effect.
And yet somehow, we have come to a place where we believe that literary merit is found in the works that experiment with form, that juggle metaphors, however contrived, that find unusual alternatives for clichés no matter how longwinded and inauthentic. I see it in the way some books are heralded above others: loose, fragmented, flat, perhaps edgy, no demonstrative ability to tell a good story or captivate readers.
Sally Rooney’s first two novels connected with readers in a manner comparable to what would have happened in the 19th century. So many of us felt seen and understood on a deeper level. We also enjoyed the ride. Infamously, Will Self—while promoting a line of macarons at the restaurant Hakkasan in 2019—dismissed her work as “very simple stuff with no literary ambition.” I think Rooney may have had the same bone with books by writers with huge literary ambitions and self-consciously complex prose. In her Normal People, one character laments the state of modern literature: “It was culture as class performance, literature fetishised for its ability to take educated people on false emotional journeys, so that they might afterwards feel superior to the uneducated people whose emotional journeys they liked to read about.” I wonder if in writing her Beautiful World, Where Are You? she was taking a stab again at this literary world, at once criticising the “pretty little novels” about nothing, and (arguably) writing one of them (to make a point?).
Seriously, our priorities have shifted so much: a few months ago I was reading a piece in The New Yorker where the reviewer slated Roberto Bolaño’s prose for its purported flatness. The author Giles Harvey remarked: “He was something of an anachronism: a great novelist who was not a great writer. You have to go back to Balzac and Dostoyevsky to find masters of the novel form who showed so little interest in the sentence.” But if verbosity is seen as the peak of literary prowess, we wouldn’t have Albert Camus or Gustave Flaubert or so many of the writers who are considered masters of their craft. As a Zen gardener pares back the chaos to show us what is most important, I think good writers know which words matter.
This tendency towards self-flagellation exists in other arenas in the art world, too. In a bid to accumulate cultural capital, we’ve stared bleakly at grey canvases justified with an essay full of art talk, read those books that everyone is supposed to like and praise when they offer us nothing at all. Sometimes their hype is justified. But I don’t think many of the works praised for their worthiness now—or namedropped in conversations—will stand the test of time. Ideas about whether or not art ought to be enjoyed have been shifting since the industrial revolution. Now many of us will gladly—or rather, unhappily—sit through a 4-hour opera in absolute silence. In the 18th and 19th century, opera was a more leisurely affair. You’d go irrespective of what was on. It was a chance to meet friends, perhaps meet your future partner. Complain about the performance or sing its praises. Drink and eat. Ilana Walder-Biesanz writes for Opera Vivre about how, in the 18th century, composers would give a less prominent singer the first aria in act two: “This was known as the “sorbet aria”: it was traditional to serve sorbet at that time, and the clinking of the spoons made the music difficult to hear.) If the opera truly bores you, you can always pay a visit to friends in another box or head to the gambling tables.” Cut to the present moment, and eating so much as a snack at the opera is frowned upon, a clear sign of unsophistication. You lose cultural capital.
What we place value in culturally shows what we place value in spiritually. Sometimes I read a book and I think the answer is: we place value in nothing. At the heart of so many books is an empty husk. We are granted a few slivers of real life, and no thread to connect them all. There is no meaning.
This is not to say we can’t have our lyrical novels. A good question might be, to steal from Marie Kondo, do they spark joy? Admittedly this might not be the best measure of the value of a piece of art. It might make us suffer. But that might have a function too. Since our first attempts at art, from the first cave paintings onwards, we’ve been forging storied relationships with the world outside of ourselves and the world within us, honing the art of meaning-making. Do we really need another book about a sad figure wandering around suburbia feeling disenfranchised? Perhaps yes, if it comes from a place of truth. Richard Yates’ Revolutionary Road feels potent and true and leaves you feeling a little different than you were when you went in.
We seem to have arrived in a strange era of binary thinking where the obviously meaningful and impactful and captivating is suspect. The more unnavigable and dare I say it, boring, the worthier. We know binaries are a cultural artifice, so why don’t we acknowledge this?
Re-enchanting our bookshelves means re-injecting wonder, life and meaning into books. Long have our strange species looked to the written word to find out who we are and who we can be and who we must not be. I don’t know about you, but after a pandemic and at the onset of another terrible war, I know which books I’ll be putting down—and which ones I’ll be picking up.