Worst Fiction, 2010!

It would be audacious to offer a common link for so many works conceived in so many different environments over so many years, and yet offer it I do! I read a great deal of fiction in 2010 and watched with keen interest as some books succeeded and others failed. I sifted not only matter but motive, and during my Nightmare Summer of Homelessness, I became extra-sensitive to scams and phony sincerity, as street people must. And once I gained the provisional shelter of the crude lean-to where I currently live, I found those newly-sharpened instincts a great help when scanning the New Fiction shelves at the Boston Public Library. Authors will always give you their motivations for writing - "I guess I'm just a simple storyteller," or "my characters demanded life," or some such clap-trap, and no doubt there are tiny little germs in their books that actually interest them.

But this year an animus was as obvious as it was distasteful., Virtually every offender on this list was born of a calculating cynicism of such staggering self-absorption as to provoke homicidal rage. Not 'what do I feel?' but 'what kind of deal?' prompted these monstrosities, but the real irritant is the arrogance of 'you'll take what I give you, and you'll have the reactions I dictate.' Not one of these novels is sincere, but worse: each one of them, in their own way, mocks sincerity with a bland hatefulness that can only be achieved by authors who've already been paid.

So here they are, the worst of the very bad! As in Dante's Inferno, we'll arduously ascend to the very bottom (or something like that):

10. The Three Weissmanns of Westport by Cathleen Schine - Admitting up front that this wretched novel partially owes its place here on the list to the faults of others in no way lessens its own copious faults, nor does alluding to the book's own Dark Predecessor. It's true that Schine herself is not responsible for the embarrassing glut of Jane Austen pastiches choking the market these days, but she is responsible for all her own book's hackneyed dialogue and coarsely-orchestrated feel-good moments. And she's certainly guilty of hoping the same thing all the other Austen-defilers hope: that some of Jane's wit and insight will automatically attach to any book that parodies or imitates her, even a book as bad as this one. Hoping doesn't make it so, and that ought to be the final nail in the coffin of all such books, but we better not expect it. And there's also the aforementioned Dark Predecessor: Schine's The Love Letter was not only a viciously cynical, lazy, and horrible scrap of trash, but it also stands as yet untoppled as the Single Worst Novel Ever Written - only with no Internet back then for me to say it, just lots of ranting snail-mail letters to long-suffering friends. The enormous sin of that earlier book is a heavy burden to bear, but The Three Weissmanns of Westport commits plenty of sins of its own and dares its readers not to count them, and that would have earned it a spot on the list anyway.

9. How to Read the Air by Dinaw Mengestu - It's a neat little irony that Mengestu's thin, meager novel is mostly about the many and multi-layered lies African ex-pats tell almost compulsively, and this book is a very good example of how a work of fiction can also be a sustained lie. African ex-pat Jonas Wondemarium (that surname wouldn't be significant, would it? geez) is the alleged center of this book's many trite stories, but the real point here is the novel's unspoken but deafening proclamation: "I, the author, am an African ex-pat! I am a cottage industry! No matter what garbage I serve up, you must call it 'a searing examination of exile and community' in the New York Times!' If the author's name were Daniel Miller, this novel would have been called an idiotic, farcical bit of laziness. But the book-world is enamored of the exotic and will venerate any old crap as long as it carried a rifle across the veldt when it was eight.

8. The Scent of Rain and Lightning by Nancy Pickard - You know you're in trouble when an author feels the need to pack not one but two cliched abstractions into the book's very title, as if she just can't wait to set about the task of boring her readers. Some ineffable logic dictated that this book couldn't be called The Scent of Rain or The Scent of Lightning, and that same logic governs every page of this tired, lazily-written story about an old murder, a new trial, and a conflicted family forced to confront What Really Happened That Night. Every character here is a cardboard stock-type out of some tepid Bonanza re-run, except there's no Hop Sing to make saucy insults on his way back to the kitchen.

7. Hester by Paula Reed - Nathaniel Hawthorne should count his blessings it's Jane Austen getting all that pastiche attention and not himself, if this ridiculous 'sequel' to The Scarlet Letter is any indication of the bullet he dodged. Hester Prynne, telepath. You have been warned.

6. All That Follows by Jim Crace - The standard line here in condemning a putrid little squib like this from an internationally-regarded novelist like Crace would be to say "how are the mighty fallen" or "a rare misstep" - but that standard line would be wrong, since Crace has been egregiously over-estimated since the moment he first set pen to paper. No, the correct response when writing about this flaccid story of sad sack Leonard Lessing (not Moring but Lessing, get it?), a wannabe radical tyrannized by the women in his life, is "more of the same." Crace has always thought it acceptable to waste the readers' time (and money) with pointless, meandering digressions on any little subject that happens to be fascinating him at the moment he sat down to his computer. As a result, his stack of tellingly slender novels are as stinky and insubstantial as a rack of farts. This novel, like his previous two, doesn't even bother to conclude - it just appears, offends, and vaguely dissipates.

5. The Privileges by Jonathan Dee - Also criminally overrated, Dee turns in a lazy, cliched novel about money-grubbing power couple Adam and Cynthia Morey (not Lessy but Morey, get it?) and their messed-up kids and their glamorous lifestyle and their maniacal greed and Adam's risky investment practices and the inevitable etc. etc. Not one sentence of this novel is energetic; not one paragraph was profitably revised, not one ounce of heart is present throughout this whole exercise of socially-relevant 'topical' fiction reduced to the mindless driving of cap-and-piston.

4. The Instructions by Adam Levin - Take a young author who hasn't stopped writing shit since he was 12 years old, include every single uncrafted bit of journal-keeping about every single subject that has ever passed through that author's head, create a crassly-manipulative shred of a plot starring not only a disillusioned young boy but a Jewish disillusioned young boy, take the resultant 1000-page disgustingly self-indulgent manuscript to a publisher who encourages such blockhead prolixity instead of scorning it, and you have The Instructions by first (and very much hopefully last) time author Adam Levin, here channeling David Foster Wallace and producing a book very nearly as awful as all those by his Dark Master.

3. The Four Fingers of Death by Rick Moody - Much like the tripartite godhead, the three books that comprise our Dark Trinity of the Worst Novels of 2010 are really one novel, and yet three separate faces of cynicism. And as with most expressions of cynicism, the core quality is contempt for the audience. This kind of evil, uninformed cynicism has achieved the state of considering the reading public to be contemptible stooges, sheep who'll nibble on any rotten lettuce presented to them. how these three authors must have chuckled at their monuments of mockery were bought and talked about! How they must have smirked at a press so willing to play their game! And in some ways - although not the most important ones - Rick Moody's opus of obscurity is the worst of the three, an act of open hostility against his readers. His hack writer protagonist Montese Crandall is introduced, mocked as an ineffectual C-lister, and then handed the book, as if Moody were saying "Let's both of us - me and you readers - sit back and marvel at how bad this all is." But what he's really saying is, "These totally unconnected things - Mexican wrestling, baseball cards, etc. - momentarily interested me, and this was the first idea I had of how to string them all together; I didn't try any harder because I've already cashed my check." Moody has famously been called the worst writer of his generation; he provides ample evidence for this in The Four Fingers of Death.

2. The Passage by Justin Cronin - The cynicism informing this hackneyed, overwritten pile of poop is naked opportunism trying its damndest to disguise itself in New Yorker affectations. Cronin's overlong post-apocalyptic story of lab-spawned 'viral' vampires and the people who fight and flee them has been ecstatically praised by both the publishing industry and the critics (most embarrassingly Dan Chaon). Its publication made Cronin a multi-millionaire, launched a thousand book-group discussions, and ensured Dakota Fanning a future Oscar - and all he had to do to achieve all this was sell his literary soul on the open market and then lie his face off about it in a million fawning interviews. A post-apocalyptic monster was indeed born out of a laboratory here - the lab was the 1980s, the Apocalypse happened this summer, and now, for the next forty years, It walks among us.

1. Freedom by Jonathan Franzen - The cynicism of our Worst Novel of 2010 is the God the Father of such evil, The Great Author. Franzen's oily, unsmiling acceptance of this horrific honorific is not the least of his many sins, and his arrogance is by far the worst part of Freedom, a big fat speeding ticket of a novel that's as long as it is bland, as strident as it is dull, and as stilted as it is silly. The plot of this mess (allegedly a satire on new-yuppie over-achievers but really a cringing apologia for them, issued by one of their own) hardly matters; what matters is the wing-back chair, the leather elbow-patches, the straight-faced evocation of 'semiotics' and 'subtexts,' the swampy, impenetrable dullness of the thing. Franzen's kind of cynicism is the worst of them all, the presumption of entree into the literary pantheon. On his worst day, Raymond Chandler could write the pants off this pompous clown, but half a million pretentious book-buyers can't be wrong.

Soft Porn in the Book Review!

As anyone involved in the thankless task will tell you, there are several kinds of book reviews. There shouldn’t be; they should all be voiced with and motivated by the exact same tone and tenor of honest inquiry, regardless of their subject matter or their author’s fame. But that would only happen in a dream-world where, say, the fiction editor of a literary journal wrote his own reviews – otherwise, all book reviewers have to deal with editors, and whereas the ideal book reviewer has only one motivation for writing a review (I read this book, here’s what I think is important about it), an editor can have several kinds of motivations for running one. Is the author a big name, making the book something your journal can’t simply ignore without looking foolishly provincial? Is the author a friendly person (or even a friend) whose therapy bills will skyrocket if some earnest tyro parses his every typo? Is the author’s publishing house one from which the editor in question wants a long and fruitful relationship (perhaps for future publication of the editor’s own book? Who knows – the poor schmuck writer certainly doesn’t)? Will a savaging of some new book get you dropped from that publisher’s list of future books (a calamity, since if an editor had to buy even a single book, ever, the world would come screeching to a halt)?

Editors tend to accommodate these various intervening factors by developing several kinds of book reviews. There’s the standard straight-up rave, where the only real challenge is to clutch some small strand of dignity to the dancing and cheering of the piece; there’s the roundhouse slam of a once-popular author’s latest, usually done when a) the publisher in question is too big to stop all its galley copies, and b) the author is somehow perceived has having it coming (we don’t beat up on saintly elderly Japanese writers, for instance, even though they’re all completely untalented, but a snotty young white American is fair game – Nick McDonnell won’t be able to breathe easy until he’s collecting Social Security); there’s the undisguised placeholder review, where the book in question is too ‘big’ or ‘buzzworthy’ to ignore but the only reviewer who could deliver a piece in time was an incompetent nincompoop who does nothing more than summarize the plot; and then there’s the ever-popular ‘soft pan’ review, in which the reviewer seems to have mightily disliked the book but is being charmingly coy about it.

I admit, that last kind really bothers me – because the only possible motivation for such a reviewer to obscure what he thinks is naked self-interest: I can’t bash this book because I might meet its author at an Upper West Side literary soiree, or I might want to sleep with its author, or I might want a favor from its author for my own forthcoming collection of elegiac interconnected short stories. It’s perfectly fine to watch out for such eventualities, but not in a full-length essay that’s supposed to be a review of a book. Facebook instead, I always want to shout.

In any given week, you’ll find good examples of all of these various book review types in that bête noir of all serious readers, the New York Times Book Review. That’s why I love it so: every issue gives you a little survey course in the natural history of book reviewing.

Take today’s issue, for example. You can see the political statement right away: the cover is given to a debut novel by Adam Ross rather than to Imperial Bedrooms by Bret Easton Ellis (and if you don’t think the cover spot is a coveted status symbol, you’ve been listening to too many lyingly self-deprecating authors). The review is by a woolgathering Scott Turow, and it’s mostly plot summary and vapid boilerplate (“Mr. Peanut is most harrowing in its bleakly convincing portrayal of the eternal contest that often passes for a marriage”), with a few nonsense-mysticisms thrown in (“The novel is shape-shifting, inhabiting several planes of reality”). The point of the piece isn’t to review the book (I’ve read Mr. Peanut, and trust me: it only inhabits the reality-plane of puerile crapola) but to anoint the author, a benediction the Book Review is better situated than anybody to bestow.

(By contrast, the Ellis review was handed to the literary editor of the OTHER Times, Erica Wagner, who pays proper acknoweldgement to the cultural landmark-status of Less Than Zero and then proceeds to pulverize its new sequel, Imperial Bedrooms, ending with a school-mistress admonition of a type only the Brits can pull off: “’History repeats the old conceits, the glib replies, the same defeats,’ runs one of this novel’s epigraphs, a line from Elvis Costello. So it may, but fiction doesn’t have to: that’s the point. Let’s hope Ellis figures that out.” Hee.)



But the type of review most prominently on display this time around is the aforementioned ‘soft pan.’ This would be annoying enough in the Book Review under any circumstances, but two of the times it happens today really irk. First, David Carr turns in a full-length review of Bill Clegg’s new memoir Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man and resolutely stops short of slamming a book he obviously disliked. Clegg’s memoir details his descent from cutie-patootie hotshot literary agent to slightly unkempt crack addict, and you might think the reason Carr goes soft on it is because he has high hopes for a similar book of his own – but no: he already wrote that book, Night of the Gun, and it’s considerably, comfortably better than Clegg’s book. And yet, everywhere in his review he stops just short of calling Clegg narcissist pedaling a third-rate survivor’s tale, and it becomes so noticeable it starts to beg for explanation. My best guess is that Carr is a nice guy who didn’t want to beat up on a fellow recovering drug addict. For which, if true, I say again: Facebook, not the New York Times Book Review.

The second ‘soft pan’ is mercifully shorter – Mike Peed’s seven-paragraph notice of Justin Cronin’s 700-page new novel The Passage. For the privilege of getting to watch an author sell his soul in public, the entertainment industry has showered The Passage with the kind of adoration usually reserved for incarnations of the Buddha (although I’m going to hope there was an element of irony in Stephen King’s “The best book EVER WRITTEN! The best book that ever CAN be written!”), and Peed clearly knows this (“If there’s a class at Iowa on exploiting publishing crazes, Cronin surely aced it”). And yet, his seven paragraphs condemn nothing about the book. Instead, all is gentle plot summary (no spoilers!) and guarded pretension (“The Passage, then, is fundamentally an investigation into the creation and destruction of a flawed race”). To put it mildly, a book that was written for the sole purpose of getting its author piles of money deserves rougher handling. And the reason it doesn’t get such handling here is likely connected to the ad revenues generated for the Times by Ballantine Books in promoting The Passage. Plus, you don’t want to be the only person who didn’t like such a hot, hot book, do you? You won’t get invited to any of its parties!

Still, the Book Review this time around ends with a fun piece about how boring, watery Borges loved fantastic, vital Robert Louis Stevenson – if that piece prompts even one of Borges’ pretentious name-dropping fans to try Stevenson, some good will come out of this issue after all.