The End of Civilization in the Penny Press?

By now I'm sure you've all seen the New York Times Book Review from Sunday, and I swear by Crom and Mitra, I originally intended simply to ignore it here at Stevereads. But you know what? The more of these little things we ignore, the more we give these little things not only power but legitimacy, and then forty years from now we look around at a world both mad and stupid and dare to ask "How on Earth did this happen?"

For those of you who perhaps don't take in the Book Review, a quick recap: James Parker (a Boston resident! How mortifying!) turned in a 1500-word review of the new Stephen King doorstop, Under the Dome, and the Book Review editors decided to run the thing on the cover. The New York Times Book Review is the single most influential yardstick and tastemaker in the book-selling world, of course; not only does 'New York Times bestseller' do wonders for the sale of any book from here to Lahore, but the Book Review actually determines the buying habits of countless thousands of over-moneyed middle-aged people all across the country, people who'll hand over their credit cards for anything between hard covers as long as it carries the Times seal of approval. Authors are paid bonuses entirely dependent on whether or not - and for how long - their book shows up on the Times list, because publishers know there's no advertising like it anywhere on the planet.

And as a great philosopher once said, with great power comes great responsibility.

James Parker confesses to be a lifelong fan of King's work, and that's fine. And millions of people read King's books, which is also fine (some reading being better than none at all). But Parker's piece isn't a book review - it's a barely-coherent fan letter, and it's the lead-off piece in the New York Times Book Review. Genuine, serious authors have new books out, and yet some Times editor decided the most coveted spot in book-press should go to an 1,100-page pulp novel Stephen King wrote in 480 days - and the book is given no legitimate criticism in that lead-off piece. And all of that is really, really bad.

King's novel is as tedious as a reformed drunk. An impenetrable dome suddenly appears over a small town in (yawn) Maine, and suddenly the local bullies are taking over, the local nutjobs are getting nuttier, and King has about a dozen dystopian tropes he can swat around for however the hell long he feels like it. There is nothing whatsoever noteworthy in this enormous book (the author so arrogantly flaunting how little time it took him to produce it looks downright dimwitted when set against the backdrop of how aggressively ordinary a book it is) - all the characters are stock characters, all the subplot outcomes can be predicted on page 2, all the dumb plot-contrivances are simply presented to the reader, linearly and in a sleepwalker's monotone.

And if Parker wants to like this crap, that's fine by me. But he does more than that - it's not that he praises it, it's that he writes his piece under the assumption that its worth as a book is immaterial, as if the mere fact that it was written by Stephen King not only warrants it our attention but exempts it from scrutiny. Parker was somehow allowed to write dark, malevolent nonsense like this:

As for the prose, it's not all smooth sailing. Given King's extraordinary career-long dominance, we might expect him at this point to be stylistically complete, turning perfect sentences, as breezily at home in his idiom as P. G. Wodehouse. But he isn't, quite. "Then it came down on her again, like unpleasant presents raining from a poison pinata: the realization that Howie was dead." (it's the accidental rhyme of "unpleasant" and "presents" that makes that one such a stinker.)

Where to start with this garbage? First, I guarantee Parker that rhyme wasn't accidental - I guarantee King intended it and sat back from 'unpleasant,' 'presents,' 'poison,' and 'pinata' with a proud little smile on his face. He's that far away from having any idea what good writing looks like. He isn't quite Wodehouse? Outhouse is more like it, and it's always been that way - the moronic shift Parker makes here from 'dominance' (which is a question of sales) to 'stylistically complete' (which isn't) is done with a fluidity only given to somebody who hasn't done fifteen minutes of genuine thinking about what he's typing - it's a sure sign that Parker couldn't have disliked this book, regardless of its contents. In fact, its contents get a complete pass:

We shouldn't be too squeamish about the odd half-baked simile or lapse into B-movie dialogue, is my point. Writing flat-out keeps him close to his story, close to his source.

I was going to ignore this whole thing, I swear. But when the front-page essay of the New York Times Book Review slavishly praises Stephen King and mocks with words like "squeamish" those of us who dislike bad, lazy, cliched writing, something serious is going on - something perhaps worthy of comment, and something surely that should shame the Times. The Book Review has praised unworthy authors in the past, Gawd knows - but this is the first time they've allowed a reviewer to admit an author is unworthy and then praise him anyway, working on the assumption that all this hoity-toity palaver about bad writing is just so much squeamishness. It's quite literally the worst precedent any review journal could possibly set. Regardless of how many books Stephen King sells, his first drafts (what you get when you write 'flat-out' and then don't revise) are no more worth reading than anybody else's. James Parker is perfectly free to disagree - but he doesn't disagree. He admits the book is rushed and shoddy, then he tells us those things don't really matter.

That kind of sophomoric idiocy walks a quick path to intellectual irrelevance, and the fact that the Times either doesn't know that or knows it and is willing to risk it in order to win a few populist votes of sympathy ... well, that's the real horror story here.

A Tale of Two (insert adjective) Writers in the Penny Press!

Lots of great stuff in the New Yorker this week, starting with a classic, gorgeous cover by Eric Drooker (and interspersed with a strong selection of cartoons this time around, quite a few of which strike exactly the right clever, citified tone for a New Yorker cartoon) and moving on to a funny "Talk of the Town" piece by Nick Paumgarten on those two Northwest pilots who overshot their runway by a hundred and fifty miles because they were absorbed on their laptops. Of course lots of commentary's been spilled on this, but Paumgarten is worth quoting at length:

Afterward, they explained that they'd logged onto their personal laptop computers and become so engrossed - not in Farm Ville or porn, or even good old off-line activity, such as a fistfight or a nap, but, rather, if you believe them, in the nuances of the airline's new crew flight-scheduling procedure - that they'd essentially forgotten where they were or what they were supposed to be doing. Which was landing a plane. The equivalent for a text-messaging driver might be for him to veer off a turnpike into a cornfield and drive twenty miles through the corn rows - stalks thumping the hood, G.P.S. lady losing her mind - without once looking up from the task of typing a heartfelt response to a wireless provider's auto-generated telemarketing text. That is, it's almost unimaginable.

Not sure what it'll take for states to enact the very, very obvious legislation needed to ban using cellphones and especially visual media like texting or laptops while operating heavy machinery at high speeds - it can't be deaths, since lots of people have already been killed through just such negligence - maybe notoriety? Maybe somebody texting-while-driving plows straight into the White House street barrier and dies in a hail of automatic weapons fire? Maybe an elementary school bus driver takes himself and his forty little charges off an overpass while texting? It's the dumbest thing in the world that the legislation hasn't happened yet, so I'm increasingly curious to know what the triggering event will eventually be.

But the main attractions of this issue, for me, were two pieces on authors with whom I have, shall we say, problematic reader relationships. Thomas Mallon turns in a long and wonderful synopsis of the literary and sociological phenomenon that is Ayn Rand. At first, I was worried that Mallon himself is one of her legion of mindless worshipers, but I was quickly reassured by some of his great quips about her unendurable books, like these two gems about The Fountainhead: "It is, in fact, badly executed on every level of language, plot, and characterization," and "The novel's dialogue is never even accidentally plausible." Hee.

The other author is Jonathan Safran Foer, whose latest book Eating Animals is reviewed at length in a smart, argumentative piece by Elizabeth Kolbert. Foer's book is also damn near unbearable, but not, as in Rand's case, because it's poorly written - in fact, it - and Foer in general - would be far less irritating if it were possible to simply dismiss it as bad writing. No, Foer can definitely craft sound prose - but what he's done with that ability since he first easily, effortlessly gimmicked his way into public view with Everything Is Illuminated has been nothing but frustrating, and this book is no exception. In it, he hyperventilates about how the prospect of fatherhood forced him to re-evaluate his eating habits ... for every page of the book, he bounces between sounding like he's the first person ever to learn that meat consumption is wasteful and cruel and the first person ever to become a father. The end result is wearyingly narcissistic, despite the large amount of gruesomely fascinating data lucidly presented.


Kolbert soft-pedals a lot more than Mallon ("Some may object" and "others will argue" ... but not much more than a peep or two what she may object or will argue), which may arise from greater politeness or a sense of fellow-feeling (she is, it turns out, a bit insufferable herself, being one of those hobbyist chicken-raisers the entire rest of the country - for various and equally valid reasons - so rightly detests). But you have to give her credit for her well-written not-entirely-hypothetical defense of eating animals, on two grounds: people are, after all, still animals - geared by millions of years of evolution to eat meat, and animals are, in fact, not people - so they don't deserve the full panoply of rights and protections people extend to themselves. She acknowledges that Foer disagrees with both these points, and she goes on from them to make some serious body-blows against some of his book's points (like his wishy-washiness on calling factory farmers evil, or his apparent willingness to continue drinking milk and eating eggs). It ends up being every bit as satisfying as Mallon's piece.

There's other good stuff too in this issue - Jill Lepore writes about the staggering amounts of violence in American society, and Anthony Lane is his usual peppy, quotable self reviewing two movies nobody will remember next week. But for my money (which reminds me: really need to start subscribing to the New Yorker), it's the two literary pieces that sell the issue - just wish they were about less (insert adjective) writers ...

Fact and Fiction in the Penny Press!

With a post title like that, you're all probably expecting me to turn right away to this week's People magazine, which features a corporate hack-job "profile" of Gossip Girl rancid tobacco addict boyequin Chace Crawford as one of the summer's "hottest bachelors" ... since the piece hyperventilates quite earnestly about how hot Chace is, how funny Chace is, how romantic Chace is, and how straight Chace is (and since the profile never alludes either to the stench of tobacco or the fact that Chase is life-splittingly hung over every single morning, that he wasn't even blow-dryably close to photographable for the first two or three hours of the shoot), it certainly qualifies as an example of the grey nether-ground between fact and fiction.



But no, I leave such vitriol for others (including the good folks at IHateChaceCrawford, who've certainly got their work cut out for them with this vacant-brained piece of pork rind)! We've got slightly bigger fish to fry in this installment of In the Penny Press, and we'll start with the Fiction end of the spectrum, which brings us to the latest issue of Esquire. This issue has some other interesting stuff in it (although it's once again simply loaded with stupid mini-articles giving tips about grilling, and once again simply loaded with full-page ads for cigars, for all the world like we lived in an alternate reality in which none of the magazine's hip young go-getter subscribers know that smoking causes mouth, lung, heart, kidney, throat, brain, and skin cancer, not only in you but in all the people you smoke near)(top-notch habit, that - ever so attractive), but the clear highlight from a marketing perspective certainly has to be the short story by Stephen King. It's called "Morality," and it's a big-boy work - as its title implies, it's a little morality play about normal people facing abnormal moral choices, with not the slightest hint of the supernatural anywhere to be seen.

Quite apart from its merits or lack of them, "Morality" only solidifies in my mind a conviction that's been growing for some time: sooner or later, American readers are going to have to figure out what to do with Stephen King.

It was one thing when he was just churning out progressively unreadable schlock horror novels - plenty of people do that, and it's easy for those so inclined to ignore. That got a little more complicated when he bought a picturesque mansion, let Sunday magazines photograph his enormous library, and most of all started donating serious amounts of money to worthy causes. These are literary warning signs, the kinds of things a schlock horror novelist does when he's beginning to want to be taken seriously as a writer.

Uproarious laughter is the proper response from the publishing industry, accompanied by a brayed version of the rhetorical question, "If you wanted to be taken seriously, why'd you write about friggin killer clowns?" But it's been a long time since the publishing industry had what's known in bull-riding circles as "a pair," and so King's steady encroachment on the lower slopes of Parnassus hasn't been endured stoically - it's been actively encouraged. In 2003, the National Book Foundation gave King a medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, and psychics from every state in the Union were bombarded with the same message from Nathaniel Hawthorne: "What the fuck?"

There's been a book of essays on the craft of writing; there's been a couple of novels with only nominal horror-elements (if you don't count the prose); there've been straight-up fiction stories in mainstream quasi-literary magazines, and now there's "Morality" in the latest Esquire.

Reading the story doesn't help us know any better how to think about this new, emerging Stephen King. It's the story of a struggling young couple in New York - Chad is a substitute teacher who never gets enough work to pay the bills, and his wife Nora is an in-home care-provider for a wealthy stroke victim named Reverend Winston. The two of them are living a life of quiet desperation, always on the edge of solvency, when Winston makes Nora an offer she at first wants to refuse: all his life, he's been a perfectly good, moral person, but before he dies, he'd like to know what it feels like to commit a sin. Since he's recovering from a stroke, he's not really able to do the actual committing himself, and that's where Nora comes in. If she'll perform his sin by proxy, he'll pay her an enormous sum of money, enough to solve the young couple's money problems. She agonizes over the idea, Chad agonizes over the idea, and then they decide to do it.

The sin? Nora is to enter a playground, walk up to one of the little children, and punch him squarely in the face, while Chad films the whole thing for the Reverend's viewing pleasure. Nora does it, they collect their money, and then King hauls in a rather predictable array of moral aftershocks. And by that point, any reader of short fiction that isn't by schlock horror novelists with Nobel aspirations will see more problems than can be readily counted, starting with the biggest three: 1) the entire story is based on coincidence, 2) all three main characters in the story behave in ways no real person would ever behave, even for a moment while very drunk, and 3) the act the good reverend chooses for Nora to perform might be a crime, but it's sure as Hell not a sin.

1 & 2 are the real problems here, though: King might want to try his hand at mainstream fiction, and certainly everybody in America is entitled to try a little self-reinvention, but there's no getting around the fact that King's apprenticeship for writing conventional fiction is nearly 40 years of writing schlock horror novels in which lazy, shopworn contrivances of the worst ilk are standard reading fare, in every book, on every page. You can't snap your fingers and suddenly be a writer who didn't learn his trade that way - and no matter how many high school water polo teams King underwrites, he doesn't strike me as having one-thousandth the humility necessary to re-learn writing from the ground up.

And if he's not willing to do that, we're all going to see more variations on "Morality" from him - in Esquire, in The New Yorker, and who knows where else - "serious" tales of ethics and suburbs and characters lunging at three-dimensionality. None of it will be any good - how can it be, when all of it was learned in a candle-lit House of Wax? - but all of it will want to be, and when one of the top-selling novelists of the 20th century so loudly wants something, every reader is pulled into the melodrama of it.




And really, that same theme of overreaching finds its way into the "Fact" portion of the Penny Press this time around. In the latest GQ (the with a naked Sacha Baron Cohen on the cover, advertising his upcoming film, the most-hyped/least-funny film since, come to think of it, Borat), John Jeremiah Sullivan (think of that wedding! talk about schlock horror!) does his level best to write a serious, probing piece about a subject who was a walking punch line from the moment he first shuffled onto the public stage: Levi Johnston, the wavy-haired lantern-jawed bo-hunk who impregnated Bristol Palin, the idiot daughter of Sarah Palin, the idiot Alaska governor John McCain, in a desperately irresponsible gimmick-trick, picked to be his vice presidential candidate in the last election. The pick alone forced the majority of voters to confront the fact that McCain was just plain insane, and that probably cost him the election, and the entire world stepped back from the edge of an unthinkable abyss - but even before then, Levi and Bristol were "on the rocks," as the tabloids say, and once the votes were counted, the Palins pried him off the skin of their family like a bloated tick.



Cast off, cast out, no longer part of the apparently ongoing story of the Palins (Jeremiah Sullivan makes a horrifying offhand reference to a "2012 run"), and, touchingly, no longer allowed to be much part of the life of the child he engendered with Bristol - that's where this article finds young Levi. Jeremiah Sullivan meets up with him in small-town Alaska, where Levi does what can only be referred to as a sinful amount of bear-hunting but appears to have no job and no job prospects (beyond the offhand mention of a possible reality-show about hunting)(all these heart-stopping offhand mentions combine to make this piece considerably more frightening than King's story). Our author does a wonderful job of conveying what virtually every small town in Alaska makes a visitor feel:

It is a shithole surrounded by such loveliness. Stand there and blink back and forth, shutting your left eye, then your right. Left eye: spit of highway, aggressive proliferation of half-abandoned strip malls, a few roads dwindling off to little houses. Right eye: the mountains, the expanding sky, the shadowy crevasses, a bald eagle. Highway, strip malls, little houses; mountains, sky, crevasses, eagle. Highwaystripmallslittlehouses; mountainsskycrevasseseagle.

Both eyes: Wasilla.

And he's equally evocative on that sharp, nauseating moment in American history when all these various Wasilla people suddenly threatened to matter:

It takes some mental effort to recover the feeling of how much he seemed to mean at one time, and practically yesterday. Obama has made him seem kitschy already, has stolen his power to signify. Not presuming anything about one's politics - referring instead to the sheer dynamism of events since the election. We are a couple of beads further along the necklace of cultural time from Levi. We are post-Levi. It's decadent to think of him now. But the chemical traces remain of a plausibility structure inside which his very face seemed full of information and even warning. Something was happening to the country, it was splitting in two. Levi looked like a place where the ripping might start. We were laughing at him then too, of course - that was largely it. If McCain's choosing Palin had been cynical (as born out by their recoiling from each other in defeat), not until his embrace of Levi did it become farcical. .... We knew he was there only because it had been deemed worse for him not to be there. That gave him a curious magnetism. And John McCain, fine, he was trying to win a campaign, he's an opportunist. He's also a United States senator and a war hero, and there was something in how he greeted Levi - how for a second it mattered whether he greeted this boy, and in what manner - like an acknowledgment. Not of one man to another, exactly, but of one force to another. It was either the beginning or the end of something. Briefly recall when you didn't know which.

That's just about as good as hopped-up Red Bull deadline-prose gets, and the whole article shines with it. For the brief span of its pages, we can indeed recall when we walked around every day wondering very dark things about our own countrymen, urgently asking ourselves the same questions over and over again: Can't they see what's happening here? Can't they see what's at stake here? Are they REALLY going to treat the most important presidential election in modern memory like an evening of 'American Idol'? "Hey! The grumpy old guy picked a hottie hockey-mom who's JUST LIKE US!"

Then you stop reading, and you close the magazine, and reality reasserts itself. Fact separates from fiction and both start behaving themselves again: John McCain will never be president, Obama is alive, in charge, and still enjoying popularity in the polls. Sarah Palin will not, cannot ever be taken seriously as a candidate for national office, and apart from reading a very entertaining magazine article by John Jeremiah Sullivan, none of us needs to think about Levi Johnston at all.

Storm of the Century!

Our book today started life as a screenplay for a long TV movie, 1999's Storm of the Century by none other than Stephen King, and it raises several fascinating questions, the foremost being: under what conditions can a bad writer produce good work?

In the realm of pure theory, of course, there are no such circumstances - a bad writer is a bad writer because he's not a good writer, and circumstances don't enter into it one way or the other. But the blogosphere, thank gawd, has little to do with pure theory and is all about contingent reality, and the simple truth is, Storm of the Century is a good book because Stephen King wasn't always a bad writer. There are stretches in Different Seasons that any comic writer could be proud of, for instance, and Salem's Lot is a fine, if verbose, vampire novel. That kernel of talent has to be there before an author can return to it, which raises the question of circumstances again.

Clearly, the key is control. Stephen King is the most popular, best-selling author of the 20th century, and once he started to become that (around It? The Dark Half, certainly?), he slipped the surly bonds of editorial control. He might continue to talk about having editors and publishers as friends, but nobody at that stage in a popular writer's career can say in any meaningful way "this part doesn't work," and all writers absolutely need that, or they become self-indulgent, self-referential, and self-absorbed.

This happened in spades to King (a tip-off for those of you searching his books: if an author has his characters refer to him as an author of popular books, that author has Left the Path and might not ever find his way back), and the underpinnings of it were certainly true in the genesis of Storm of the Century, which King only had to pitch to ABC in the roughest outline before the network rolled over like a sleepy kitten and gave him the kind of creative latitude most screenwriters only dream of. But the resulting work is indeed hugely more controlled than the piles of blathering wet-wash King produces in book-form these days, and the reason is simple: the format imposed it.

This is a screenplay, after all, not a novel. The action is carried almost entirely by dialogue, and King has a pretty good ear for dialogue. And dialogue is necessarily spoken by characters, which drastically limits the extent to which the author can interject his own navel-gazing into the proceedings. As a result, Storm of the Century is ironically both typically Stephen King in its preoccupations and refreshingly Stephen King-free in its presentation.

The setting is familiar: Little Tall Island, a small community of intertwined local families off the coast of Maine. Toward this community two unusual phenomena are headed with ominous intensity: the eponymous storm, a gigantic snow-system that threatens to shut down the island's power and totally cut it off from the mainland for a few days at least, and a mysterious man named Andre Linoge who carries a decorative cane and seems to know every dark secret the residents of Little Tall have.


Fans of King's work will expect automatically that there are plenty of such secrets, and this is right: it seems like everybody on Little Tall - from Robbie Beals, the prickly town manager, to Mike Anderson, the valiant, overwhelmed town constable, to all the other men and women gathering close in the face of the storm - harbors some dark revelation they haven't told anyone.

Linoge knows all these secrets, and he's free with his knowledge from the start, as when he taunts Robbie Beals with a shame from his past:

LINOGE:

You were with a whore in Boston when your mother died in Machias. Ma was in that crappy nursing home they closed down last fall, the one where they found rats in the pantry, right? She choked to death calling your name. Isn't that sweet? Other than a good slice of processed yellow cheese, there's nothing on earth like a mother's love!

Mike Anderson and his deputy find Linoge sitting calmly in the house of an old woman he's bludgeoned to death, and they take him to the makeshift holding cell that is all Little Tall has in the way of a prison. The temporary nature of the accommodations is put under immediate intolerable stress by the onset of the storm, which is like a living character in the story (King regularly intercuts the early action with television weather forecasts predicting the size and ferocity of this behemoth bearing down on the Maine coast). The storm quickly isolates the townspeople and concentrates the action of the story, as Linoge keeps saying, "Give me what I want, and I'll go away."

It's almost immediately obvious that Linoge isn't human - instead, he's a King archetype: the tester, the supernatural agent who puts pressure on the personal fault lines of ordinary people until they crack wide open (think of King's masterful portrait of Leland Gaunt, the tester in Needful Things). One of the most consistently enjoyable little aspects of King's testers is the element of completely idiosyncratic amusement they take in watching the havoc they cause, and in this Andre Linoge ("I Am Legion," naturally) is no exception. But what he wants from the people of Little Tall is no laughing matter. His request could not be more grave (he chooses Little Tall because island people pull together in emergencies - and know how to keep secrets), as he gradually reveals to the assembled townsfolk:

LINOGE:

By the standards of your mayfly existences, I have long to live yet - I'll still be walking the earth when all but the freshest and newest among you ... Davey Hopewell, perhaps, or young Don Beals ...

We INTERCUT SHOTS of DAVEY with his parents and DON sleeping on his cot.

LINOGE (continues):

... have gone to your graves. But in terms of my own existence, time has grown short. You ask me what I want?

Interior: MIKE and MOLLY ANDERSON.

MIKE already knows, and his face is filling with HORROR and FURIOUS PROTEST. When he begins speaking, his voice rising from a WHISPER TO A SCREAM, MOLLY seizes his wrist ...

MIKE:

No, no, no, no ...

LINOGE (ignores MIKE):

I want someone to raise and teach; someone to whom I can pass on all that I have learned and all I know; I want someone who will carry on my work when I can no longer do it myself.

Interior: MIKE.

He rises to his feet, dragging MOLLY with him.

MIKE:

No! No! Never!

Interior: LINOGE.

LINOGE (ignores MIKE):

I want a child. One of the eight sleeping back there. It doesn't matter which one: all are just as likely in my eyes. Give me what I want - give it freely - and I'll go away.

King's novels may be bloated and unfocused these days (I keep expecting - and yes, hoping - that if nothing else, simple advancing age will prompt him to sharpen and deepen what he does every season), but I'll always hold up Storm of the Century as a good example of what his art looks like when he's in more or less perfect control of it. There are no explicit villains in the piece ... even bellicose Robbie Beals is too fully realized to be hissable, and Linoge himself is ultimately more strange and unaccountable than outright evil. As a reading experience, Storm of the Century is, believe it or not, well worth your time.

And of course I could hardly be expected to let an entry like this conclude without saying something about that long TV movie, could I? Put simply, it's fantastic, easily the most textured and worthwhile filmed product King has ever created. The redoubtable Tim Daly gives Mike Anderson an appealing vulnerability, Jeffrey DeMunn makes Robbie Beals completely three-dimensional, erstwhile dreamboat white rapper Jeremy Jordan displays the glimmers of genuine talent that were shortly afterwards flattened by drug addiction, and of course the mighty Colm Feore (so good and yet so miscast in 32 Short Films About Glenn Gould and so great as the semi-human villain in The Chronicles of Riddick) is utterly arresting as Andre Linoge, even though the role doesn't have all that much meat on its bones. He knocks the part out of the park, just as Max Von Sydow did for Leland Gaunt. It's probably great fun to be a tester!

H.R.H.!

Our book today is H.R.H. by Danielle Steel, the second-worst novelist of the 20th century. She's also the second-best selling author of the 20th century; the first in both those categories is Stephen King, and as with most upgrades from #2 to #1, the person in the top spot is much worse and much more dangerous than the runner-up. King has aspirations to be taken seriously - and trust me when I predict, those aspirations will only get more desperate (and produce more deplorable stuff) as he gets older and becomes more and more aware of the fact that there were two paths open to him as a writer thirty years ago, and he took the wrong one if you're destination is literary respectability. His desire for what he can never have will only sharpen as time closes in on him - we'll see his critical study of Proust (or its mongrel equivalent) within a decade, and in the meantime, he's written a book on the craft of writing, and that book is taken seriously in some quarters, even assigned in some college-level courses. Hence the danger.

(It's the outgrowth of a natural human contradiction: people want to read good books, but people are also invincibly lazy ... so they read only stupid, easy books, but they still keep feeling the original want - and eventually, that causes them to call the stupid, easy books they actually do read good ... because it seems like such a neat little solution to their problem! And if those stupid, easy books are big enough financial successes or garner a wide enough audience of people trying that same solution, those of us who aren't invincibly lazy and actually do read good books - or at least real books - on a regular basis start to get characterized as cranks and killjoys and snobs, because we still have the nerve to say the Harry Potter books are awful, or that there's no literary worth to anything Stephen King has ever written, or that Susan Sontag is grotesquely overrated, or that nobody should be reading Raymond Carver .... and so on. All those judgements are right, but as the crowds grow larger wanting to elevate what they've settled for, they start to look more and more eccentric ...)

Danielle Steel might not be quite the same danger to the reading public as Stephen King, but boy, is she a bad writer! She's the kind of bad writer who wastes no time in being bad - she's bad right from the first sentence. Steel has written over 75 books, and in all that verbiage, she's not picked up a single trick of good prose. It's uncanny. H.R.H. was written in 2006 (she wrote three other novels in that same year), but Steel's awfulness has a fly-in-amber quality to it - this book isn't merely as bad as something she wrote thirty years ago, it's exactly as bad.

It's the story of Christianna, a beautiful young princess of modern-day Lichtenstein (the Royal Highness of the title) who's tormented by a Princess Diana-like desire to live a normal life, to do charity work all day long the way normal people do. At the book's opening, she's watching her dog Charles romp in a late summer rainstorm and having the following reverie:

He was having a great time, as Christianna was, watching him. It was the last of summer and the weather was still warm. She had returned to Vaduz in June, after four years of college in Berkeley. Coming home had been something of a shock, and so far the best thing about her homecoming was Charles. Other than her cousins in England and Germany, and acquaintances throughout Europe, her only friend was Charles. She led a sheltered and isolated life, and always had.

The problems load onto the prose with locust-like enswaddling totality, don't they? The book will go on to tell us - over and over again - how close Christianna is to her father, the reigning prince of Lichtenstein, how strong a bond they share, and yet here Steel is telling us the highlight of Christianna's entire summer at home has been her dog. And you sense right away the reason for this and all other problems with the book: Steel doesn't recall that her own words have created that vacant summer (there's no actual reason why the book can't open in June); she doesn't read her own work. Hell, she doesn't write her own work - I'd bet my last basset hound she records them, for transcription by underlings at some later date. If she read what she, er, produces, she'd see that the above passage says Christianna's only friend is Charles - except for a horde of friends across three countries and two continents. She'd see that Christianna has always led a sheltered and isolated life (got that? she's been both sheltered and isolated) - except for the four years she spent on the open campus of a college 7000 miles away from home.

You'd think such lazy, stupid writing would doom an author's career - unless you read the Bestseller feature Open Letters ran some months ago. During the gruesome prep-work everybody did for that issue, one thing became glaringly obvious: writers of this kind of garbage know exactly what they're doing. It would be folly to suggest Danielle Steel is somehow lucky in what she does - she's built a brand-name following precisely because the tone, tenor, and tautologies of her work haven't changed in an entire generation. Mothers who love her books can confidently pass them on to daughters of a similar lazy, stupid reading disposition, and they can both read the next book, without fear of disappointment.

Anyway, back to Christianna: she eventually rebels against her beloved father (very beloved - both father and daughter are always admiring - and commenting on - how attractive each other looks; mother is, conveniently and perhaps to her own relief, safely dead) and goes to Africa to do some charity work. Her presumably armed bodyguards excite no special attention from customs, nor does the fact that she has no surname printed on her passport - and soon she's rolling bandages with a whole cast of grubby-but-adorable peon volunteers, even consenting to touch some of the poor sick black folk who're too busy vomiting blood to do any charity work of their own. She goes to this clinic strictly incognito, but she wastes precious little time revealing herself to some of her fellow volunteers - including Parker, the scruffy-dreamy guy she of course falls in love with (that Parker is attractive, wealthy, and white almost goes without saying ... if Steel had had Christianna fall in love with one of those African patients, and then had the courage to write that book, right to its end, she'd be an entirely different author)(unlike Stephen King, I get the impression the thought of doing something like this literally never crosses Steel's mind).

At least once in every paragraph, we're told these thing: 1) Christianna loves her father deeply, 2) Christianna feels her duty to Lichtenstein too strongly to ever abandon it for merely personal rewards, 3) Christianna misses her time as a student at Berkeley, and (eventually) 4) Christianna deeply loves Parker, and that the love reminds her of 3, conflicts with 1, and is doomed by 2. And I'm not exaggerating: we're told all four of those things at least a thousand times in the course of this 383-page novel - all four are repeated several times on every page. To a so-called 'serious' reader, someone exploring the written word in search of the furthest reaches of its power and intricacy, this is nothing less than a nightmare, a kind of Tourettesian anti-reading.

But to all other readers, it's a virtually perfect formula: you're told a diverting story, but at no point are you required by the storyteller to actually pay attention - so the experience of moving through the book's pages is mentally effortless. You get the gain - the diverting story - without any expenditure of anything on your part: no remembering, no imagination, no preconceptions challenged. You get something for nothing - which has always been the American dream.



'Serious' readers who still occasionally read books like this (and I'm not the only one!) won't be able to help themselves - they'll occasionally do some of the work Steel herself so consistently avoids. They'll occasionally sniff out the real book buried under all the layers of reductive crapola. Take this passage, for instance:

She [Christianna] was also very interested in women's rights, which was a sore subject in her country. Women had only had the vote for just slightly over twenty years, since 1984, which was unthinkable. She liked to say that her arrival had brought them freedom, since the year of her emancipation was the one in which she'd been born.

Despite the claim made there, Christianna doesn't 'like to say' anything even remotely that witty, sarcastic, or interesting anywhere in the course of H.R.H. - she is blandness personified - but oh, what a tantalizing little glimpse it is! A glimpse of a version of this novel in which the characters, especially the title character, aren't cliched ciphers going through predictable motions to comfort a somnolent reading public and finance the author's various full-length portraits.

And who knows? Perhaps even a traveler as far down that road as Steel is really can find her way to something better, really can right the wrongs that have marred nearly 100 novels, if the spirit moves her. Danielle, we met once, years and years ago - you kept your handler waiting impatiently while you and I agreed that Jackie Collins' popularity was no good excuse for how bad her writing is. If you can recall that conversation - and more importantly, if you can recall the you who was having it - send me an email! We'll tell your publisher you're taking a year off, and we'll write a book you'll not only be proud of but that'll get reviewed on the front page of every newspaper in the country. It'll be just what poor Christianna wants: the best of both worlds.