If you walk into a bookstore, a few things should be readily apparent to you. Firstly, you will see the obligatory table set up with the latest hardcover and bestsellers, foisted right at wallet level. Then you will notice rows and rows of general fiction, and that should be the largest section in the store besides all the cheap mysteries, romances and nonfiction. A good litmus test: if you walk into a bookstore that doesn’t have at least one copy of “The Great Gatsby,” you’re either in an airport or not in a bookstore.
Parsing the fiction section, you’ll find all the sure-fires and canonical favorites no doubt—the authors who stores just know will always have a market, or the authors who will make the store look good, taking a page from the pretentious collegiate individual who has Kierkegaard on his or her shelf and has never read it.
A question that may pop into your head at this point is, “why do we read the books we do?” which is a valid inquiry. Another question may be, “why do we care about these authors?”
Depending on who you ask, authors occupy a very particular niche in this hurtling wrangle tangle we call life. They’re pinnacles of humanity—or lazy free loaders who can’t do any real work. Between these two poles sits the never-ending discussion of what makes an author an author.
The fundamental question of what makes an author worth liking or remembering is far too large for a column such as this. Even narrowing it to what an author should do or be is too much. And how do we discuss authors when—let’s face it—there are so damn many of them?
For the intents of analysis, I’m limiting myself to literary fiction—mon métier—which precludes stuff like science fiction, paperback mysteries and romances (or that strange chimera, the Paperbacked Sci-Fi MysterRom). Now whether that’s unfair, and whether such books have literary merit is a question for another day (and for another person; too many headaches on my part).
So now the question emerges: what is an author and what should he or she be doing with their work? What do you like to see in an author?
Do you align yourself with social realists who seek to depict the world in literature like Honoré de Balzac, in essence trying to transcribe reality to something that is not reality? Are you looking for something quote unquote “substantive?” Like novels that are buoyed (or leaden) with social criticism, like a prime Sinclair Lewis novel or Wilkie Collins? Does melodrama à la Dickens rustle your jimmies?
Or are you more on par with authors who don’t have much in the way of social criticism or policy suggestions, but just float along in the current of their aesthetics? Do you want to get lost in the inertia of a Virginia Woolf novel? Do you want to read ebulliently weird stuff like Murakami? And don’t get me started on metafiction…
The sheer malleability of literary fiction combined with the multiplicity of contributors makes it a veritable hydra. This image is, of course, daunting, especially if your own personal preferences makes you want to prune away some or most. There is nothing wrong with disliking a certain style or a certain authors. Plenty of real time authors hated each other.
H.G. Wells despised George Bernard Shaw. Evelyn Waugh didn’t like Proust. Hemingway and Faulkner traded acerbic digs at each other’s styles. George Meredith (“who?” we all chime) wanted Dickens to waste away. Henry James thought Poe was for primitive mindsets. And writers as disparate as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Mark Twain and Charlotte Bronte have ganged up against Jane Austen through the years.
Of course, as far as author digs go, nobody ever surpassed Vladimir Nabokov in terms of range and venom. With the force and lift of a blizzard, Nabokov attempted to blow away many common favorites with sheer opinion. He termed Saul Bellow “a miserable mediocrity” (Bellow quipped that Nabokov was “a wicked wizard”). Dostoevsky, Henry James, Camus, Sartre, Faulkner, Hemingway and Oscar Wilde were all in the line of fire. Nabokov’s scorn was as bald as his pate.
Whether you agree with Nabokov, or whether you agree with any of the above examples, depends on you. The beauty of having an author-measuring contest is that no matter what, you will never be wrong, because you can never ever be right! Yay for arbitrary opinions!
The point you should (hopefully) draw from all this is that how you should feel about authors should be wholly personal. Don’t feel like you’re being gaoled by someone else’s opinion and subsequently, don’t try and jail others.
