QUILLBLOG

American Book Review goes negative

The American Book Review has released a list of the “Top 40 Bad Books” of all time. Selected largely by academics, the list contains some surprises. D.H. Lawrence’s Women in Love is described as what might appear if “someone put a gun to Nietzsche’s head and made him write a Harlequin romance.” Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God is described as “wondrously bad: stylistically precious, lavishly sentimental, ludicrous of characterization … incoherent of theme.” And Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s Frankenstein is called “the greatest bad book in the English language.”

Writing about the selections on the L.A. Times’ book blog, Carolyn Kellogg calls upon the academic respondents to heal themselves before presuming to judge what qualifies as bad writing:

On the one hand, these are some of America’s best-read people, so we should be able to trust their analysis. On the other hand, their analysis sometimes reads like this: “Badness enters the nonparodic historical novel when an author overtly uses historically situated people, places, and cultures as mirrors, and denies their difference.” That’s part of a critique of Toni Morrison’s A Mercy, E.L. Doctorow’s The March and Ian McEwan’s Saturday – whatever those three writers’ offenses, their sentences are certainly more direct and graceful.

Meanwhile, over at the Guardian, Alison Flood says she is less interested in the major works that are kneecapped, but is intrigued by some of the lesser-known titles that sound truly dreadful:

I haven’t read Nelson Hayes’s Dildo Cay, but Pennsylvania State University’s Jonathan P. Eburne almost tempts me into giving it a go. “It is so earnestly bad as to call its own existence into question,” he writes, calling the novel “the product less of an unsteady hand than of a resoundingly tin ear, [with prose] so categorically graceless as to supersede camp and plunge straight into ontological confusion.”

Pondering whether “even the most sober war-era reader would leap to associate the titular islet with the tall Caribbean cactuses that populate it, rather than, say, with artificial phalluses,” Eburne quotes a wonderfully bad extract from the novel. “‘Father, I want to talk with you!’ Adrian had been watching his father walk the dike unsteadily, and suddenly he had seen himself at the age of sixty walking the dike unsteadily, and on top of his restlessness it was too much for him. ‘How strong do you think that pickle is?’ his father asked, ignoring the tone of Adrian’s voice.” I want to know more.