Professional Documents
Culture Documents
THE
ULYSSES
DELUSION
Rethinking Standards of Literary Merit
Palgrave
macmillan
THE ULYSSES DELUSION
Copyright Cecilia Konchar Farr 2016
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2016 978-1-137-55362-1
Portions of this work appeared in earlier versions in other venues, as noted
throughout. My thanks to SUNY Press (A Wizard of Their Age: Introduction),
University of Kentucky Press (Youve Come a Long Way Baby: It Was Chick Lit
All Along), Lexington Books (Liberating Sanctuary: Communion With Books),
University of Illinois (This Book is Action: Introduction), and Mississippi State
University (Mississippi Quarterly 66.3: Faulkner Novels of our OWN) for
permission to reprint here.
All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication
may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be
reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission. In accordance
with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under
the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright
Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6-10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS.
Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may
be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
First published 2016 by
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN
The author has asserted their right to be identified as the author of this work
in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited,
registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills,
Basingstoke, Hampshire, RG21 6XS.
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ISBN 978-1-349-71647-0
E-PDF ISBN: 9781137542779
DOI: 10.1057/9781137542779
Acknowledgments xi
Preface: Ransoming a Reading Nation xiii
Part II Investigations 53
3 Reading Lolita at St. Kates 55
4 Oprahs Book Club and the Summer of Faulkner 65
5 Lost in a Chick Lit Austenland 77
6 What I Learned from The (Book) Group 89
7 Storytelling with Jodi Picoult 99
8 Rereading Rand 111
9 Writing Wizardry 125
Notes 147
Bibliography 183
Index 195
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Ack now l ed gmen t s
It was early July 2009, but it could have been any time1999,
2015, 1950. Its almost always summer, often nearing the end of a
decade, when someone feels compelled to offer America a reading
list. This time it was Newsweek Magazine with a booklist cover:
What to Read Now.
There, at the beginning of a severe economic recession, between
laments at the loss of Michael Jackson and Farrah Fawcett, were 50
books that make sense of our time; it was an eclectic collection
of fiction and nonfiction, mostly contemporary, a highly subjec-
tive stab at suggested summer reading from a group of smart
editors and writers at a struggling newsmagazine. And its a great
idea, really. Being an English professor, I have to believe that read-
ing fiction to make sense of things is important even when GM is
bankrupt. You go, Newsweek.
But why the self-important, protesting-too-much second list,
the inevitable, over-reaching meta-list of the Top 100 Books of
All Time? Of All Time. Seriously?
I tried not to be put off by the audacity of such a project; after all,
the Newsweek editors pooled a variety of source lists, from Oprah,
Wikipedia, and readers choices, in an effort to be more demo-
cratic than these lists tend to be. They constructed a program,
crunched the numbers. They assured us that it was all mathemati-
cal. Then I tried not to be surprised when, in the end, their 100-
book list looked pretty much like every book list before it and the
many that have come after. It had only 25 spaces for non-white and
non-male writers combined, and fewer still for the genres readers
love mostmystery, crime, romance, fantasy, and science fiction.
xiv PREFACE
Finally, I tried, I really did, not to be angry that the list assumed
a shared sense of literary value without ever defining what consti-
tutes value, what makes these books good, or best.
But there in the teaser (Heres the first three books. Go to our
website for the whole list!) lay the despoiler of my self-control,
the demise of my intellectual distanceUlysses. (Remember the
way Seinfeld used to say Newman? Say it like that.) Ulysses :
my Emperors New Book. It shows up on every list, most nota-
bly number one on the Modern Librarys Best 100 Novels of
the Twentieth Century. Its on both Harold and Allan Blooms
influential lists, many colleges core reading lists, and everywhere
you find Masterpieces of Literature or the Great Books of the
Western Canon. Its probably even on your must-read-before-
I-die list.
Chances are thats where it will stay. Because, truth be told,
Ulysses is likely the least read Most Important Book of the twen-
tieth century. When I assigned it to my senior seminar students
a few years ago, I challenged them to read it in public places.
All semester we laughed over stories of strangers in bars and cof-
fee shops admiring our reading choice. They all went something
like this:
You see how the ransom, then, generates its own longevity. Visit the
Joyce section of your local university library (in the PR6000s) and
see how far those shelves stretch. To keep this system working, the
best novels will always be ones, like Ulysses, that require interpreta-
tion; they make sense only with wise professorial intercession.4
But while we professors busied ourselves keeping good novels
safe for properly educated people, Americans kept reading what
they liked. Bestseller lists and bookstores sprouted up across the
twentieth century, and after a while, most people lost track of
PREFACE xvii
father is choosing the movies he will watch with his troubled teen-
aged son:
Here and elsewhere Ulysses has become the epitome of high art at
its worst, removed from life and indifferent to its audience.8 Thats
the death of any art form, but for the novel, whose roots are demo-
cratic and popular, its a crime.
The Ulysses Delusion is my call to end a century-long standoff, to
settle this ransom thing once and for all by getting professors and
readers together in genuine conversations about novels. I dont
have a secret plan to transform every enthusiastic reader into an
English major or to force-feed the professionals Fifty Shades of
Grey. I just want us to start talking, authentically, realistically. For
example, before we can decide which novels are good, we should
discuss, together, what they are good for. Should they change our
minds, change the world, pass the time, pass on values, entertain,
enlighten, inspire? Why do readers read them? Why has this form
of writing, this messy, imaginative, and often conservative genre,
so dominated literature for more than two hundred years?
It may be that I watched a few too many Columbo reruns in my
formative years, so I think Ill schlump in with my rumpled over-
coat and sort this thing out, an everywoman reader and a profes-
sor, a book-clubber and a critic. Just like that, at the end of an hour
(or the end of this book) with an incisive one more thing, we
will end this standoff that keeps literary professionals from engag-
ing reading Americans more consistently and that prevents US
culture from acknowledging its deep reading roots. Then literate
Americans and book lovers, Newsweek editors and Yale professors
will put down their lists, set aside their very different novels and
xx PREFACE
start to listen to one another. We will join forces and develop clear
standards of excellence for both readers and critics, flexible stan-
dards that suit a wider range of books, useful standards responsive
to what novels do uniquely well. Then (this is where the sound-
track swells and the credits roll) the novel will be ransomed back
to us, set free from the strictures of insular academic discourse
and high modernism. Watch as it steps back from the pressure
toward immediate gratification and the aesthetics of reality TV!
Undaunted and ever popular, the American novel will resume its
educating, enthralling, democratizing, conversation-generating,
artistic, and consumer-driven work.
PA R T I
The Crime
I write in coffee shops, and heres why: I get interrupted like this.
Just now, at the Bean Factory, I had a completely unexpected and
exhilarating conversation with David, a 20-something violinist/
graduate student/barista, who was reading Proust. Hes on the
second volume of Remembrance of Things Past. So we talked for
a half hour about why he loves Proust, the language, the ideas,
the genius. The power and passion of Davids interactions with
this novel are what I want for my students. But, David observes,
it would not be the same if he had to read it for class, if he hadnt
come to Proust via his own curiosity, a circuitous path that began
with Thoreau and led somehow past Plato through centuries of
philosophy to the Vanity Fair back page questionnaire.
To tell the truth, my writing was interrupted yesterday, too, by
Tyone, a woman about my age who wondered if I would recom-
mend Elizabeth Gilberts Eat, Pray, Love, which was lying next to
my computer (just in case the Muses werent visiting, as my friend
Joanne would say). We talked for an engaging 20 minutes about
memoirs and self help, what works for us (honesty and humor) and
what doesnt (edicts and ego), and why, then, for us Eat was so
much better than Pray or Love.
I was interrupted the day before by a local public radio pro-
gram, Talking Volumes. I couldnt stop listening as reader after
reader phoned in to enthuse about how much they love, love, love
To Kill a Mockingbird. I reread it every year, one woman said.
It is still the best book I ever read, another insisted, from years
beyond her junior high curriculum.
These interruptions are not diversions. They have become the
stuff of my research. Paying attention to what readers say when
they talk about books was, first, part of my effort to become a bet-
ter teacher, a way to increase my awareness of my students desires
for a literate life and to be responsive to those desires. Later I real-
ized that, applied to my professional research and writing, it was
the enactment of one of the feminist theoretical principles I had
been committed to since graduate school: that the best ideas come
from listening respectfully, in community, not from hearing myself
lecture from atop a perch of serious scholarly books.
COME AND GET IT 5
from the forest with a jolt, embarrassed as the room exploded with
laughter.
Remember what that felt likenot the humiliation, but the
total absorption? Most readers I know have a story like this, when
they were so lost in a book that reality was edged out. Nancy
Drew also inspired this for me, and Jo March, Trixie Belden,
Up a Road Slowly, the Black Stallionand A White Bird Flying.
Remember the books that enticed you to stay up with a flash-
light long into the night? When I read Anna Karenina in col-
lege it was that forest fire all over again. I just couldnt put it
down, so I, an A-student who always sat in the front row, contin-
ued to read Anna discretely, under my notebook, right through
Environmental Biology, only this time I was more skilled (from
years of practice) and didnt get caught wandering so far afield
from reality. But getting lost is something avid readers aim for.
We long for that forest fire.
Yet as I compared the work I do as a critic, the language I use,
with what I hear from readers, getting lost or entranced was
not part of my critical repertoire.3 It is not what I had learned to
analyze or evaluate. Nor is discussability, the quality most often
cited by book clubs as essential to their best choices. These are,
however, the qualities I hear enthusiastic everyday readers use to
describe the books they value. They want to drift off into books,
empathizing with relatable characters and being swept away to
different times and places; they want to have something to talk
about when theyre done, turning the solitary act of reading into
a social opportunity; and, most surprising to me, readers want
to learn something new. They want to close a book smarter than
they were when they started it. How could I have forgotten that
oh-so-satisfying aspect of novel reading? Of course, of course,
thats why I read James Michener and Irving Stone as a teenager.
But I did forget it, and my theoretical training never once called
my attention to it. In a study my students and I conducted of local
book clubs, we surfaced these termsabsorption, relatability, dis-
cussability, and informationor versions of them, over and over
among the devoted readers who made up these clubs (more on
COME AND GET IT 7
The trade books cover is arty and evokes the atmosphere of the
book; it even includes a quotation from John Updikes review
in The New Yorker. The mass-market cover appeals to someone
coming to the book from the movie. The trade book is both
taller and wider. And finally, the trade book is considerably more
expensive.
These variations in the books appearance and price have their
roots in the ways they are sold. Mass-market books are designed
to fit into the racks set near the checkout counter at supermar-
kets, drugstores, hospital gift shops and airport newsstands. They
are priced affordably so they can be bought on impulse. There are
other production differences in binding and paper quality (histori-
cally, paperbacks were printed on pulp and could fit in the con-
sumers pocket). The format is often used for genre fiction, science
fiction, romance, thrillers and mysteries.
COME AND GET IT 9
twist? (You know youve done it.) What if they compared reading to
going to the movies or watching television and decided they often
prefer reading because it demands something different from them?
What if they could openly appreciate the way reading makes them
provide some of the actionimagining into, filling out, creating
connections, and working to construct the entertainmentrather
than letting the action race by them in a frenzy of blockbuster
excitement? What if avid readers more often pushed away from
their light reading, hungry for more substantial fare, for less fluff
in their stories and more fiber in their characters? In other words,
what if more readers decided to choose another doorway to enter
books by, say the tiny (but quite aesthetically pleasing) doorway of
language that the English teachers love?8
Seeking a response to these questions, I have ventured through
aesthetic and reception theories, histories of the novel, cultural
and American studies, and library sciences discipline of readers
advisory, as well as through many local book clubs. This book is
the result. It is a gathering of my own enthusiasm for the novel and
for the readers who have loved it for three centuries now.
This first chapter is an argument for expanding critical and
aesthetic practices to accommodate the realities of a genre that
has been, since its inception, not only artistic but also deeply
democratic and profoundly gendered. Chapter 2 exposes the class
divisions that undergird academic and cultural preferences and
guide how we choose books. It calls out the elitist assumptions
that force us to divorce capitalism from artistry and examines
the effects of that bitter divorce on literate culture in the United
States. Following some case studies of popular (or just famous)
novels in the Investigations section, I conclude by proposing a
different model for evaluating novels, attentive both to the desires
of readers and the insights of professors. Finally, I invite you to
imagine with me what could be the result if readers and critics
interact more (and more respectfully), and then our standards of
literary merit deepen in response. Together, we could generate a
more literate American culture teeming with complex and interest-
ing conversations about books.
COME AND GET IT 11
her vivid, dark and detailed yarn about Heathcliffs dance with
the devil to remind him (and by extension us) to read the Bible.
Instead of this book?
What I find irresistible about the history of the novel is that this
feisty genre just wouldnt buckle under the pressure from above.
Nimble and shape shifting, it adjusted to its critics while charming
its ever-growing audience. One of my favorite quotes is one that
Nina Baym cites in Novels, Readers and Reviewers from a writer in
Harpers Magazine in 1853 who noted that novels work because
hundreds of readers who would sleep over a sermon, or drone
over an essay, or yield a cold and barren assent to the deductions of
an ethical treatise, will be startled into reflection, or won to emu-
lation, or roused into effort, by the delineations they meet with
in a tale which they opened only for the amusement of an hour
(28). I get it. Ive read the Bible, and I have to say that Wuthering
Heights does a much better job of keeping me awake. Ken Follett,
in fact, can keep me up all night.
By the end of the nineteenth century the little-genre-that-could
had all but taken over popular literature. Accessible and engaging,
it fit perfectly into democratic US culture, besting the classics
those sermons, essays, and ethical treatises (often un-translated
from Latin or Greek)for public attention. Novels could reach
more readers because education in the classics was available to only
a few privileged men, and rare was the white woman who could
read Latin and Greek, even among the upper class where educated
women were not scarce. And because Black women and men were
forbidden to be literate by law in much of the United States before
the Civil War, and many forbidden in practice long afterwards.
Other people of color, poor, rural, working-class and immigrant
women and men also had little access to education beyond the
basic literacy skills, even well into the twentieth century. Even
today. I think of the immigrant Bohemian father in Willa Cathers
My Antonia, a starving Nebraska farmer, beseeching the well fed
neighbor boy Jim Burden to teach, teach my Antonia, as he
thrust a book into Jims hands. While farm girls like Antonia
learned to read, they rarely achieved a level of education that would
COME AND GET IT 15
allow them to read the classics or even highbrow novels that relied
heavily on knowledge of classical texts and European languages.
These works contain allusions and metaphors, plots, characters,
or concerns that assume an erudition achieved by only the most
advantaged Americans. Instead, most people read popular novels.
And a lot of them.
Indeed, the rise of the popular novel paralleled historically
the rise of democracy and universal literacy in the United States
(and in Europe), and it benefited from the mass production of
the industrial revolution and the influx of immigrants eager to
learn English. As Baym observes, the novel was always considered
the province of women and the newly literate masses, and its
dominant position represented less a change of taste in an exist-
ing audience than a change in the makeup of the audience for the
written word (29) [emphasis mine]. From the beginning, the
novel both attracted and constructed the audience that ensured
its survival and, eventually, its dominance, she explains. With the
page-turning quality of my forest fire book, the novel appealed to
struggling readers, the unskilled, and the aspiring American com-
mitted to self-improvement.11
Early novels also served a useful community-building function,
as Davidson and others have explained.12 Operating as what con-
temporary critics have called social cement, novels could link
a diverse population across race, class, and gender concerns, as
Harriet Beecher Stowe famously did with Uncle Toms Cabin just
before the Civil War. By demanding empathy (and, more contro-
versially, pity) for her characters trapped in slavery, she made it
impossible for her readers to support the Souths continuation of
their peculiar institution. In American literature classes we often
repeat the anecdote that has Abraham Lincoln calling her the
little lady who started the Civil War. For a more recent example,
think of how millions of readers repeatedly swept up the first copies
of J. K. Rowlings books chronicling Harry Potters struggles with
the dark forces of terrorism, making them phenomenally success-
ful novels across languages, cultures, and continents at the turn of
the twenty-first century.13
16 THE ULYSSES DELUSION
Judging Books
In autumn, when an American literary professionals fancy turns
to the National Book Awards, serious literary novelist Jonathan
Franzen was, in 2010, enjoying another round of praise for another
Great American Novel.24 This time it was Freedom, his first novel
since The Corrections (his third novel) inspired a commotion in
Oprahs Book Club in 2001 just before it won the National Book
Award.25 Living as I do in St. Paul, just across the railroad tracks
from the neighborhood where Franzen set parts of Freedom, it was
impossible to miss the critical chatter about his technical skill and
the depth of his social and psychological insight. For some critics
(himself included 26), he was the novelist who would return readers
to that Dickensian day where social relevance and cultural critique
met linguistic and philosophical complexity in a blessed union of
literary merit, confirmed on bestseller lists across the land.
Judging Freedom by traditional standards, Franzen certainly
deserves at least some of the attention he gets. Freedom is aestheti-
cally pleasing, beautifully crafted, with precise sentences, witty
word play, and conversations that ring true to their Midwestern
voices. It definitely invites readers to enter it via Pearls smallest
doorway; it has lovely language. In addition, its structure is satis-
fying, realistic rather than experimental, with a gratifying conclu-
sion, where most of the pieces fall together with a conservative
click: self-definition achieved, marriage affirmed (woman-of-color
foil killed). It is also culturally significant, delving deep into the
darkness of the American soul (critics love the darkness of the soul)
and plumbing the complexity of human relationships. It is erudite,
referencing other works of literature, art, and even science, and its
scope is large, ranging over 500 pages and across a lifetime.
Freedom put Franzen on the cover of Time Magazine (August
23, 2010) with Great American Novelist as its headline. The
New York Times reviewed it twice, the second time in an essay
by Sam Tanenhaus, the Book Review editor, in an extended cover
story proclaiming it a masterpiece in the reviews first sentence.
Tanenhaus compared Franzen to Dickens, Tolstoy, Bellow and
20 THE ULYSSES DELUSION
The Atlantic 74 26
Harpers 79 21
London Review of Books 74 26
New York Review of Books 84 16
The Times Literary Supplement 76 24
The New York Times Book Review 65 35
In short, the ratio of female authors reviewed was at best about one-third, and at worst less
than a quarter!
24 THE ULYSSES DELUSION
online forums and reader blogs. I love how they are many things at
the same time, both highbrow and lowbrow, hard to pin down and
impossible to suppress, spilling out beyond their categories in col-
orful and chaotic confusion. I believe that to judge novels astutely
and well critics need to be in conversation not just with other crit-
ics, but also with the novels history and its passionate advocates,
the many avid admirers and consumers of novels. If we are serious
about understanding novels and want to do them justice, we will
wander off into side rooms, entering them by doorways both large
and small; we will listen to women and honor fantasy fans, study
romance and embrace empathy. If we wander well, our literary
future will find the brazenly ambitious American novel, adaptable
and accommodating, still a part of readers everyday lives and even
more deeply a part of our cultures critical conversations.
CH A P T ER 2
Bring Money
When I gave my children their first books, they literally ate them
up. Their gnawed-on, drool-smeared, cardboard books are some
of my favorite relics of bygone baby daysPat the Bunny and
Goodnight Moon in ruined, well-loved pieces. I like to think of
books this way, not just as cultural productions, creative expres-
sions or communicative acts, but as things that we consume with
the joy and intensity of toothless infants.
The trouble is, such a view of books is decidedly not what people
expect from me. Its been a few years now since I began to wonder
why these central acts of readingblissful indulgence and deter-
mined consumptionhave been marginal to my scholarly study
of literature. Why, in my professors world of literary theories, are
books the subjects of cool appreciation but seldom heated avoca-
tion? Why was I trained mainly to see them as artistic objects or
social interventions, and seldom as capitalist products?
The aging among us (or those who watched VH1s I Love
the Seventies shows) might recall the StarKist commercials where
Charlie works really hard to get the purveyors of tuna to recog-
nize that hes one classy fish. Despite his efforts to display social
and artistic refinement, the voiceover always rejects him: Sorry,
Charlie. StarKist doesnt want tuna with good taste. StarKist wants
tuna that tastes good. Poor Charlie. Like the Trix Rabbit or the
Cocoa Puffs Cuckoo, he never gets to satisfy his desires. Weirdly,
though, Charlies desire is not to consume but to be consumed;
he seeks approval (and annihilation) rather than, like his cartoon
buddies, food. Even as a kid, I found that disturbing.
30 THE ULYSSES DELUSION
that I dont have cable (certainly no tawdry satellite dish) and never
use my TV except to watch films with subtitles.
Though we can play it like a game, class is a multifaceted sys-
tem in US culture, more complex than it first appears, and more
recalcitrant. Siblings raised by the same parents, in the same
town, for example, may identify with different taste cultures.
Have you ever tried to get a half-mocha-soy latte in Slippery
Rock, Pennsylvania? My sister, she of the black coffee, loves to
see me try. And the link to money isnt as apparent as it might
seemafter all, I make roughly the same amount as my brother
the trucker or my sister the nurse (before she got her masters
degree and left this PhD in the dust). This is, as Gans argues,
also about education and what it teaches us to value. There is
no simple correlation between the higher and lower taste cul-
tures and the higher and lower classes, he explains, but what
people choose for their arts and entertainment is still influenced
by their socioeconomic resources, symbolic as well as material
(vii). My march through the educational system, my symbolic
socioeconomic resource, accounts for many of my differences
from my seven brothers and sisters when it comes to aesthetic
choices. But religion, geography, jobs, even personal preference
also play a part.
Complex as the sources are, it is clear that Americans know and
recognize class categories based on aesthetic choices, not just on
the number of our college degrees or the size of our paychecks
(or government receipts or trust fund draws). And these catego-
ries run deep. They matter to us. Observe most recent presidential
candidates, all with sizable incomes and degrees from prestigious
universities, working overtime to convince blue-collar Americans
that they are just like them. In 2008, the arugula-loving Barack
Obama put down his iPod and went bowling. After the next elec-
tion, we were led to believe that he shoots a gun (theres even a
picture). Hillary Clinton is still (as I write this) putting her elbows
on the table of many an Iowa diner. In 2012, buttoned-down,
well-heeled businessman Mitt Romney took off his tie and com-
miserated (usually awkwardly) with the unemployed, one foot on a
34 THE ULYSSES DELUSION
There is, finally, the same sense that culture is something created
by the few for the few, threatened by the many, and imperiled by
democracy; the conviction that culture cannot come from the
young, the inexperienced, the untutored, the marginal; the belief
that culture is finite and fixed, defined and measured, complex and
difficult of access, recognizable only by those trained to recognize
it, comprehensible only to those qualified to comprehend it. (25)
You can almost see little Charlie Chaplin trapped in the gears of
this great capitalist machine.
This disparagement of the middlebrow deepens in critic Dwight
MacDonalds influential 1960 essay, Masscult and Midcult,
in which he accuses the middlebrow of vulgarizing high culture
and mining low culture for profit. Middlebrow art, he tells us,
is empty, sentimental, and easily accessible (thats a bad thing
remember: real art takes work). High culture artists like those in
the avant-garde movement, on the other hand, turned their backs
on the marketplace, preferring to work for a small audience that
sympathized with their experiments because it was sophisticated
enough to understand them (220). Like Kershners literary artists
after the death of Dickens, McDonalds highbrows distinguished
themselves by their rejection of the marketplace. Following
Marxist theorists, McDonald connects masscult to capitalism
as a brutalizing and anaesthetizing force, undermining democracy
by inspiring complacency.
The people arent to blame, however, in MacDonalds formula-
tion (and in those of Marxist critics). The common people have
folk art, their private little kitchen garden walled off from the
great formal park of their masters (214). But when mass culture
interferes and breaks down the wall, integrating the masses into
a debased form of High Culture, it becomes the instrument of
domination. If the people listen to folk music or jazz, according
to MacDonald, they are tending the garden, and all is well. If they
venture off into rock and roll or Broadway musicals, woe to them,
for their categories are blurred, the dividers are gone. Reading
MacDonalds argument now, it is striking how the categories he
found so solid and distinct were actually temporary and subjective.
His footnote comparing the kind of thing heard at the Newport
Jazz Festivals to Rock n Roll, where the former is musically
BRING MONEY 41
studying these lists that the striking thing is not how seldom but
how often serious novels sell well. Kordas 1998 yearly bestseller
list is typical, featuring Toni Morrisons Paradise and Tom Wolfes
A Man in Full flanked by three Danielle Steel novels. A more
recent New York Times Bestseller List (October 17, 2010) featured
Franzens Freedom just above Nicholas Sparks, Danielle Steel, and
Janet Evanovichs latest; or another (October 26, 2014) which saw
Marilynne Robinson, with Lila, surrounded by Ken Follett, Jan
Karon, and Lee Child.
To understand how novels operate in American culture and to
know how to recognize the good ones, critics cant simply dismiss
outright as debased and compromised the ones that sell, throwing
their hands up at the capriciousness of readers. Nor can we inju-
diciously eliminate from consideration the novels materiality, how
it functions in the marketplace. How has it been possible for every
one of Janet Evanovichs last twelve novels to achieve number one
status on the New York Times Bestseller List, for example? What is
it about Stephanie Plum that readers find so irresistible? Could we
entertain the possibility that similarities between Toni Morrison
and Danielle Steel novels lead them both to the bestseller lists?
Could it be that they are not distinguished solely by their differ-
ences? And while were at it, what is with vampires and zombies
lately? To understand American novels, we need to ask. Ignoring
low- and middlebrow novels and thinking of their well-wrought
bestseller list neighbors as strange anomalies limits our inquiry
and our understanding while deepening the divisions that have
come to characterize our cultural life.
big box retailers and chain stores will sell only a few, often con-
servative, books, and their selling of them guarantees their success
(see The Shack or Heaven is for Real ).
In short, its often Wal-Mart or Amazon that decides what
books will sell, what books their shoppers will read or give as gifts
this holiday season. It leads me to ask: if corporations are people,
are these the people we want to take book recommendations from?
The result, according to friends I talk with in publishing, is that
publishers tend to focus on selling to big buyers, not so much to
readers. As William Petrocelli, an owner of Book Passage, told
the New York Times, You have a choke point where millions of
writers are trying to reach millions of readers, but if it all has to go
through a narrow funnel where there are only four or five buyers
deciding whats going to get published, the business is in trou-
ble. He worried that book choices will be made by a few corpo-
rate executives rather than hundreds of idiosyncratic booksellers
(Rich)or, ideally, readers and critics in conversation.
A similar manifestation of this trend is how bookstores now
select a few promising books to barrage you with as you walk in the
door. Have you noticed the proliferation of those low front table
displays and the migration of the high bookshelves to the stores
perimeters? Booksellers seem to be constantly on the prowl for the
next blockbuster that will ensure their bottom line, so they sell a
selected few books with insistent enthusiasm. Centers of e-com-
merce such as amazon.com do the same thing, sometimes slashing
prices on selected e-books to move sales and create blockbusters.
Trends like these shift sellers, publishers, and marketers further
from readers and, again, away from thoughtful selection based on
reader preference, let alone on any overt standard of literary merit
(Do you really think Ill like Ann Learys The Good House: A Novel
because I bought Louise Erdrichs The Round House, Amazon?).
Book choice in the marketplace isnt always about democracy or
personal preference, then; Ill grant a century of critics their fear:
it is sometimes classic market domination, that clinking of coins
that frightened Brooks and that palpitates the hearts of humanities
professors (even some 30 years after 1984 ). If there was art grown
48 THE ULYSSES DELUSION
Investigations
This section takes the ideas developed so far and deploys them
on novels in a series of short readings. Continuing the ransom
metaphor, these investigations are like Harvey Keitel at the end
of Thelma and Louise, running into that barren, empty space of
the standoffin this case, where traditional academic and aes-
thetic analysis confronts reader response and joyful consumption
(you dont have to decide which one is heavily armed and which
is about to hit the gas). Each chapter pushes toward a parleyed
agreement on how to judge books, the ones were supposed to
read and all of those others, including bestsellers, romances, and
Young Adult fiction. I selected the novels from the Newsweek
and Modern Library Top 100 lists and from among recent
bestsellers. A few of the notes begin from my work with stu-
dents, where our shared knowledge is constantly renegotiated.
Turns out, thats good practice if youre going to act as Keitels
Detective Slocumb.
CH A P T ER 3
But more important than those scientific and literary aspects, the
narrator intones, is the ethical impact the book should have on
the serious reader. There is a general lesson here about dan-
gerous trends and potent evils that actually exist. They arent
just in a story. Reading this should make all of usparents, social
workers, educatorsapply ourselves with still greater vigilance
READING LOLITA AT ST. KATES 59
When I started, fifty-six days ago, to write Lolita, first in the psy-
chopathic ward for observation, and then in this well-heated, albeit
tombal seclusion, I thought I would use these notes in toto at my
READING LOLITA AT ST. KATES 61
the high art literary tradition and the pleasure reading modes of
its women readers2005: The Summer of Faulkner.1
By the time Winfrey recommended three Faulkner novelsAs
I Lay Dying, The Sound and the Fury, and A Light in August her
Book Club had been going for almost ten years.2 And though the
project had been astoundingly successful for its first six years, the
whole enterprise was now faltering. Beaten back by waves of criti-
cism set off by Jonathan Franzens public undermining of her book
choices, Winfrey famously cancelled the Book Club altogether in
2002.3 When she revamped the format and returned a year later,
she announced a new focus on classics. Though the Book Club
continues today after several more format shifts (online and on
OWN, Winfreys cable network), it never quite got back to what
it did best in its early yearsencouraging reading, selling a lot of
interesting books, and regularly engaging millions of people in
meaningful conversations about novels.4
The Summer of Faulkner represented the end of the Book
Clubs second incarnation, as an aspirational highbrow literary
enterprise. As Malin Pereira points out in her essay Oprahs Book
Club and the American Dream, the revamped Classics Book Club
was pointedly and actively educational, with academics obviously
involved in the production of the website background informa-
tion, study questions and e-mail reading assistance (201). On
oprah.com during the Summer of Faulkner, visitors were directed
to Oprahs Classroom to watch video lectures, ponder reading
questions, and take quizzes (yes, quizzes). They could print out
a bookmark with reading deadlines, as on a college syllabus, and
there were guides for each novel, with reading tips and scholarly,
though accessible, essaysabout Faulkner, his influence on Toni
Morrison, his background and biography, his use of myth, and
about strategies for reading his modernist narrative (like a mystery,
like a jury trial, like a symphony). In the Summer of Faulkner, read-
ers all over the country were introduced to Thadious M. Davis,
Robert W. Hamblin, Phillip and Arnold Weinstein, Jay Parini,
Dan Kartiganer, and other notable scholars.
By all of my academic standards, this was good stuff. Taking
advantage of the best resources available, Oprah turned her Book
OPRAHS BOOK CLUB AND THE SUMMER OF FAULKNER 67
point, there may be up to ten separate lists on the Book Club 2.0
website, comprising over 100 books. No one could possibly keep
up. Since Wild, though, only three books have been designated
official Book Club selections and granted the treasured O
(thats one a year, for those keeping track at home), and they are
all throwback Oprah novelsa gorgeous, character-driven first
book by the young African-American Ayana Mathis, The Twelve
Tribes of Hattie; Ruby, Cynthia Bonds arresting story of love and
redemption in a tiny Texas town, also a debut novel; and Sue
Monk Kidds The Invention of Wings, a fictionalized telling of the
relationship between antebellum abolitionist Sarah Grimk and
her slave, Hetty Handful Grimk.
Seventy-two books are now on Oprahs website as Book Club
choices.11 Of those, 24 are from the Book Clubs later incarnations
the three years of classics that ended with Faulkner, the six patchy
years that followed, and now Book Club 2.0about twelve years
altogether. More than twice as many, 48, are from the first six
years. Traversing the range of contemporary (as opposed to classic)
fiction, from literary to less-so, with a few memoirs sprinkled in,
the original Book Club choices seemed aimed to gather readers
by appealing to their diverse preferences, interests, and skill levels.
Readers who struggled with the small doorways of the challenging
novels could wait until the next month and breeze through the big
doors of a plot-driven page-turner.
The Classic Book Club and those that followed met less often,
and, again, in shorter televised segments with limited reader inter-
action, and they featured fewer books. The books included after
the word classic was invoked, though more globally diverse,
were less varied, mainly literary fiction and nearly all by white
men (who, I probably dont need to point out, make up a small
proportion of Oprahs audience12). It is revealing, considering the
demographics of Oprahs Book Club and the gendered history of
the novel, that from 2004 until the announcement of Book Club
2.0, Oprah had not chosen a single novel by a woman writer
eight years and not a one and only a handful by men of color;
whereas, all but nine of the 48 selections of the earlier book club
OPRAHS BOOK CLUB AND THE SUMMER OF FAULKNER 71
change. The books came alive, and the conversation was engag-
ing. Oprah didnt need to choose one or the otherfeminine or
seriousbecause she demonstrated repeatedly that it is possible to
join skilled academic practices with womens reading conventions,
especially in the contexts of book clubs, a longstanding tradition in
the United States.13 I saw this happen on Oprahs Book Club many
times, particularly when Toni Morrison visited.
Taking Oprahs readers seriously, the Nobel-Prize-winning
Morrison appeared on the Book Club four times, more than any
other writer, and she talked honestly about how she constructs a
story and why her novels are difficult. She also listened, inviting
readers into her fictional worlds as she thoughtfully adjusted her
explanations to accommodate their perspectives. I still maintain
that the Book Club show on Morrisons The Bluest Eye was one
of the finest things I have ever seen on television.14 It was filled
with admiration for Morrisons exceptional craft and compassion
for her relatable flawed characters, and it was dignified by the
personal discoveries and transformations of the assembled read-
ers on Oprahs set; this mixed-race group talked openly about
racism and white privilege in a way Americans seldom attempt.
Morrisons influence, in this instance and throughout the Oprahs
Book Club venture, led logically to the Summer of Faulkner. She
had encouraged Winfrey to read his novels, and Oprah passed that
on to her audience. But Oprah readers never read Faulkner the way
they read Morrison15 with no lectures, no quizzes, no reading
guides, only six women talking intensely about a book they had all
read and were deeply invested in.
This in itself, the way Oprah called the earnest attention of
her legions of fans to a single novel, was always astonishing to
me. To see people on airplanes, at the beach, in coffee shops, all
reading and discussing the same book was remarkable, and even
more so (for English teachers) when the book was by Faulkner
or Morrison. For nearly twenty years now Oprah has consistently
brought books into meaningful contact with readers, at first play-
ing the encounter out on her stage in Chicago and lately featuring
it on her website and occasionally on OWN. I probably dont need
OPRAHS BOOK CLUB AND THE SUMMER OF FAULKNER 73
to say it, but publishers hope Oprah will never stop recommending
books. Her triumph is theirs, from top-selling reissued classics to
successful first novels.
Oprahs advocacy certainly worked for Faulkner. Always steady
sellers thanks to high school and college courses, Faulkners nov-
els jumped onto bestseller lists during the Summer of Faulkner,
with 518,049 copies of Oprahs special, boxed, three-novel set
sold, according to Publishers Weekly.16 Other classics had seen
similar success. The year before The Summer of Faulkner, The
Good Earth sold more than a half million copies; but this number
and Faulkners actually represent a drop in readers engagement
with Oprahs Classics Book Club. Its debut novel, East of Eden,
sold 1,689,000 copies in 2003. Anna Karenina sold more than
900,000 the following summer. One Hundred Years of Solitude
managed 850,000, and The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, the choice
just before the Faulkner novels, sold 735,000. Compare these
to A Million Little Pieces, which, again, followed Faulkner and
likely benefited from the controversy it stirred about the param-
eters of nonfiction. It sold over three million copies. Night, the
only book selection in 2007, approached 1.2 million. In 2008 (an
active and diverse year for Oprahs Book Club choices, similar to
her early Book Club years) each of five books sold over a million
copiesThe Road, Pillars of the Earth, Love in the Time of Cholera,
Middlesex, and The Measure of a Man.
It is also important to point out that during years when Oprah
was not selecting novels, there were almost always fewer novels
on the publishers list of top sellers that year. In 2002, the year of
Oprahs hiatus (and, granted, the year after 9/11), only one book
sold more than a million copies, and that was a cookbook. In the
active years of the early Book Club, ten or more novels dominated
the million-seller list year after year.
For an English professor, the lesson here is obvious: novels are
more vital to American culture, more centrally positioned in our
conversations, more relevant to our lives when people actually
read them. With a mixed motive of proselytizing self-improvement
through reading (Live your best life!) and, of course, achieving
74 THE ULYSSES DELUSION
commercial success, Oprah turned books into gold. She got peo-
ple reading (and buying) novels. She influenced book sales in the
United States more than any single person ever has.17 Much more.
And the novels she chose appealed more broadly when her Book
Club was more responsive to its readerswhen it was more com-
mercially motivated (as per Levine and Cowen in chapter 2). It was
less successful when it began, self-consciously, to build its liter-
ary legacy in that first decade of the twenty-first century, when it
courted the highbrow and the classic, when it studied Faulkner.
Oprahs Book Club revampedclassics, peripatetic, and 2.0
has been markedly less consistent, noticeably less populist, and
surprisingly less substantial than the early contemporary Book
Club. Because it was, essentially, a middlebrow womens book
club, Oprahs Book Club worked better when it paid attention to
its viewers than when it responded to its critics; it interacted more
easily with living writers than with challenging (and sanctified)
dead ones; and it functioned more effectively with everyday read-
ers than it did with professors. The academic reading modes of the
Summer of Faulkner, as impressive as they were (and they were
impressive), did not represent the best of Oprahs Book Club.
When readers were the seekers, the experts, the explorers,
gathered in a circle of overstuffed chairs on Oprahs set with
wineglasses in front of them and the author alongside, they
demonstrated how to read together, to question well and to link
books to their lives. In short, they modeled how to read like care-
ful, astute, middlebrow readers. There were fewer right answers
and more moments of connection and insight, fewer assertions
and more interaction. In this way, books came alive in front of
millions of viewers who saw possibilities instead of obligation in
these novels. Many of them dashed out to buy their own copy
immediately after.
What Oprah readers experienced in the Summer of Faulkner
was typical of the Book Clubs Classics incarnation. It was well
organized and erudite, with online questions, scholarly web-
casts, and constant e-mail encouragement to move forward with
the seasons reading goals. It appealed to the everyday readers
OPRAHS BOOK CLUB AND THE SUMMER OF FAULKNER 75
What effect do labels like chick lit and romance novel have
on womens writing? The way we read them changes, and their
literary merit suffers.
literary forms the worlds that inspire it (67). And who could
disagree? Most of the English majors in our Jane Austen class
liked Pride and Prejudice better than Bridget Jones, and, viscer-
ally almost, the chastened but dignified Elizabeth better than the
embarrassing Bridget. Our standards of literary merit clearly have
merit, and this sort of sorting has, in many ways, served our liter-
ary tradition well.
Similarly, Stephanie Harzewski, who stands out among critics of
chick lit in her conscientious tracing of its antecedents in womens
literature, reminds us that the literary merit of these novels is ques-
tionable, but their success invites us to reexamine literary value
(33). With her conclusion that, In its triumvirate embrace of shop-
ping, femininity, and mass culture, the genre of chick lit greets the
novels closet skeletons in a new marketplace (43), Harzewski, like
Wells, opens the question of how we evaluate novels aesthetically
when they are and always have been material products, participants
in the capitalist economy. When they are successfully marketed
to their predominantly feminine readers, when they amuse and
engross us successfully, their aesthetic value always drops. Serious
literature is, again, in the words of R. B. Kershner, written by those
most inclined to view themselves as artists who, inevitably (and
prescriptively), find their audiences limited.
In the current construction of this feminine genre, sex and
money predominate. As a result, chick lit is perceived, predictably,
as shallow (and, again, disconcertingly pink, which made pulling
the chick lit from my chaotic bookshelf to write this chapter a less
complicated task). The nexus of its fictional fantasies is not found
in characters, relationships, or events, which are all perceived as
much more true-to-life, but in settingthe high-powered, urban
world of advertising, finance, or publishing, a dream world where
spending offers community, therapy, reward, and wish-fulfillment.
As Jessica Van Slooten points out:
much more like Fielding than Austen to me. And why didnt we
notice that the Shopaholic Becky is very much like Becky Sharpe and
the theme of the novels much like William Makepeace Thackerays
Vanity Fair? That adds a depth of context to these novels that sim-
ply condemning their consumerism cannot do. They are coming-
of-age fiction, bildungsroman, Joseph Campbells heros journey
with a feminist slant. If we can imagine locating and defining chick
lit as part of a literary tradition that defines itself with, not against,
the ostensibly more artistic white mens writing, or even mens fre-
quent forays into romance writing (Im looking at you, Nicholas
Sparks), we open it up to better scholarship.
Critics, especially feminist ones, ought to occupy this imagined,
historically grounded, aesthetic place and define chick lit as part
of a broad, diverse literary tradition, one that can recognize and
celebrate commercial viability, one that can relish a good romance
plot, one that, speaking in a compelling fictional voice, can offer
up characters as alive as the people we meet every day. There is,
of course, also a useful tradition that values imaginative use of
language, inventive and thought-provoking metaphors, layers of
meaning, complex characters, and innovative handling of conven-
tional structure, as Wells outlines it. But again, slighting the way
the novel has always been chick lit pits masculine against feminine,
the aesthetic against the commercially successful, and keeps us from
embracing the unique qualities of the novel as its readers experi-
ence them. And, as we have seen with chick lit, unquestioningly
embracing only traditional standards of aesthetic merit, narrowly
defined as they are, traps even well-meaning critics in a paradigm
that perceives feminine interests as frivolous and routinely ignores
contributions by writers of color. It limits our tracing of womens
participation in novel writing to a few exceptional white women
artists who suit the dominant discourse, such as Jane Austen.
Thats not to say that my romance-centered students should not
have been invited to use aesthetic practices to reveal the fascinat-
ing complexities of Austens novel. It was precisely our emphasis
on both pop culture and literary analysis, Parrin and I found, that
energized our class.12
88 THE ULYSSES DELUSION
Gendering this genre also keeps the novel away from men and
could, if history tells us anything, be the death of the novelkilled
by lipstick and Manolo Blahniks, not cable TV or video games or
Amazon, as predictions would have it. If men begin to shy away
from Jane Austen, if they no longer read novels, we end up meticu-
lously dividing fiction from nonfiction and getting upset when the
lines are crossed, as the James Frey incident on Oprahs Book Club
demonstrated.13 If we turn our bookstores as pink and khaki as
the aisles in Toys R Us, no one benefits, and the novel suffers.
To this point, critics of chick lit, both literary and cultural, have
been complicit in undermining the genre by accepting its niche,
its unimportant corner of the larger literary garden; whereas, one
could argue, conversely, that it is a (brilliant pink) flowering of a
tradition. It reminds us again what makes novels work for readers:
main characters they can imagine themselves into, recognizable
depictions of their lives and fantasies, reaffirmation of key cultural
values, and, dammit, good solid entertaining stories that make
you want to run to the bookstore to buy another one.
Most of chick lit may not be Literature in the traditional aes-
thetic sense, but its certainly another chapter in the unfolding
adventures and changing fortunes of the novel in todays consum-
erist and print-resistant world. How the genre is perceived and
named, which novels are labeled, and what those novels tell us are
all constructions of criticism. In choosing which novels we study
and how, critics, even in our attention to chick lit, have become
complicit in sidelining and minimizing this genre. In naming this
little space chick lit, we participate in the marginalization of most
novels by and about women. If we buy chick lit as the epitome of
pink, then we buy its commercialist and often over-simplistic view
of women readers and writers. If, instead, we value it as a fascinat-
ing foray into the ongoing literary historical conversation about
the noveland the novels commercial viability based on its com-
pelling appeals to readersthen we have a subgenre thats good
for the novel and good for women.
CH A P T ER 6
While were on the topic of how seeing books as feminine can under-
mine our evaluations of their significance, Id like to turn, for a
moment, to Fifty Shades of Grey. There it was again in the New York
Times Book Review (September 21, 2014), as it has been for years
now: Fifty Shades of Grey, along with Fifty Shades Darker and Fifty
Shades Freed, on the trade paperback fiction list. To the tradethats
the fancy list, the Simone de Beauvoir list from chapter 1. For a while
these three were numbers 1, 2, and 3; now theyre down to 5, 14,
and 15.1 Before they crept over to this list, they first dominated the
combined print and e-book bestseller list. And again I wondered, as
I have for years, as many of you probably wonder as well: WHY?
Bestselling novels are an enigma to scholars. In studies of these
lists, critics often take on a tone of complete exasperation, as we saw
in chapter 2. Because they are, again, accounts of commerce not
quality, these lists stymie our attempts at aesthetic assessment of the
novels found on them. But it has been my contention that paying
close attention to reader preferences (even the most embarrassing
ones) can reveal valuable information about the novel, what makes
it good, and what work it performs in US American culture.
Which leads me back to that provocative question about Fifty
Shades of Grey. Did these particular novels hit a cultural sweet
spot, illuminate a social conundrum or reinforce firmly held
90 THE ULYSSES DELUSION
Clearly, there was good stuff going on there. Lucky me, I was
mentored by a generation of feminist critics who knew how to
value novels for what they do as well as what they are.8 And I have
observed (with other scholars of the middlebrow) that some of the
most popular bestselling novels have an effectthey inspire read-
ers to discussion.
By the early sixties, womens novels had about two hundred years
of practice appealing to their readers with these effective methods.
And they were good at it. Drawing readers in with absorbing plots
and captivating characters, then firing them up for social change
was part of their repertoire, from Uncle Toms Cabin and Life in
the Iron Mills in the nineteenth century to The Street and To Kill a
Mockingbird in the years preceding The Group. Yet history seldom
accounts for this influence. These novels become like the kitchen
things that Susan Glaspell writes about in her short story A Jury
of Her Peers (1917), where the farmwives find in the feminine
details of sewing and canning the motive and methods of a crime,
while the men dismiss their observations as trifling and insignifi-
cant. Because womens novels are like those kitchen things, their
influence is seldom acknowledged, as we turn our attention to
more overtly political nonfiction, like Friedans.
A few years later, in the early seventies, the influence of womens
novels like McCarthys became so pronounced that it was much
harder to ignore. Susan Faludi, in an oft-quoted passage from her
afterward for the 1993 reissue of Marilyn Frenchs The Womens
Room, writes about the effect of that iconic consciousness-raising
novel:
of anger that is peculiarly bracing, the kind of fury that fuels small
and big changes. (469, qtd in Loudermilk 18)
Fiction, too, had been doing the work of naming the nameless, of
making change tangible, as the women in The Group with their
unladylike behavior demonstrate.11
It is probably important to note that this is not the general
scholarly take on this era of transformation in womens lives
through popular fiction. For example, Kim A. Loudermilk, in
her 2004 study Fictional Feminism: How American Bestsellers
Affect the Movement for Womens Equality, argues that, although
these texts may sometimes empower individual readers or viewers,
the fictional feminism they present tends to appropriate radical
ideas and uphold dominant cultural norms (41). Echoing the
condemnations of Marxist theorists from Theodor Adorno to
Frederic Jameson, she asserts, popular culture tends to promote
relatively traditional and conservative values and that storytelling
itself has functioned as a conservative force (2829). Working
from a foundational bias that consumer culture is inevitably cor-
rupting, Loudermilk then suggests, with Jameson, that popu-
lar success proves a novels mainstream credentials.12 It must,
because radical disruption looks like the high art we examined
in chapter 2 underappreciated, little understood, generally mas-
culine. The bumbling, well-meaning popular is always already
co-opted, its revolutionary teeth removed. She quotes Resa
Dudovitz: Few bestselling authors ever reject the outright tra-
ditional female roles because to do so would compromise their
novels appeal on the mass market (30).
But what about Lakey, the hero of (bestselling) The Group, the
most admired and successful, the most transgressive, the part-
nered lesbian?
I find Loudermilks argument (and others like it) simply wrong,
as wrong as aesthetic analysis that writes off womens work and
banks on class division for its legitimacy. This sort of dismissal
ultimately views womens novels as kitchen things and fails to
account for the unique information they offer. With the men in
Glaspells story, it heads out to the barn or upstairs to look at the
windows. Thats not where the evidence is, folks.
WHAT I LEARNED FROM THE (BOOK) GROUP 97
For the sake of argument, lets begin with what this novel does
well. First, may I just mention that there were nearly 66,000 rat-
ings and nearly 10,000 reviews of The Storyteller on Goodreads
as of September 2014, less than two years after its publication,
and that the average rating was 4.24 on a five-point scale?2 Jodi
Picoult attracts readers. And what these nonprofessional review-
ers say demonstrates that her readers enter her fiction in diverse
ways, by every one of Nancy Pearls doorways, including lan-
guage, but most often and most obviously by plot (which, you
may remember, is the biggest doorway). This novel has a typical
Picoultian interwoven narrative of multiple voices, so it also has
at least three compelling plots to follow from five different per-
spectives. An obvious majority of the Goodreads reviews, written
overwhelmingly by women, comment on or summarize these sto-
ries, which include a Holocaust narrative (from both a Nazis and
a Jews perspective), a vampire tale (here called upir, or ghost
in Polish), and a romance plot about a bland baker (named after
a spice) who falls for a Nazi-hunter, who also recounts his ver-
sion of their developing relationship. All of these stories include
a similar moral dimension, where someone needs to make a Big
Decision about forgiveness, love, loss, and redemption. Lets just
say things happen.
And when you read it, you want to know what happens. The
Storyteller is nothing if not absorbing. As Toto66 Gore noted on
Goodreads, This was one of those books . . . the kind you begin,
get sucked in, cant eat . . . answer the phone . . . watch TV . . . all
you want to do is read. Then you get near the end and find any
excuse not to read because you dont want it to end [ellipses in
the original] (March 12, 2013). That cant-put-it-down quality,
that forest fire fascination, was observably at work for many read-
ers. Natalie Powell, for example, wrote, It took me only two and
half days to read this, because it was so good. I get really carsick
when Im traveling and reading, but I was forcing myself to read
in the car on the way to our vacation, even though I was dying of
a horrible headache (July 1, 2013). Erin McDonnell-Jones called
it addictingly wonderful (June 12, 2013). The book wouldnt
STORYTELLING WITH JODI PICOULT 101
While reading The Storyteller, I did not discover anything about the
Holocaust that I did not already know . . . but its the first time
Ive gotten close to thinking about what it would be like to experi-
ence Nazi cruelty first-hand. And it was the first time I thought
about what Nazis themselves saw, felt and believed. It is brilliantly
told and wonderfully wraps together, while still doing justice to its
charactersand the real people who suffered. (March 25, 2012)
The reader brings as much to the book as the writer does: youre
bringing your past, youre bringing your thoughts, youre bringing
your future. Its my job as a writer to tell you a story thats going
to take you away from whatever youre doingyour laundry, your
kids, whateverbut that, to me, is the least important part. When
I sit down to write a book, my goal is to make you ask yourself,
Why are my opinions what they are? Im not going to make
you change them necessarily. You might if Ive done a good job,
but at the very least, youre going to ask yourself where you stand
on a given issue. To me, the mark of a great book is that it can
move a variety of people, even though each person is connecting
in a different way. The purpose of a story is to be a crowbar that
slides under your skin and, with luck, cracks your mind wide open.
(Picoult, Books)
STORYTELLING WITH JODI PICOULT 103
The writing begins in the second half of the year, she told her
Minnesota audience, on schedule. A book a year, just like that,
every year. Every one of her 22 books, then, is full of informa-
tion about the issue she selects, and the characters in it experience
the issue first hand. This you are there quality appeals to novel
readers, making issues more relevant and immediate, while also
generating good conversations. Colleagues of mine in biology, for
example, use Picoults My Sisters Keeper to encourage reflection
and discussion about the ethics of genetic testing and the limits of
medical intervention. What would you do in the same situation?
they ask, just as Picoult would have it.7
Belying the conclusion that what makes something a bestseller
is entirely unpredictable, Picoult set out to predict it. As she
revealed in Oprah Magazine: I dont think anyone even knew
I was writing until Id written a good five or six books. And it
wasnt until the ninth or 10th book that I hit the bestseller list.
And there she has stayed. With absorbing plots, relatable charac-
ters, plenty of information, and an overt invitation to discussion,
Picoult achieves bestseller status again and again. She told the
Guardian: When I think about writers who use fiction as social
commentary and to raise social awareness but who are also very
popular, I think of Dickens.
Yet, Ive read Charles Dickens. Charles Dickens is a favorite nov-
elist of mine. Jodi Picoult is no Charles Dickens.
And why is that? Why are critics so astoundingly of one voice
when it comes to Jodi Picoult novels? Why has the New York Times
not taken a single one of her last six novels seriously enough to
review it? In fact, she is ignored consistently by The New Yorker,
Harpers, the Atlantic, and the New York Review of Books.8 What
are the standards of literary merit that produce such unanimity in
these leading literary venues?
As we have seen, critics and professors locate excellence in a
tradition of evaluative criteria quite different from the ones that
readers ordinarily use. These are the qualities that put an aesthetic
reading ahead of a cultural one for the Lolita readers in chapter 3,
the ones that led chick lit critics to marginalize the books they
STORYTELLING WITH JODI PICOULT 105
which she turns over to Sage. In it is the dark fairy tale that she
told, Scheherazade-like, to keep herself alive in the concentra-
tion campthat vampire story I mentioned earlier. In the end we
discover that she told that story to Franz/Josef, and he became
obsessed with it. Minka, then, is apparently the titular storyteller;
she is certainly the most engaging character in the novel.
There are some inelegant thuds as these and other stories hit the
ground. There is Sages struggle to forgive herself for (accidentally)
killing her mother in a car crash, and her quest to earn the for-
giveness of Pepper and Saffron, her (equally bland) sisters. (Dear
SparkNotes: forgiveness is a central theme.) There is Mary, the
ex-nun who gardens and feeds people. There is the cheating funeral
director, the Jesus bread, the grief group, and the poet/barista
who speaks always and unhesitatingly in haiku. The USA Today,
one of the few mainstream venues that reviewed The Storyteller,
called it a big mess of a novel. Jocelyn McClurg, the reviewer,
noted some good qualitiesthat the novel grapples with complex
moral questions, for examplebut she concludes that too much
of this novel just seems forced and frivolous, leaving an unpleasant
aftertastelike a gooey pastry you know is bad for you but just
keep eating. Thats funny because (spoiler alert) Sage kills Josef
with a pastry laced with a poisonous plant from Marys miraculous
garden. And then goes home to her law-enforcing boyfriend who
works for the Department of Justice and never tells him that story.
And they live happily ever after.
And plausibility shatters as Picoult fumbles it in these narra-
tives. I understand this is a story, and our agreement with good
stories is that we will willingly suspend disbelief to embrace them.
But there are limits to a readers investment in this bargain with
the realistic novel.11 Because realism is a characteristic both read-
ers and critics expect in an Anglo-American novel like this one
one that is set in our time and in places that we recognize, one
that accesses actual historical eventsit is disturbing to us when
improbable things happen, especially when they appear to be short-
cuts rather than the products of creative license.12 Some review-
ers on Goodreads called out this weakness, such as Taughnee
STORYTELLING WITH JODI PICOULT 107
imagination; they come off the page and into our lives, with their
range of authentic human emotions. Only Minka does this in
The Storyteller. Too many of the other characters in this novel are
inconsistent, flat, or flavorless.
Finally, in light of her legions of fans, I am struck by how little
Picoult seems to trust her readers. Truthfully, this is my pet peeve
as a novel-lover. Please, please dont spell everything out. Have
some restraint. Trust me to get it. At several places in this novel it
was as if Picoult put up a flashing neon sign: This is a metaphor.
Those marauding vampire brothers? The Nazi boys. The chess
set? Minkas fairy tale. Bread? Family, tradition, comfort. Ovens?
No kidding, she did this: Here are the litters, used to slide a body
inside, the way I use a peel to slide an artisanal loaf into my wood-
fired oven (96). And Minka and Sage? They are so much alike!
They both have scars! They both hide! They both cheat! Isnt that
interesting?
It would be hard to overestimate how much restraint is val-
ued by serious readers, critics, and professors. We expect verbal
restraintas in not subtitling your novel A Novel (that goes
for you, too, Jonathan Franzen), as in not repeatedly conflating
knead and need, or not arbitrarily naming three sisters after
spices, and calling the one Sage who most definitely isnt. We
want stylistic restraintas in using punctuation carefully and
meticulously editing sentences. But perhaps most of all, we look
for emotional restraintas in not taking detours around our
intricate humanity to get to easy affecting triggers. This one runs
deep, into a modernist resistance to anything tagged sentimental.
And while this resistance is often class- or gender-based, as we
have seen, here Picoult has stepped so far over the line that it isnt
even a judgment call. It is inexcusable to use a concentration camp
as a backstory, to draw tears for the privileged American whose
nana just died, when that nana had survived the Shoah. And that
sweet old German? He shares his Daily Bread with his puppy.
A puppy!
If traditional aesthetic standards can find few redeeming
qualities in this novel, perhaps (I suggest hopefully) a cultural
STORYTELLING WITH JODI PICOULT 109
And, in the end, Im left with this assessment, from Alice Short
of the L.A. Times :
Rereading Rand
of the twentieth century, where Rand claims half of the top eight
spots, with Atlas Shrugged at number one.1 It is an influential
book, a popular culture phenomenon, selling more copies in 2012
than it did when it was published in 1957, and tracing its resur-
gence to the fierce advocacy of many Libertarian and Tea Party
politicians (and superfan Alan Greenspan). A thousand-page-plus
politically charged romance novel, it has also been a target for
liberal send-ups, like comedian John Olivers How is Ayn Rand
Still a Thing? (YouTube September 29, 2014), the recent Alternet
post from Adam Lee 10 (insane) things I learned about the world
reading Ayn Rands Atlas Shrugged(April 29, 2014), and a still-
circulating blog post Atlas Shrugged: The Abridged Version (with
spoilers) first posted in 2008.2
Thats pretty serious longevity for an Internet culture with a
notoriously short attention span. On the other hand, like Jodi
Picoult, Rand has been consistently and almost universally ignored
by literary professionals, pointedly snubbed by academics and intel-
lectuals. Adam Kirsch, literary critic and senior editor at the New
Republic, crystallized this disdain in the New York Times in 2009:
sophomore, circa 1979, couldnt figure out for the life of me.
Heres what I mean: in my first year at Slippery Rock State College,
I visited my philosophy professor during his office hour and hap-
pened to mention my love for Rands novels. Coming from a work-
ing-class familymostly, at that point, Reagan Democratsand
from a public school system overwhelmed by Baby Boomers, I had
little experience with the standards by which I was supposed to
reject Atlas Shrugged. So I enthused about the book. I mean, it
was huge and intellectual. I had to plod through the culminating
60-page John Galt radio broadcast paragraph by paragraph. And I
was proud of myself, proud that I got it. My professor, however,
was not impressed. It took only a telltale shudder, an almost imper-
ceptible disgust, for me to understand that this taste (like my affec-
tion for Holly Hobbies, Norman Rockwell, and old Frank Capra
movies) was embarrassing, that I should keep it to myself. And so I
diduntil that hopeful encounter in Brownsville three years later.
But even after graduating with an English and journalism
major, I hadnt learned why I wasnt supposed to like Rand novels.
No one bothered to break it down because the barricades were
already up.
And there it is: Atlas Shrugged is political. This novel lives and
dies by its politics. That, in itself, is not unusual in the history
of novels. It would be difficult to be more overtly political than
Charles Dickens, Harriet Beecher Stowe, or Richard Wright. In
the novels illustrious past, it has been possible to be very political
and still be very good. And while its true that I may be a little sen-
sitive because of my own experience with Rand, I think theres an
argument to be made here for taking other peoples literary tastes
seriously enough to address them respectfully. A shudder cant
substitute for a real conversation. In this penultimate investigation
chapter, then, I want to address my younger self and other Atlas
aficionados. In the spirit of conversation that frames my questions
throughout this book, I want to assess Atlas Shrugged as a novel.
Is it beautiful, innovative, or skilled? What work does it aim to do
and for whom? Does it do it well? And, in the end, how do the
message and the medium co-exist in this sprawling, earnest story?
114 THE ULYSSES DELUSION
breasts pressed to the desk; she felt the longing in her muscles, in
the nerves of her body. (207) [Ellipses in original]
When she finally finds him, Dagnys narrative depicts a man with
a face that bore no mark of pain or fear or guilt. A seemingly
detailed examination of the shape of his mouth characterizes it as
pride, and more: it was if he took pride in being proud, and she
portrays the angular planes of his cheeks as arrogance, of ten-
sion, of scornyet the face had none of these qualities, it had their
final sum: a look of serene determination and of certainty, and the
look of a ruthless innocence which would not seek forgiveness or
grant it (643). Now I ask you, what does he look like?
This sort of emotional description ran rampant through nine-
teenth-century novels, when people believed that the shape of your
head could reveal your character (or lack thereof) and when it was
a literary convention to read peoples faces.3 It comes across today
as overreaching and unskilled, as it has the narrator doing the
readers work; it delineates everything we should be observing but
paints it garishly on a characters face. At one point, for example,
Dagny looks at Galt, hiding neither her suffering nor her longing
nor her calm, knowing that all three were in her glance (744).
(All of that. In her glance. Try demonstrating that in a mirror.
Im just saying: I cant suspend disbelief enough.) Earlier, another
character, observing Dagny, notices a faint contraction of her
cheeks and lips; it was not quite a smile, but it gave him her whole
answer: pain, admiration, understanding (439). (Apparently such
facial revelations come in threes.) A few pages later, Dagny reads
her childhood friend Francisco dAnconia: He smiled, not look-
ing at her; it was a mocking smile, but it was a smile of pain and
the mockery was directed at himself (476). Afterwards, he smiles
again, this time with the luminous sincerity of innocence and
pain (478).
Recalling for a moment that I am a modernist by training, and a
Hemingway fan by (journalistic) inclination, you might see where
following a single lift of an eyebrow or facial contortion with a sen-
tence or two, even an entire paragraph, of emotional explication
116 THE ULYSSES DELUSION
The light cloth of his shirt seemed to stress, rather than hide, the
structure of his figure, his skin was suntanned, his body had the
hardness, the gaunt tensile strength, the clean precision of foundry
casting, he looked as if he were poured out of metal, but some
dimmed, soft-lustered metal, like an aluminum-copper alloy, the
color of his skin blending with the chestnut brown of his hair, the
loose strands of the hair shading from brown to gold in the sun,
and his eyes completing the colors, as the one part of the casting
left undimmed and hardly lustrous: his eyes were the deep, dark
green of light glinting on metal. (643)
mountain utopia full of Frank Lloyd Wright houses for single men,
there are only three womena beautiful actress, a nameless novel-
ist, and Dagny, who runs a railroad but first enters the village as
a housemaid.) As this story plays out alongside the romance plot,
Rand also interweaves a utopian allegory of individualism, unfet-
tered capitalism, and American exceptionalism.
Owing mainly to this allegorical inclination, Rand follows the
Dickensian practice of making the good guys and the bad guys
obvious not just by their appearance (and face messaging), but
also by their names. Orren Boyle, Bertram Scudder, and Wesley
Mouch are deceptive, loose, and fleshy, where Ellis Wyatt, Calvin
Atwood, and Midas Mulligan are honest, thin, and hard.4 And
its a simple Either-Or (as Part Two is titled) for every char-
acter. They occupy a black and white moral universe, a realm of
philosophical certainty so unshaken by doubt that it reads more
like a parable than a modern novel. Galt instructs the world that,
This, in every hour and every issue, is your basic moral choice:
thinking or non-thinking, existence or non-existence, A or non-
A, entity or zero (931). And the novel drives this polarity home
repeatedly.
James Taggart, Dagnys nogoodnik brother, has a face that is
pale and soft with eyes that are pale and veiled, and a glance
that moved slowly, never quite stopping, gliding off and past things
in eternal resentment of their existence (14). Nearly every time
he appears, the novel employs the words soft and pale. Hank
Reardon, one of the admirable industrialists (and an old-school
Nordic Minnesotan), is described quite differently, with eyes the
color and quality of pale blue ice and a face cut by prominent
cheekbones and by a few sharp lines (34). He, like every good
person, is thin, angular and mechanisticand ultimately Aryan,
as Adam Lee points out in his Alternet blog.5
This makes it simple for Dagny to recognize Hugh Akstons
importance even when he is working as a cook in a diner. The
philosophy professor who inspired those three crusading college
boys had a lean face and gray hair that blended in tone with the
cold blue of his eyes; somewhere beyond his look of courteous
118 THE ULYSSES DELUSION
The smell came from undusted corners and from incense burning
in silver jars at the feet of contorted Oriental dieties. Ivy Starnes
sat on a pillow like a baggy Bhuddha. Her mouth was a tight little
crescent, the petulant mouth of a child demanding adulationon
the spreading, pallid face of a woman past fifty. Her eyes were two
lifeless puddles of water. Her voice had the even, dripping mono-
tone of rain. (300)
To the glory of mankind, there was, for the first and only time
in history, a country of money and I have no higher, more rever-
ent tribute to pay to America, for this means: a country of rea-
son, justice, freedom, production, achievement. For the first time,
mans mind and money were set free, and there were no fortunes-
by-conquest but only fortunes-by-work, and instead of swordsman
and slaves, there appeared the real maker of wealth, the greatest
worker, the highest type of human beingthe self-made manthe
American industrialist.
If you asked me to name the proudest distinction of Americans,
I would choosebecause it contains all the othersthe fact
that they were the people who created the phrase to make
money, No other language or nation had ever used these words
before; . . . Americans were the first to understand that wealth has
to be created. The words to make money hold the essence of
human morality. (384)
120 THE ULYSSES DELUSION
Seriously, Fifty Shades of Grey, with its room full of whips and
chains, was sweeter than this.
If Hank is a rapist, the heroic John Galt (who we are invited,
with Dagny, Hank, and others to worship) is a stalker, lurking
in the tunnels under Taggart Trancontinentals headquarters in
New York, waiting in the shadows to follow Dagny home, peer-
ing at her through windows, and anonymously befriending her
assistant so he can pump him for information. And this is situated
as flattering. She felt an odd, lighthearted indifference to his
revelation how he watched her for ten years, as if she suddenly
wanted nothing but the comfort of surrendering to helplessness
(652).12 This was just before she spent a month as his cook and
housemaid, with her eyes lowered, mumbling yes, sir (698).
Soldiering on in my rereading of Atlas Shrugged, pushing
through the boredom, shaking off my feminist indignation,
I found myself most baffled by the novels complete rejection of
the values that a lifetime of Christian practice have committed
me togenerosity, love, gentleness, empathy. Galts followers are
all required to take this oath: I swearby my life and my love
122 THE ULYSSES DELUSION
of itthat I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask
another man to live for mine. Selfishness is their creed, and they
live unfettered by anyone elses needs. That is pretty much the
opposite of what I learned in Sunday school; in fact, its a good
thing there are no children in this novel, because I cant imagine
who could take care of them without compromising their basic
principles. Reardon successfully manages, finally, to shake off his
grasping, elderly mother.
So, yes, now the politics are abhorrent to me. At this point,
I would certainly avoid reading Rands nonfiction explanations
of her philosophyIntroduction to Objectivist Epistemology, The
Virtue of Selfishness, or Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal. But so
do most Rand fans. On amazon.com Atlas Shrugged boasts 4,517
reader ratings, where the three nonfiction texts total 75; 246; and
184 reviews, respectively. Goodreads shows a similar split, with
213,267 reviews of the novel and 1,146; 8,341; and 2,529 of the
nonfiction, in the same order.13 So while some would argue that
what makes this novel work is its politics, its pretty clear to me
that what makes the politics work is the novel.
Clearly, the novel is full of information. Rand takes many
detours from the plot to lay out her philosophy in repetitive
detail, either logically, in the mouths of its adherents, or counter
punctually, in the ridiculous straw men (like Mouch) who live its
opposite. This constant reaffirmation of the main concepts brings
them home pretty clearly by the end of the book, and delivered as
they are, through heroic, iconic Americans, these ideas become
quite heady. The wealthy, handsome characters who proudly own
their selfishness and bravely endure the bumbling incompetence
of everyone around them become the lynchpins of the novel, the
ones we spend (a lot of) our time with and are invited to relate to,
even identify as. And there is no space to do otherwise, because,
truly, everyone else in the novel is like those poor passengers on
the train, so sheep-like and misled that they deserve to dieand
would, without our superheroes to save them from themselves.14
The form of Atlas Shrugged is familiarromance, mystery,
allegory. The attraction for readers is practicedabsorption,
REREADING RAND 123
Writing Wizardry
This final investigation begins with another family road trip, this
one when my children were nine and six.1 Seasoned travelers, they
already knew to bring along good books to make the hours go
by less tediously. That summer, I packed Harry Potter and the
Sorcerers Stone for the three of us. It was a new fantasy novel that
had just begun to dominate the New York Times Bestseller List,
and I thought we could read it together.2
Our plan was to drive from St. Paul to Chicago, where we would
meet my parents, then eventually end up in Southern Utah, where
my brother Mitch would pick up our mom and dad, and where my
kids and I would camp and hike for a few days in Canyonlands and
Moab before meeting up with the family again in Salt Lake City.
Then the five of us would pile back in my little SUV and head
east, dropping my parents at their car in Chicago so they could
return to Pennsylvania, while Daley, Tanner, and I turned toward
Minnesota (and their red-rock- and travel-loving Dad, whose job
wouldnt let him go with us that summer).
Well, the road trip wasnt quite the joyous family reunion I
had planned. It turned out to be the last time I would be with
my dad before he succumbed permanently to the dementia that
accompanied his advancing Parkinsons disease. When he insisted
on taking his turn driving just outside of Chicago, he panicked on
126 THE ULYSSES DELUSION
The only thing more embarrassing than catching a guy on the plane
looking at pornography on his computer is seeing a guy on the
plane reading The Hunger Games. Or a Twilight book. Or Harry
Potter. The only time Im O.K. with an adult holding a childrens
book is if hes moving his mouth as he reads.
WRITING WIZARDRY 133
they made Rachel and Evan, Tanner and Daley and many, many
Millenials avid readers of big, complex novels.
And this is how I bring this Investigations section to a close,
with a paean to the power of the novel. Its a power that, as a
professor, I am privileged to pass on, and that my Harry Potter
students returned to me with their own imprintwith their gen-
erations unique stamp of passion and playfulnessand a touch of
wizardry.
PA R T I I I
The Deal
Heres to books!
Oprah Winfrey
You, Readers List, failed to consider that good doesnt just mean
well loved; it often means difficult, discomfiting, or unfamiliar.
You, Newsweek List, pretended to be populist, but never seri-
ously considered the popular.
You, Modern Library, delivered conservative standards unex-
amined, as cultural givens.
You, Radcliffe rival, kept your standards obscure and suspi-
ciously senseless.
All of you did it. All of you underestimated, underexamined,
undervalued the novel. All of you, in different ways, were bad at
assessing books.
But so are the rest of us. Why are we generating lists instead
of conversations? Why havent we figured out yet what the mean-
ing of good is? Why arent professors, who are usually teachers,
more engaged with readers in our public scholarship? Why have so
many American readers given up on our best books?
To conclude this story, I want to offer an alternate ending to
our ransom situation, one that invites us all to the negotiating
table to talk about novels with the enthusiasm and engagement
they deserve, one that leaves the Ulysses delusion and its invented
divisions behind and reminds us that we have been, that we are
still, a reading nation.
2. Further discussion of the rise of the novel and its threat to received
cultural norms, especially for young women, follows in chapter 1;
see also Nancy Armstrongs groundbreaking Desire and Domestic
Fiction: A Political History of the Novel.
3. An elaboration of this point also follows in chapter 1, jumping off
from Cathy N. Davidsons influential Revolution and the Word:
The Rise of the Novel in America.
4. I would be the first to admit that I find reading (and reread-
ing) complex novels a pleasure. After studying literature for years,
honing my critical skills and practices, I enjoy unleashing them
on a text that takes time and effort to work through. There is
undoubtedly gratification to be found in that process, as well as
sharpened insights and discovered depths. The objection I am
forming here, however, is to how this is often figured in critical
literary discourse as the only legitimate mode of reading. I elabo-
rate on this objection further throughout (it is, in fact, one of the
primary points of this book), but Rita Felski, in Uses of Literature,
characterizes it succinctly when she describes the way critics read
literature as literature. It means, she writes:
Assenting to a view of art as impervious to comprehen-
sion, assimilation, or real-world consequences, perennially
guarded by a forbidding do not touch sign, its value adju-
dicated by a culture of connoisseurship and a seminar-room
sensibility anxious to ward of the grubby handprints and
smears of everyday life. (8)
5. A discussion of why critics love Franzen is found in the second
half of chapter 1; why they disdain Picoults novels is the subject
of chapter 7. Though, to be clear, critics in the most elite places
dont pan Picoults novels; they ignore them.
6. Ulysses is, of course, technically a novel. Novels are very gener-
ally described as long (one online definition says book-length)
fictional prose narratives. Websters Dictionary (because this
book is primarily about the American novel) defines it as an
invented prose narrative that is usually long and complex and
deals especially with human experience through a usually con-
nected sequence of events (accessed online at www.merriam
-webster.com/dictionary/novel on October 30, 2014). More on
what makes a novel a novel follows.
NOTES 149
and books. As anyone who has met Nancy can attest, shes read
everything ; her perspective on readers and reading, then, was
invaluable to me.
6. Examining one random Sundays (August 7, 2011) New York
Times Bestseller Lists demonstrates how some of the lists have
been constructed to be more equal than others. Of the top fifteen
books on the trade fiction list, nine had been reviewed in the New
York Times ; four of the top fifteen hardcover fiction bestsellers
had been reviewed. On the e-book fiction and mass-market lists
that week, only two out of the top fifteen had been reviewed.
7. Nor was this the last time the Book Reviews Bestseller Lists were
revised. When e-books got their own list, the Times added a weekly
mega-list integrating information from several of the bestseller
lists, making it the first time Ive seen a book from Harlequin on
the NYTimes lists. E. L. James quickly followed, with her Shades
of Grey series opening the floodgates for what people will read
when no one can tell what they are reading.
8. I will note here that while my life experiences have placed me in
both categories, avid reader and literary professional, the space
I own as I write this book is the latter. My we is meant to be
slippery, to challenge and elide categories, but generally speak-
ing, my we in this text is a royal we of literary profession-
als, mainly English professors. My perspective is inevitably the
scholarly one, despite my delight and indulgence in (and respect
for) popular reading. Another category I purposefully collapse is
literary professional, which, in this study, includes both college
and university scholars and professional critics, usually educated
by those scholars. While I realize that work in the media and work
in the Academy are quite different, I have generally found their
standards of literary merit remain similar. It pains me, again, that
professional literary criticism has little to say about the novels that
most people value. More on that in chapter 2.
9. Small pieces of this chapter appeared earlier in Communion
with Books: The Double Life of Literature at the College of St.
Catherine for the colleges centennial book project, Liberating
Sanctuary: A Hundred Years of Womens Education at the College
of St. Catherine, a collection of essays from feminist perspectives
about the history of our Catholic liberal arts college for women
in St. Paul, Minnesota (Lexington Books 2011), and in It Was
152 NOTES
follow, I believe that one way we can judge the value of novels
is by the cultural work they perform. But my work has also been
concerned with linking cultural value with aesthetic evaluation.
23. Baym also concludes that reviewers and critics were complicit in
a redefinition of the novels value. She asserts, the novel was
recognized to be a womans formcrucially to involve women
readers, authors and charactersyet reviewers continually gen-
eralized about novels in ways that made women a special case.
Reviewers also praised and preferred serious novels until seri-
ousness became the justification for our enterprises of academic
literary criticism and literary pedagogy and is the source of their
tension with the general public. . . . novels designed to give plea-
sure to the smallest number of people are touted as the present
ages masterpieces (2425).
24. Again, see Lawrence Buells serious study of this concept, The
Dream of the Great American Novel.
25. For a more careful analysis of Franzens history on Oprahs Book
Club I refer you (unashamedly) to my own Reading Oprah: How
Oprahs Book Club Changed the Way America Reads (SUNY
2004). This was, however, one of the episodes of Oprahs Book
Club that drew the most attention from the Academy. Jim
Collins addresses it in Bring on the Books for Everybody (Duke
2010), as does Evan Brier in the epilogue of A Novel Marketplace:
Mass Culture, the Book Trade, and Postwar American Fiction
(University of Pennsylvania 2010), and Kathleen Rooney in the
updated version of her 2005 Reading with Oprah (University of
Arkansas 2008). Many scholarly articles examine it as well, includ-
ing Sarah Robbinss Making Corrections to Oprahs Book Club:
Reclaiming Literary Power for Gendered Literacy Management in
The Oprah Phenomenon (Jennifer Harris and Elwood Watson, eds.
University Press of Kentucky, 2007), Chris Ingrahams discussion
in Philosophy and Rhetoric, Talking (About) the Elite and Mass:
Vernacular Rhetoric and Discursive Status (2013; 46.1: 121),
and William Pritchards commentary in Commonweal (A world
of false choices, Commonweal 137.18 (2010): 38+). When the
popular novel meets the high art literary tradition, as it did so
dramatically in this incident, critics paid attention. For the same
reason, Oprahs Summer of Faulkner drew similar, though
more muted, attention, as I explore in chapter 4.
156 NOTES
of Lolita in chapter 3). Good art, for Kant, is not political, not
interested, that is, it reflects his own value system, what we some-
times call the water we swim in, meaning that it is so present to
us that we become unaware of it. Formalist projects (disinterested,
beautiful) are then privileged, and remain privileged, for the most
part, throughout most of mainstream modernism and contempo-
rary criticism. White women writers and writers of color are almost
never perceived as disinterested because their gender or race or
class is inevitably seen as political.
A broader discussion of gendered and multicultural chal-
lenges to Kant is found in Aesthetics in a Multicultural Age
(Oxford 2002), edited by Emory Elliott, Louis Freitas Caton, and
Jeffrey Rhyne. Rita Felskis Beyond Feminist Aesthetics: Feminist
Literature and Social Change (Harvard 1989) and Hilde Hein and
Carolyn Korsmeyers collection Aesthetics in Feminist Perspective
(Indiana 1993), also inform my analysis of Kant here and in my
discussion of Lolita in chapter 3. I am also indebted to Terry
Eagletons examination of Kantian aesthetics in The Ideology of
the Aesthetic (1990). Eagleton argues that the aesthetic is located
not in the object, which is simply an occasion for the pleasurable
harmonization of our faculties (96). He asserts, instead, that
judgments of taste appear to be descriptions of the world but are
in fact concealed emotive utterances, performatives masquerading
as constatives (93), an idea that matches my understanding of
Kant, though Eagletons is located in Marxism where mine stands
on feminism.
29. Kant also distinguishes between the beautiful, or truly artistic,
and the pleasant. In judging the pleasant, there is no accounting
for tasteeveryone has his own taste ; but in judging the beauti-
ful we cannot say that each man has his own particular taste. For
this would be as much as to say that there is no taste whatever,
[that is], no aesthetic judgment which can make a rightful claim
upon everyones assent (287). When we call something beauti-
ful, he argues, we expect universal assent. Beauty is the property
of things not the reflection of individual preference. Hence he
says the thing is beautiful; and he does not count on the agree-
ment of others . . . but he demands it of them (287). This idea is
also further developed in chapter 2.
158 NOTES
2 Bring Money
standards, and that only its creators and audiences are com-
plete human beings, and that for these reasons it has a right
to maintain its cultural status and power. The irony is that
to defend its creator orientation it requires status, and to
claim such status it must compare itself to something lower.
This is one reason why the mass culture critique continues
to exist. (76)
10. The irony of this shift toward pleasing the critics is that the project
could never be nearly as commercially successful as pleasing the
women readers. I note in Reading Oprah that Franzens publish-
ers, expecting success with The Corrections it was already being
reviewed as the great American novelran 90,000 copies of
the novel, a generous estimate for a literary novel and almost
twice the total sales of Franzens first two novels combined. And
how many more did they have to run when Oprah selected it
for her Book Club later that month? More than 600,000, seven
times as many as the initial release (76). It brings to mind Nina
Bayms observation about how the dominant position of the pop-
ular novel in the nineteenth century represented less a change of
taste in an existing audience than a change in the makeup of the
audience for the written word (29).
11. The website lists 75 total selections for Oprahs Book Club, but
I count all three childrens picture books by Bill Cosby as one
selection; Oprahs Book Club counts each of them individually.
12. In Janice Pecks important 2008 study, The Age of Oprah: Cultural
Icon for the Neoliberal Era, she notes that Oprahs audience was
77 percent female and 81 percent white.
13. The topic of middlebrow womens book clubs is endlessly fasci-
nating to me. They came into being in the nineteenth century
when access to education was less open to women, and some of
them laid out serious plans of study, even as the ladies in the
group put on their white gloves, gossiped, and lunched. And
they never stoppedthroughout the twentieth century and into
the consciousness-raising groups and political collectives of the
womens liberation movement on to Oprahs Book Club groups.
Their work is always community building, sometimes friendship
driven, usually educative, now and then engaged with social jus-
tice or compassionate service. And these groups are ubiquitous.
Ill bet every one of you reading this has a mother, grandmother,
NOTES 169
States. But she shouldnt be blamed for the way I represent any
of that here.
9. Weiners campaign for more recognition of women writers has
stirred controversy for several years now; similar observations led
to the establishment of VIDA: Women in Literary Arts and their
influential annual counts of women writers reviewed and pub-
lished, beginning in 2010 (www.vidaweb.org). See chapter 1.
10. Again, I began developing this list of qualities in an earlier essay,
Communion with Books: The Double Life of Literature at the
College of St. Catherine for the colleges centennial book pro-
ject, Liberating Sanctuary: Womens Education and Community
at the College of St. Catherine, a collection of essays from feminist
perspectives about the history of our Catholic liberal arts col-
lege for women in St. Paul, Minnesota. I owe the editors (who
are also my writing group colleagues), Joanne Cavallaro, Jane
Carroll, and Sharon Doherty, a debt of thanks for the great con-
versations and thoughtful critiques that led me on the path to
this book.
11. There is a longer version of this analysis of how Oprahs Book
Club confronts high cultural value throughout Reading Oprah.
12. More on this combination of the popular and aesthetic in the
classroom in chapter 9: Writing Wizardry.
13. For a more thorough discussion of James Freys encounter with
Oprahs Book Club, see Jaime Harkers Oprah, James Frey and
the Problem of the Literary in The Oprah Affect.
11. Volumes have been written on the realist novel, which aims his-
torically to hold a mirror up to life. It is a favorite of middle-
brow scholars because of its persistent popularity and its unique
aesthetic. The realist novel was a staple particularly of the
nineteenth century, pre-modernism. For a thoughtful account-
ing of this tradition and how it constructed our reading prac-
tices, see Nancy Glazener, Reading for Realism: The History
of a US Literary Institution, 18501910 (Duke 1997). Wayne
Booths The Company we Keep: An Ethics of Fiction was again
helpful as I approached Picoults novel. And finally, Wolfgang
Isers The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in Prose
Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett (Johns Hopkins 1978), par-
ticularly The Reader as a Component Part of the Realistic
Novel (as excerpted in Hale, it is a frequent part of my assigned
curriculum).
12. I admit that I came to The Storyteller with a bias left over from
reading another Picoult novel, My Sisters Keeper, with perhaps
the most implausible ending in all of literary history. So conve-
ee-nient, as Dana Carveys Church Lady would say.
13. Theodor Adorno famously wrote of the impossibility of poetry
after the Holocaust, an argument he later rejected, though it is
still a marker in Holocaust Studies. A German and a cultural critic
of the Frankfurt School, he joined with other European philoso-
phers in trying to chart where to go next, in culture and politics,
after they had seen the end of civilization. In any event, I cant
even begin to do justice to the arguments against Holocaust rep-
resentation here. Suffice it to say that any historically aware or
culturally sensitive writer would approach it with great caution
and deference.
8 Rereading R and
1. It does look like someone might have rallied the troops for a
write-in Rand campaign on the Modern Librarys list. The web-
site describes their method for collecting reader opinions: The
readers poll for the best novels published in the English language
since 1900 opened on July 20, 1998 and closed on October 20,
1998, with 217,520 votes cast. Atlas Shrugged does, however,
appear consistently on reader surveys. Notably (perhaps more for
NOTES 177
the chapter to come), one more recent list, the Facebook Book
Challenge, asked its (younger) readers (with an average age of
37) to choose the ten books that have stayed with you. The
tallied results didnt include Atlas Shrugged, but the dominance
of To Kill a Mockingbird and Lord of the Rings as reader favor-
ites continued uninterruptedthey were numbers four and five
on the Modern Librarys Readers List and two and three on the
Facebook Challenge. Harry Potter outstripped every other book
by quite a margin on Facebook, which didnt ask for best books
but most influential ones, thus inviting childrens and YA books,
and probably sidelining aesthetic considerations and mediating
the influence of books were supposed to like (dont worry, Atlas
Shrugged, Ulysses doesnt appear on the 100-book compilation
eitherthough Pride and Prejudice, Jane Eyre, and The Great
Gatsby make the top 15). The Facebook readers list, generated
by Lada Adamic and Pinkesh Patel, examined over 130,000 sta-
tus updates from August 2014 (mainly from the United States,
the United Kingdom, and India). Readers Favorites lists are eas-
ily generated on the Internet now. Informative ones are available
at Goodreads, Barnes and Noble, and Amazon as well as many
library websites.
2. The blog was first shared on the rigourousintuition.ca website,
with its author listed as chlamor (September 27, 2008). It was
forwarded to me then, but I had forgotten about it when one
of my very first students (and still my favorite, of course), Doug
Anderson, sent it along as I was writing this (thanks, Dug!).
3. This morphed into the idea of eugenics in parts of the late nine-
teenth and early twentieth century Progressive Movement in the
United States, and many scientists and other intellectuals found
it reasonable to judge entire races based on genetic features. Then
there was Hitler. Because of these associations, most literary nov-
elists since WWII tend to shy away from reading faces in this
manner. For a more complete discussion of the eugenics move-
ment in the United States, its prejudices and practices, see Nancy
Ordovers American Eugenics: Race, Queer Anatomy, and the
Science of Nationalism (U of MN 2003).
4. Theres also Rodrigo Gonzales, the Chilean diplomat who suf-
fers from a fat, blank face and the eyes of a killer (792). In this
178 NOTES
9 Writing Wizardry
10 Redefining Excellence
3. Again, see chapter 8, f66, for further discussion of these four lists
(and a few more) and what they reveal.
4. If were keeping it one hundred, as Comedy Centrals Larry
Wilmore urges, I should admit that some of Morrisons novels
step over this line for me, being so difficult, so writerly, that at
times they seem to disregard the desires of even practiced readers
( Jazz, Paradise). I might suggest that they succumb to the Ulysses
delusion.
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