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American Literature Readings in the 21st Century

THE
ULYSSES
DELUSION
Rethinking Standards of Literary Merit

Cecilia Konchar Farr


American Literature Readings in the 21st Century
Series Editor: Linda Wagner-Martin

American Literature Readings in the 21st Century publishes works by


contemporary critics that help shape critical opinion regarding literature of
the nineteenth and twentieth century in the United States.

Published by Palgrave Macmillan:


Freak Shows in Modern American Imagination: Constructing the Damaged Body
from Willa Cather to Truman Capote
By Thomas Fahy
Women and Race in Contemporary U.S. Writing: From Faulkner to Morrison
By Kelly Lynch Reames
American Political Poetry in the 21st Century
By Michael Dowdy
Science and Technology in the Age of Hawthorne, Melville, Twain, and James:
Thinking and Writing Electricity
By Sam Halliday
F. Scott Fitzgeralds Racial Angles and the Business of Literary Greatness
By Michael Nowlin
Sex, Race, and Family in Contemporary American Short Stories
By Melissa Bostrom
Democracy in Contemporary U.S. Womens Poetry
By Nicky Marsh
James Merrill and W.H. Auden: Homosexuality and Poetic Influence
By Piotr K. Gwiazda
Contemporary U.S. Latino/a Literary Criticism
Edited by Lyn Di Iorio Sand n and Richard Perez
The Hero in Contemporary American Fiction: The Works of Saul Bellow and Don
DeLillo
By Stephanie S. Halldorson
Race and Identity in Hemingways Fiction
By Amy L. Strong
Edith Wharton and the Conversations of Literary Modernism
By Jennifer Haytock
The Anti-Hero in the American Novel: From Joseph Heller to Kurt Vonnegut
By David Simmons
Indians, Environment, and Identity on the Borders of American Literature:
From Faulkner and Morrison to Walker and Silko
By Lindsey Claire Smith
The American Landscape in the Poetry of Frost, Bishop, and Ashbery:
The House Abandoned
By Marit J. MacArthur
Narrating Class in American Fiction
By William Dow
The Culture of Soft Work: Labor, Gender, and Race in Postmodern American
Narrative
By Heather J. Hicks
Cormac McCarthy: American Canticles
By Kenneth Lincoln
Elizabeth Spencers Complicated Cartographies: Reimagining Home, the South,
and Southern Literary Production
By Catherine Seltzer
New Critical Essays on Kurt Vonnegut
Edited by David Simmons
Feminist Readings of Edith Wharton: From Silence to Speech
By Dianne L. Chambers
The Emergence of the American Frontier Hero 16821826: Gender, Action, and
Emotion
By Denise Mary MacNeil
Norman Mailers Later Fictions: Ancient Evenings through Castle in the Forest
Edited by John Whalen-Bridge
Fetishism and its Discontents in Post-1960 American Fiction
By Christopher Kocela
Language, Gender, and Community in Late Twentieth-Century Fiction: American
Voices and American Identities
By Mary Jane Hurst
Repression and Realism in Postwar American Literature
By Erin Mercer
Writing Celebrity: Stein, Fitzgerald, and the Modern(ist) Art of Self-Fashioning
By Timothy W. Galow
Bret Easton Ellis: Underwriting the Contemporary
By Georgina Colby
Amnesia and Redress in Contemporary American Fiction: Counterhistory
By Marni Gauthier
Vigilante Women in Contemporary American Fiction
By Alison Graham-Bertolini
Queer Commodities: Contemporary US Fiction, Consumer Capitalism, and Gay
and Lesbian Subcultures
By Guy Davidson
Reading Vietnam Amid the War on Terror
By Ty Hawkins
American Authorship and Autobiographical Narrative: Mailer, Wildeman, Eggers
By Jonathan DAmore
Readings of Trauma, Madness, and the Body
By Sarah Wood Anderson
Intuitions in Literature, Technology, and Politics: Parabilities
By Alan Ramn Clinton
African American Gothic: Screams from Shadowed Places
By Maisha Wester
Exploring the Limits of the Human through Science Fiction
By Gerald Alva Miller Jr.
A Companion to David Foster Wallace Studies
Edited by Marshall Boswell and Stephen J. Burn
The Middle Class in the Great Depression: Popular Womens Novels of the 1930s
By Jennifer Haytock
Charles Bukowski, King of the Underground: From Obscurity to Literary Icon
By Abel Debritto
Urban Space and Late Twentieth-Century New York Literature: Reformed
Geographies
By Catalina Neculai
Revision as Resistance in Twentieth-Century American Drama
By Meredith M. Malburne-Wade
Rooting Memory, Rooting Place: Regionalism in the Twenty-First-Century
American South
By Christopher Lloyd
Kate Chopin in Context: New Approaches
Edited by Heather Ostman and Kate ODonoghue
The Non-National in Contemporary American Literature: Ethnic Women Writers
and Problematic Belongings
By Dalia M. A. Gomaa
The Ulysses Delusion: Rethinking Standards of Literary Merit
By Cecilia Konchar Farr
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The ULYSSES Delusion
Rethinking Standards of Literary Merit

Cecilia Konchar Farr

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
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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

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data


Names: Konchar Farr, Cecilia, 1958
Title: The Ulysses delusion : rethinking standards of literary merit /
Cecilia Konchar Farr.
Description: New York, NY : Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. | Series: American literature
readings in the twenty-rst century | Includes bibliographical references.
Identifiers: LCCN 2015029230 |
Subjects: LCSH: American ctionHistory and criticism. | Fiction
AppreciationUnited StatesHistory. | Popular literatureUnited States
History and criticism. | Books and readingUnited StatesHistory. | Social
values in literature. | CriticismUnited StatesHistory. | Feminist literary
criticismUnited States. | BISAC: LITERARY CRITICISM / General. | LITERARY
CRITICISM / Feminist. | LITERARY CRITICISM / American / General. |
LITERARY CRITICISM / Women Authors.
Classification: LCC PS371 .K66 2016 | DDC 813.009dc23 LC record available
at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015029230
A catalogue record for the book is available from the British Library.
For Katherine Fishburn, poet and professor, whose
attentive mentoring, passionate creativity, and
committed scholarship shaped my intellectual life.
This page intentionally left blank
C on t en t s

Acknowledgments xi
Preface: Ransoming a Reading Nation xiii

Part I The Crime 1


1 Come and Get It 3
2 Bring Money 29

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

Part III The Deal 137


10 Redefining Excellence 139

Notes 147
Bibliography 183
Index 195
This page intentionally left blank
Ack now l ed gmen t s

First, a huge thanks to the students in my fall 2007 Senior Seminar


who fearlessly took on aesthetic theory and actually read Ulysses
they have the t-shirts to prove itand whose insights and con-
versations were invaluable to the conception of this book: Jessica
Lopez-Lyman, Meghara Eichorn-Hicks, Frankie Barnhill, Abby
Duepner, Robin Regan, Hillary Novacek-Bundt, Bryn Almli,
Jean Gibson, Agnieszka Hajdyla, Alex Lanpher, Becca Ross,
Kerrie Patterson, and Rachel Rolland. Hearty thanks, also, to my
Womens Book Club class, fall 2008, who helped me imagine an
audience for this book, an audience like them, full of women who
love novels and (even more) love talking about them. Let me add a
giant shout-out to my Harry Potter editors because they managed
to upend my world when I thought I knew all I was going to learn
about teaching (and three of them, Kate Glassman, Sarah Wente,
and Jenny McDougal, used their mad editing skills again here).
And thanks go out to the many students at St. Kates who still
grace my life and challenge my thinking.
I am also indebted to Jaime Harker who is, hands down, the
best and most intense conversationalist I know, one of my most
valued colleagues and my favorite co-editor. Long talks with her,
and with Diane Brown at The J&S Ward, helped me navigate
my way through The Ulysses Delusion. Missy Bradshaw, one of the
first people I ever knew who loved Joyces Ulysses, was also an
honest and helpful critic of the nearly completed manuscript, as
was Amy Blair. Thanks to all of these cherished colleagues and
friends, as well as to Brigitte Shull, Ryan Jenkins and the team
at Palgrave Macmillan, and to my supporter and mentor Linda
Wagner-Martin, for making this a part of her American Literature
Readings in the 21st Century series.
xii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I acknowledge, with gratitude, Charles Denny and his family


and St. Catherine University for the Carol Easley Denny Award
that funded my sabbatical research and kick-started this project
in 2008. Thanks to the university, also, for the honor of the Sr.
Mona Riley Endowed Chair of the Humanities that gave me time
to complete this and other projects in the years that followed.
The Feministas Writing Group at St. Kates sustains meJoanne
Cavallaro, Jane Carroll, Lynne(-Bob) Gildensoph, Cindy Norton,
Sharon Doherty, Hui Wilcox, Amy Hilden, Martha Phillips (of
the Madeline Island branch), Gabrielle Civil (Eastern division),
and Lilly Goren (Wisconsin chapter). I am also grateful to our
retired faculty development dean, Susan Cochrane, whose persis-
tent advocacy gave us our annual Scholars Retreat where major
parts of this book took shape. Thanks, too, to Deans MaryAnn
Janosik and Alan Silva who followed Susans advocacy with their
own. It helps to work at a university whose president is a passion-
ate reader and whose Provost was an English major; thanks to Sr.
Andrea Lee, IHM, and Colleen Hegranes for their support over
the (lets not say how many) years.
When this manuscript, nearly completed, came up against
a deadline, Sam and Nancy Rushforth and Kody Patridge and
Laurie Wood gave me the gift of uninterrupted time and glorious
open space in their cabins at the foot of Capitol Reef in Southern
Utah. I still smell the sage when I open my files.
This book benefitted particularly from my daughter Daleys
insistence that she wanted to read it now. Our weekly conversa-
tions, on rollerblades, on Skype while she studied literature at
Oxford, and over Steve Vandewaters coffee, fueled my work. My
love and thanks to my mom for long story hours in her big green
rocking chair; she made a reader out of me. Thanks, also, to my
son, Tanner, who keeps me honest and entertained, and to Cubs
who really, really reads every word and always has.
Pr eface: R a nsoming
a R e a ding Nat ion

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:

Stranger: Wow, good book.


Ulysses reader: Oh, youve read it?
Stranger: No, but . . .

Novels, especially modern novels, have been the focus of my


research for the 25 years I have been a professor. In all those
years, I can still almost count on my fingers the number of people
I know who have read Ulysses cover to cover. If I include my (com-
pelled) senior seminar students, I may have to add a few toes.1 And
yet, I would need a crowd fully equipped with fingers and toes to
count the number of readers and critics who will tell you its the
best novel ever written. Why is that?
How can we agree so enthusiastically, so universally, on some-
thing so few of us have read?
PREFACE xv

This is what I call the Ulysses delusion, and it is a sign of a


serious reading problem undercutting literate US culture. This
book argues that the literary establishment is, in effect, hold-
ing the novel for ransom, circumscribing this popular form
with the language and concerns of the Academy. But the joke is
on the professors because instead of paying the required respect
to a high art version of the novel, American readers are walk-
ing away, settling for less exclusive facsimiles. The more scholars
talk about experimentation and narrative strategies, deconstruc-
tion and existential stoicism, innovation and linguistic complex-
ity, the more readers take their favorite characters and exciting
plots and exit the conversation. Oh, they listen still, but the
teenaged son listened for the highlights (Did she say food or
money?).
Americans love novels. We buy them and read them vora-
ciouslywhen theyre by George R. R. Martin, E. L. James, or
Lee Child. We read them indiscriminately, for reasons quirky
and predictable. We read them enough that, over the course of a
little more than a century, we have created a successful capitalist
enterprise out of an art form. What Americans do not read on a
regular basis, though, are Good Books. In fact, we tend to avoid
most of the literary novels we ought to read. We put them on
our lists, on our shelves, among our best intentions, and then we
keep right on reading Nicholas Sparks. Its surprising to me that
many passionate readers I know can so easily identifyand shrug
offwhat they should be reading. Thats why, when asked, they
will tell you Ulysses is good, really good, even though they have
never read it.
Well, how do they know?
This is where the ransom comes in. Since the invention of the
novel about 300 years ago, relatively recently for a literary genre,
readers have been warned against its tantalizing power.2 It is a dan-
gerous thing, the novel. It draws you into alternate worlds, con-
nects you with characters you would never meet on the streets of
your town, invites you to imagine things, feel things, think. And
all of this without proper training. Kids pick these things up!
xvi PREFACE

Someone had to do something. So critics, teachers, publishers,


professors, even preachers started sorting through novels, catego-
rizing, celebrating, condemning and codifying them.3 When we
began teaching the novel in earnest in the middle of the twentieth
century the ransom plot began to unfold. Here in the universities,
we laid out our terms. We professors will let you readers know
which of all the stories generated in our novel-loving nation are
worthwhile, and we will guard these novels, because, we promise,
there arent many of them, and they may not be safe in your indis-
criminate hands. It will take years of training to work with them,
so you will pay us to do it (Did someone say money?). When
you come to us, we will share our secrets, so you, too, will learn
to love the novels we loveor at least to know which ones youre
supposed to love.
Training in literature teaches us that good novels are difficult.
Here, for example, is how one critic admiringly describes Joyces
style:

Immensely complex in his writing, endlessly fertile in his use of


language, full of wit, puns, tricks, intentional errors, numerological
devices, classical, scientific, medical, military, sexual, psychological
allusions . . . he left a trail of dilemmas, paradoxes, questions behind
him which armies of scholars have wrestled with for seventy years.
He intended this. He claimed that he had put so many enigmas and
puzzles into the book that they would keep the professors arguing
over Ulysses for centuries. He regarded this as a way of insuring his
immortality. (Arnold xiii)

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

those ransomed novels and the standards that supported them,


except for a twinge of recognition in a college humanities class
or when someone walks into a bar carrying Ulysses. Readers today
wander merrily off on their own, accepting a crazy mlange of rec-
ommendations from Amazon, book blogs, and friends, and most
are at a loss to explain why some novels are critically acclaimed
(Jonathan Franzens, for example) and others invariably panned
(Jodi Picoults).5 Literary professionals, for their part, talk mostly
to one another, and in a language even avid readers dont follow.
Would you be surprised to learn that it took professors years to
come to a consensus on the centrality of Ulysses? Though it was an
immediate sensation in expatriate Paris of the twenties, Ulysses was
a bit too experimental and profane for many critics and most read-
ers. Other modernist writers, though, loved Joyce (except Gertrude
Stein, who was sure she deserved the attention he was getting).
They treated him with deference and respecta few years older, a
little more published, and armed with a certainty of his own supe-
riority that was apparently quite convincing, despite his scuffed
sneakers and introverts life. American Sylvia Beach jeopardized
her own livelihood, her Shakespeare and Company Bookstore, to
see Joyces novel into print. Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot lauded it in
every venue they could access. Still, it wasnt until some important
critics at important universities started heralding it in Great Britain
and the United States in the 1950s that it began to take its place at
the center of the developing Modernist canon. In the last years of
the twentieth century, when theoretical approaches to novels were
our professorial preoccupation, Ulysses settled right in and, unchal-
lenged, staked its claim at number one.
My own history with Ulysses is complicated. I have a nearly
monogamous, long-term relationship with novels, dating back to
elementary school. Poetry and drama, short stories, memoir and
theory have tried to win me over; I could be courted, but not
swayed. When I began to study twentieth-century novels inten-
sively in graduate school, it soon became clear that Joyce and I
would have to come to terms. I negotiated my way through the
short stories of Dubliners, engaged with Joyces first published
xviii PREFACE

novel, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and then came to a


screeching halt somewhere before page forty-five of Ulysses. This,
I said, is not a novel.6 Novels have characters I care aboutlike
Edith Whartons Lily Bart or Ann Petrys Lutie Johnson. They
tell stories that haunt me, like Jay Gatsbys or ntonia Shimerdas.
Their writers savor language the way Zora Neale Hurston does,
for the secrets it exposes, not for what it can obscure; they love
words the way Ernest Hemingway does, for the fierceness of
their harnessed power, not for their raucous excesses (though I
do like a little raucous excess now and then, thank you, Dorothy
Richardson). Good novels challenge me the way William Faulkner
or Virginia Woolf can, to revelation, not distraction.7 Something
about this novel was all wrong. It kept pulling me in and leading
me nowhere. I was disgusted and bored. There, I said it. My name
is Cecilia. Im a modernist, and I dont like Ulysses.
I understand why other critics love it. Sure, I get a kick out
of how Joyce challenges the basic assumptions of novel-writing. I
chuckle over the puns, the often musical language and the clever
wordplaythe metempsychosis and usurpation. I revel in the defi-
ant modernist aesthetic, the bad boy rule-breaking and the experi-
mentation for its own sake. One or two of the characters come
alive for me here and there, as Stephen does when he talks about
Shakespeare. And if you wash it down with a Guinness and good
conversation, as my senior seminar did, the narrative trajectory
(lets not call it a plot), propped up by a concordance or a book-
mark on SparkNotes, is ultimately decipherable. But the women
are woodenor perhaps blow-up plastic. The allusions, plenti-
ful and erudite, are also overeager, overwrought and too often
obscure. We get it, James; you read a lot. You know your classics.
Just because youre Irish doesnt mean youre not as smart as the
other Brits.
Of all the brilliant modernist novels out there, why this one,
Newsweek? This one has come to represent all that is wrong with
the way the novel lives among us. Consider this passage from David
Gilmours bestselling memoir The Film Club, where a concerned
PREFACE xix

father is choosing the movies he will watch with his troubled teen-
aged son:

What I wasnt prepared to be was impervious to his pleasure, to


his appetite to be entertained. You have to start somewhere; if you
want to excite someone about literature, you dont start by giving
him Ulysses although, to be candid, a life without Ulysses seems
like a fine idea to me. (40)

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

What we are asking to be scrutinized are nothing less than


shared cultural assumptions so deeply rooted and so long
ingrained that, for the most part, our critical colleagues have
ceased to recognize them as such.
Annette Kolodny

A good book is a book somebody likes.


Nancy Pearl
CH A P T ER 1

Come and Get It

On a family road trip recently, I visited a used bookshop in a


tiny, touristy South Dakota town. The sign outside called atten-
tion to the first editions and rare books inside. How could a
car full of booklovers resist, even with the promise of pie just
down the street? So we browsed, showing off our discoveries
to one anotherold National Geographics, quaint volumes of
Shakespeare from the Harvard Classics Five Foot Shelf series,
obscure collections of nature poetry, and anthologies of Native
American tales. I picked up A White Bird Flying, a Beth Streeter
Aldrich novel I had loved as a teenager, and knew immediately
I wanted to reread it. It was like that scene in Somewhere in Time,
where (the oh-so-romantic) Christopher Reeve accidentally pulls
out a relic from the 1980s and lurches unexpectedly out of his
period costume drama, hurtling away from (the always anachro-
nistic) Jane Seymour. There was something vivid and time lurch-
ing about this book. I had to have it.
Harboring that feeling and clutching my book, I made my way
through the narrow front room toward the cash register. Cue
the Twilight Zone music. Suddenly there appeared a doorway to
a second room, one I hadnt noticed before. Im telling you, it
could have been the portal to a bookstore in an alternate uni-
verse. Romance novels, crime stories, cowboy books, fantasy and
science fiction, mysteries, and bestsellers, paperbacks all, crowded
the floor-to-ceiling shelves and spilled over into the narrow aisles.
Who could have predicted from among the carefully arranged
treasures of the first room that this other room existed?
A brief interruption.1
4 THE ULYSSES DELUSION

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

Introduction: Listening to Readers


So I began to listen, as carefully as I could, to what readers say
about novels. And I heard things that I seldom encountered in
professional studies of literature. There were forceful defenses of
Oprah books, intense identification with characters in chick lit,
blissful indulgence in afternoons (that become early mornings)
of mystery reading, real retreats into intricate fantasy worlds, and
determined consumption of every book, in order, in a manga series.
There were books I would never notice, books in forms I hardly
recognizeread backwards with lots of pictures, listened to while
gardening or driving, downloaded to a tablet reader. Unexpected
ideas took center stage in these conversations, and a complex world
of reading outside my literary history and theory, beyond book
reviewers and prize-winning novels, began to take shape.
Its a world that professional critics and professors like me dont
generally visit. But since I charted my first excursion there a few
years ago with a book about Oprahs Book Club, I have been
drawn back into this world that I grew up in, a world where read-
ing matters in different ways, where it inspires and entices, rescues
and entertains.2
As I revisited my own memories of reading, trying to recapture
what drew me to do it for a living, I recalled an incident in grade
school when I was just back from the library with a new book.
My teacher had arranged our desks into two half circles, and I was
placed very near the front of the outside circle, the path to the back
of the room just behind me and 30-some second graders surround-
ing me. My book was about a forest fire, as I recall, maybe with
a donkey in it. The details are gone, but I can still smell the trees
burning and remember what it felt like to be completely gripped
by this book. As I sat in my assigned space, reading time ended,
and the entire class got up and went to the back of the room for
square dancing. Our teacher turned on the music and started the
activity. I mean, they were stomping and sliding, whooping and
do-si-doing just a few feet from my desk. Suddenly, my teacher was
towering over me, wondering if I cared to join them. I returned
6 THE ULYSSES DELUSION

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

ARDI in the chapters that follow).4 I am, I confess, fascinated


by what I had been missing. After years of teaching college and
reading literary theory, I thought I knew books. Yet I had forgot-
ten so much, and was missing even more.
Lately I have found able guides for my forays into popular read-
ing in the librarians at my university, professors, alumnae, and
graduate students, who live to get people reading. With them,
I attended a presentation by librarian superhero (with her own
action figure) Nancy Pearl, of Book Lust fame. Pearl is a gentle
soul who Im certain, despite her action figures super shushing
power, never shushed anyone in her library. Her approach to book
recommendation, or, as she insists, suggestion, is completely
nonjudgmental. A good book, she says, is a book somebody
likes. Clearly, she doesnt want to horn in on critics territory.
Instead, she trains librarians to be more responsive to patrons with
a system, the result of her years of experience, based on door-
ways. While most readers advising looks for similarity in genre
(if they liked a romance, give them another romance), Pearls sys-
tem posits that readers are trying to replicate an experience, one
they access primarily through the doorways of story, character,
setting or language.5
Story is the largest, most-used doorway in Pearls formulation.
Librarians get more readers seeking the page-turning power of The
DaVinci Code or Tom Clancys novels than any other sort of book,
she explains. And, in my experience, these plot-hungry readers
have little patience for the machinations of a less speedy narrative.
Nothing happens, my students and friends often complain when
I recommend a meandering character-driven novel. Pearls least
popular (smallest) doorway is language, my doorway. The first
response of readers who use this doorway would be It was beau-
tifully written. But the problem is that the smallest doorway for
readers is pretty much the only doorway for literature professors.
Professionally, we can love an artfully written novel, say Ulysses,
that has very little plot and minimal character development, but
we will, I promise, detest a novel that moves quickly but pays little
attention to craft (we will return to what we read nonprofessionally
8 THE ULYSSES DELUSION

in a moment). In short, what readers want and what critics want


them to want are two completely different things.
Thus, the perennial Bestseller List problem. Sociologists and
cultural historians have been good at tracking the divergence
in literary taste across the strata of American life, but anyone
can observe it on any given Sunday in the New York Times Book
Review, where the books reviewed are almost never the ones on
the Bestseller Lists. In early 2008 the Book Review revamped its
bestseller lists, trying to resolve that issue and foreground the
literary novels it likes to write about.6 It wasnt the first time;
Harry Potter bullied the editors a few years ago into separating
childrens fiction from the other books.7 Before that, the much-
too-successful self-help books were rotated out, and very early
on, nonfiction was separated from fiction. Most recently, in 2011,
the editors created another list for the ever-expanding number of
electronic bestsellers, and more lists have followed. But in 2008
it was mass-market paperbacks that had to go. Here is how the
editors explained why popular books, mass-market, are distinct
from literary ones, trade, using two editions of Ian McEwens
Atonement as an example:

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

Besides being somewhat larger in size, trade paperbacks are


generally printed on more expensive paper and with sturdier bind-
ing. Because they are more expensive to produce they are higher
in price and often (not always) printed in smaller numbers. Unlike
mass-market paperbacks, which are usually sold on racks, trade
paperbacks are sold in bookstores (to the trade) and are shelved
with their spines facing out, like hardcovers . . . A trade paperback,
in short, is the book youd want to be reading if you were sitting
at Les Deux Magots and Simone de Beauvoir was looking straight
at you. (Dixler)

I will return shortly to unpack (as we literary theorists like to say)


the class assumptions in this explanation, but imagine with me for
a moment what would happen if critics admitted that most readers
dont want to read like a writer or a professor, as two recent book-
store favorites promise; they arent swayed by John Updike and
wouldnt care to impress Simone de Beauvoir at Les Deux Magots
or anywhere else.
Responding to our assigned cultural role to use what we have
learned to inform literary taste (to recommend books), what if
scholars like me humbly crossed the thresholds of literature
through some of Pearls other doorways and evaluated novels on
qualities that readers admire? Could we pay attention to the way
a novelist, say Terry McMillan, approaches readers through char-
acters they cant forget? Without turning in our PhDs, could we
take a moment to admire the intricate plot-work of The DaVinci
Code? Could we, with some German and Italian critics, praise the
precise renderings of medieval villages in Ken Folletts Pillars of
the Earth ? Could we recommend books readers could get lost in,
books they could relate to and talk about, books that teach them
something?
And what if the United Statess millions of voracious
non-professional readers paused mid-seduction/chase/zombie
scene in their e-books to be bothered by an awkward sentence or
a repeated phrase, a geographical or historical inaccuracy, an over-
indulged clich, a cheap play on emotions, or an implausible plot
10 THE ULYSSES DELUSION

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

The Birth of a Genre


Lets return to that bookstore in South Dakota and the Somewhere
in Time feeling I was describing before I was interrupted. As
I stood amid that colorful carnival of paperbacks, I couldnt help
thinking that if that moment collided with a day seventy years
earlier (with some movie magic), I would have lost A White Bird
Flying in the clamor of pink and purple covers that was the family
saga/romance section of this clandestine side room. A bestseller
in 1931, Aldrichs novel has the markings of Literature now, the
larger size and understated cover design that the Times Book Review
described as to the trade; it has a university press publisher and
earnest recommendation blurbs on the back. There was an earlier
edition just behind the one I bought, a hardcover with muted
colors and that pleasant attic smell, a lot like the Peoples Book
Club edition my family inherited from Uncle Nicks post World
War II college collection (probably from a course in Midwestern
literature). But if you slapped on a flashy contemporary cover,
A White Bird Flying could easily have slipped unnoticed among
the romances (even Christian romances) where an unsuspecting
reader might have picked it up and never realized she was reading
Literature that belonged in the front room.
I know this because it happened to me. When I tell the story of
how I became an English professor it often begins with a scruffed
up mass market novel, its front cover torn off, tumbled into a bar-
gain bin of a discount store in Butler, Pennsylvania, circa 1978.
Something about the authors name sounded familiar, maybe
because I had taken Advanced Placement English in high school.
There had been a test on a long Western literature timeline,
though our reading was much more narrowa lot of James Joyce
(Newman!) and a few Ancient Greeks, along with, if I remem-
ber correctly, a little Goethe.
Jane Austen.
Well, it wasnt a Victoria Holt romance, but it looked a lot like
one, and on the back cover it claimed to be a smart critique of the
romance. I thought Id try it. So Northanger Abbey went home
12 THE ULYSSES DELUSION

with me that day, and thats how my real education in literature


began. I came this close to being an Austen scholar before modern
American novels seduced me away from the wry (but, alas, a bit
too tidy for my taste) Miss Jane.
How real, then, are these distinctions that we live by? If you can
find Atonement, Northanger Abbey, or A White Bird Flying sized
for the rack in the grocery store, among the recommended reads
on your e-reader queue, larger-sized and tastefully displayed on the
Summer Reading table in the library, or on the textbook list for
a college literature class, are they simultaneously classic and trashy,
highbrow and lowbrow, to the trade and mass-market? If their
status can change over time, is there anything stable about the cat-
egories we place them in? Who gets to decide which room to put
these books in and by what criteria? Not to sound Clintonesque,
but how do we know whats good until we know what the mean-
ing of good is?
The novel is, in fact, an especially difficult art form to pin
down. Born late in the Age of Enlightenment amid democratic
uprisings and crumbling aristocracies, it was, for quite some time,
well beneath the notice of the educated elite.9 I think of it as the
eighteenth centurys Jersey Shore or Grand Theft Auto. It was
an impending social crisis as well as an artistic invention. And it
appealed, startlingly, to undereducated young women.10
Noting this trend, those concerned with guarding social val-
ues and protecting the sanctity of the ladies quickly busied them-
selves discouraging novel reading. Nice girls just didnt. In the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, sermons and conduct
manuals decried the insidious influence of novels. As Cathy N.
Davidson writes in her introduction in the Columbia History of
the American Novel:

The novel . . . was condemned as escapist, anti-intellectual, violent,


pornographic; since it was fiction it was a lie and therefore evil.
Since it often portrayed characters of low social station and even
lower moralsforeigners, orphans, fallen women, beggar girls,
women cross-dressing as soldiers, soldiers acting as seducersit
COME AND GET IT 13

fomented social unrest by making the lower classes dissatisfied


with their lot. The novel ostensibly contributed to the demise of
community values, the rise in licentiousness and illegitimacy, the
failure of education, the disintegration of the family; in short,
the ubiquity of the novel . . . most assuredly meant the decline of
Western civilization as it had previously been known. (3)

Substitute television, social networking sites, or gaming here, stir


in a healthy dose of skepticism about what women, lower-class,
or young people engage in, top it off, if you like, with a threat of
obesity and lethargy, and you have something of the moral panic
that met the early novel.
Its essence, its fictionality, was precisely what made the early
novel threatening. So novelists set out to make their Big Lies palat-
able to the moral guardians and cultural elite by leaning on larger
human truthfulness. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novels
often carried subtitles like a true history or an accurate account
of, or, my favorite, memoirs of an heiress for Fanny Burneys
made up tale about Cecilia. You may remember from English
class the long Custom House introduction to Hawthornes The
Scarlet Letter in which Hawthorne constructs a convincing tale of
finding a red A among some abandoned documents. Or you may
not remember it, because modern readers and teachers often skip
this part. Well, that myth, as they say, has been bustedplausible,
maybe, but just not true. Yet it demonstrates the lengths novelists
went to in order to accommodate the moralists.
It was also useful for novelists to assure their audiences repeat-
edly that the novel had an educational or moral purpose; thus,
the eighteenth-century novels that spent hundreds of pages wal-
lowing in the seduction of innocent young ladies, whose ster-
ling chastity was then obliged to triumph (briefly) in the end,
to the tune of fine lectures and admonitions for the young
reader. That practice continued through the nineteenth century.
I recently reread the wonderfully gothic Wuthering Heights and
was impressed with how Emily Bront let her housekeeper narra-
tor do the moral heavy lifting. At one point Nelly Dean interrupts
14 THE ULYSSES DELUSION

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

Such popular appeal and material success instigated intense


conversation, in the early days of the novel and of the American
nation, about the importance of unique national literatures.
Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century critics in the newly united
states were drawn to European aesthetic standards generated at
the top of strict old-world class structures, reinforced by limited
access to education, held together by appeals to piety, and shot
through with elitism. Nineteenth-century American literary critics
attempted to situate a more democratic US literature both within
and beyond that context. They longed for a literature with the
seriousness of British poets Milton and Wordsworth; they called
for the broad appeal of an American Shakespeare.14 Meanwhile,
they sought texts responsive to the idea of America, of vast lands
sparsely peopled with free, independent souls. Richard Chase
later underlines this view in the introduction to his influential
The American Novel and Its Tradition by calling on Henry David
Thoreaus concept of wildness, describing the American novel as
freer, more daring, more brilliant fiction that contrasts with the
solid moral inclusiveness and massive equability of the English
novel (vii).15
With such distinction in mind, American critics found novel-
ist James Fenimore Cooper a hopeful candidate for recognition
early on, but even those who admired his iconic Americans and
rich descriptions of lost landscapes were eventually put off by his
appalling prose.16 By the mid nineteenth century, our tradition
and textbooks tell us, Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne
had established themselves as the forerunners of a truly serious
American literary tradition, and the democratic novel became
Americas best hope for a distinctive literary presence on the
world stage.17
But there was a problem. Not many Americans read Melville
and Hawthorne.18 Over the past 40 years, literary and cultural
historians have demonstrated that the books most Americans read,
valued, and took seriously in the nineteenth century tended to
be those we now dismiss as sentimental or sensationalwomens
COME AND GET IT 17

books.19 This division between what the literary and educational


establishment called excellent and what most people read and
appreciated was certainly class based, but in the US tradition it
was also deeply gendered. In some cases, the judgment was as
simple as this: if women write it or read it, it probably isnt good;
in other words, its not sufficiently masculine to be American. Or
this counterintuitive swipe at democracy: if too many people like
it, it must be bad, too simplistic, too sensational, or (ironically)
too moralistic. Usually these two overlapped because, as we have
seen, from the beginning the most-read novels were mostly read
by women.20
As young colleges and universities in the United States estab-
lished their curricula and included not just European and classic
literature but also texts from the evolving American tradition,
a canon of American literature began to take shape, often based
on these same skewed standards. Novels had to be included on
reading lists not only because they were now essentially American
and increasingly acknowledged as artful, but also because they
appealed to the newly literate masses that some of these schools
aimed to educate. The process of selection for these novels, how-
ever, turned up different books than the student readers would
have chosen on their own. While the novel had clearly shifted
in form and style in response to the desires of its audience, the
modes of teaching and judging literature did little to adjust to
the shift. Instead of asking what the novel did differently (and
did very well), early twentieth-century critics tended to classify
and evaluate novels by the standards they knew from classical
and European texts (the famed Chicago School, for example,
grounded their critiques in Aristotle). Thus, novels like Melvilles
and Hawthornes, which never sold well in the nineteenth cen-
tury and, one could argue, were therefore unsuccessful novels,
became the cornerstones of twentieth- and twenty-first-century
courses in the American novel because of their complex language
and symbol systems, careful literary allusions, stoic restraint, and
serious philosophical and theological explorations. Often they are
18 THE ULYSSES DELUSION

praised specifically for being unlike other more popular novels.


Even in the second half of the twentieth century, when critics
paid increasing attention to the novels social power, the values
of the readers who made the novel the dominant genre contin-
ued to be sidelined.21 Where was the democratic scope, the femi-
nine appeal; where were absorption, relatability, discussability, or
information? Apparently left behind in the nineteenth century
with Harriet Beecher Stowe.22
As early critics sorted the novel out as art, then, separat-
ing books into good and bad according to established aesthetic
standards, the novel had to do more than shape-shift. It split. As
R. B. Kershner writes, the rise of the study of English literature
in British and American universities in the 1880s . . . had a variety
of consequences for the study of the novel and, eventually, for
the novel itself (16). As professional critics began to organize
the tradition, certain kinds of novels were held up as exemplary
and others were frozen out.23 And here we are: by 2000, James
Joyces Ulysses topped most of the roundups of the best novels of
the century, including the Modern Librarys. In short, what had
been a commercial and populist enterprise became one dominated
by high culture exemplars that were emphatically not commercial
successes. As Kershner concludes:

Increasingly after the death of Dickens, those novelists who took


their work most seriously and were most inclined to view them-
selves as artists also found their audiences limited; at the same
time, the most popular writers were generally dismissed by writers
of higher prestige but lower sales. More and more, the serious liter-
ary artist found himself or herself in a stance of opposition to social
norms of the time. (13)

This serious literary artist is something of a Frankenstein beast,


the result of elite cultures codification of the novel, not the natu-
ral offspring of the novels more democratic history. But it was a
powerful creation, and a gendered one, and it lives on into vigor-
ous old age todayperhaps starving in a garret somewhere, as we
like our real artists to do.
COME AND GET IT 19

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

Mann. The August 2010 Esquire featured a photo of Freedom


stacked next to novels by DeLillo, Fitzgerald, Melville, Faulkner,
and Twain, serious literary artists all. The U.K.s Guardian invoked
both Roth and Bellow before naming Freedom the novel of the
year, and the century (August 23, 2010). These critics overtly cel-
ebrate the connections between Franzens novel and other novels
by famous writers. Its the old walks like a duck, talks like a duck
adage: if he looks like one of the writers in the literary tradition
we have established, he could very well be an important contrib-
utor to that tradition, easily perpetuating, then, that traditions
long-held standards and prejudices.27 So while Tanenhaus invokes
the family romance strain of the novel early in his review,
a strain that most would agree has been dominated by women
writers (and unschooled readers), he then specifically recognizes
Franzens genius, his crystalline phrases, his attention to detail
and structure, his carefully drawn and convincing characters, but
most of all his seriousness about important ideas both social and
psychologicalwhat it means to be American in the early twenty-
first century, what it means to seek freedom, what it means to be
human and flawed.
Observing carefully the themes in these reviews, it becomes
apparent how much they reflect the values of criticism and theory
popular in contemporary scholarly studies of the novel. Reviews
of Franzens novel point toward an understanding of artistic
value that we trace back to the classical tradition (in the writ-
ings of Plato and Aristotle), but that is also deeply influenced
by modernist ideas and the aesthetic theories of Immanuel Kant.
Kant argues in The Critique of Judgment (1923) that recogniz-
ing something truly beautiful requires taste, and constructing it,
genius.28 To understand, then, if a novel is truly beautiful, truly
a work of art, it helps to work backwards and find out if the con-
structor is a genius. Many of our critiques of novels make this
sort of argument from the novelists: if hes a genius, then the
book has a good chance of being great. This is often the theme
of reviews like those above. Franzen writes (looks, talks) like
our other geniuses (Dickens, Tolstoy, Bellow and Mann, DeLillo,
COME AND GET IT 21

Fitzgerald, Melville, Faulkner and Twain). He must be a genius.


Thus, this will likely be a great novel.
Kant also tethers his argument about beauty to the realm of
universals. For Kant, beautiful things are universally embraced
as beautiful, without interest or argument.29 The educated
and astute will certainly concur when something beautiful is
placed before them, if they have taste, if they are discerning.
Thats why, in my experience, assumptions are made over and
over about The Great Books in both popular and elite culture,
but explanations for the choice of books rarely follow. Why did
all of those people my students encountered in bars and coffee
shops know Ulysses was great without ever having to read it, for
example? What makes Faulkners novels beautiful and Cathers
just skilled? If my aesthetic responsiveness were fully functional,
I wouldnt have to ask.30 (Universal should, of course, not be
confused with general or popular, otherwise Norman Rockwell
and Bing Crosby would be considered, by consensus, the great
artists of the twentieth century.)
More recent trends in scholarly criticism of novels construe
quality in social rather than aesthetic terms and tend to steer
clear of claims for universality.31 These approaches look at nov-
els as acts of communication or social discourse, as works that
reflect and help to construct community values. Franzens deep
seriousness about how we become who we are, how we know
each other, and how we make meaning in our fragmented and
dangerous postmodern world draws the attention of critics who
appreciate this level of cultural engagement. All things consid-
ered, that Franzens novel was received with raves and adulation
is hardly surprising, given the set of evaluative circumstances that
were its context.
However, reception of Freedom wasnt all cake and Snickers
bars, as my mother-in-law would say. Scholar and writer Alan
Cheuse on NPR (August 5, 2010) noted the depth of Franzens
brilliance (genius!) before concluding that Freedom was ultimately
unappealing, maybe because every line, every insight, seems cov-
ered with a light film of disdain. Franzen seems never to have met
22 THE ULYSSES DELUSION

a normal, decent, struggling human being whom he didnt want


to make us feel ever so slightly superior to, Cheuse said. Here
Cheuse is, refreshingly, making a statement about the tone of the
novel, about its relatability, not about the language or about
the writer himself. He is responding to the novel as more than an
art project.32 In his view, a novel isnt (only) an aesthetic object
but (also) a cultural intervention, and (even more) a conversation
with readers. Paying attention to the novels interaction with those
readers, Cheuse notes its failure to connect.33
This was, to be honest, my experience of the novel. Freedom
meets the requirements of my academic training for excellence,
even beauty, but I just couldnt warm to it. Technically, it was
often superb, its sentences sharp and its insights sharper. Yet if, as
readers keep telling me, good novels give us compelling characters
to relate to, this one invited me to join Franzens narrative perspec-
tive in standing back and sneering at the people he created, even
sometimes being utterly disgusted by them. This was especially
(and surprisingly) true when Patty Berglund, the central female
character, tells her own story in a strange third-person interlude.
To put it in the evaluative language of everyday readers, relatability
was low, so absorption was, well, nearly absent.34
Discussability, however, was not a problem. I followed a fasci-
nating conversation on jezebel.com, a feminist website dedicated
to the analysis of popular culture, that wondered, with the rest
of the Internet, if male writers have an edge in attracting serious
critical attention. As Katha Pollit wrote in The Nation, it started
with the vigorous tweeting of bestselling popular novelists
Jennifer Weiner and Jodi Picoult about the accolades heaped upon
Jonathan Franzens new novel, Freedom, and it quickly drew the
label Franzenfreude. As Weiner defined it, Schadenfreude is
taking pleasure in the pain of others. Franzenfreude is taking pain
in the multiple and copious reviews being showered on Jonathan
Franzen. Pollit summarized the debate: Plenty of women writ-
ers get excellent reviews, but it is very rare for them to get the
kind of excited, rapturous high-cultural reception that Franzen
was enjoying.
COME AND GET IT 23

But Pollit goes on to note a broader inequity in book reviews


of literary fiction, an inequity that others continued to quan-
tify for months afterward in online literary communities, and
which has since become an ongoing project, the VIDA count
(at www.vidaweb.org). In an entry on the BookBrowse Blog the
February after our Franzenfreude discontent, Davina Morgan-
Witts summed up the results:
Morgan-Witts proposes some plausible explanations, including
the tendency among publishers of literary fiction to choose books
by men for their catalogues. Random House, Norton, Little
Brown and Harper came in at just about one-third female, she
writes, while the smaller presses were even more extreme, such as
Graywolf (25% female), Melville House (20% female), and Dalkey
Press (10%). With many more books by men slotted into the
literary fiction category, reviewers cant really be blamed. They
just respond to what is sent to them by publishers, she points out.
Franzen himself weighed in on the debate, quickly and gra-
ciously conceding the point. The categories by which we value
fiction are skewed male, and this creates a very destructive dis-
connect between the critical establishment and the predominantly
female readership of novels. Thats inarguable, he told Terry Gross
on NPR. White male writers can more easily be seen as literary
as artistic, as disinterested, as geniusbecause the literary catego-
ries favor them. Indeed, as we have seen, the categories were set up

Table 1.1 Heres a sampling of the ratios of male to female authors


reviewed during 2010

Books reviewed authored by Men (%) Women (%)

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

since the death of Dickens and the establishment of university


English departments specifically to favor serious literary artists
and sideline popular ones. In this way, it becomes difficult for a
woman to be perceived as a genius, in the Kantian sense, because
her work is never disinterested. It has interest imposed, in that
women always seem to be writing about being women or appeal-
ing to an overwhelmingly feminine novel-reading audience; their
novels are automatically tagged as romances or chick lit, and they
are often much too commercially successful to be taken seriously
(remember Kershner: the most popular writers were generally
dismissed by writers of higher prestige but lower sales). Neither
universal nor apolitical in a traditional aesthetic sense, a woman
novelists work is often seen as limited in ways that writers like
Franzen never experience.
The evaluative weighting of gender against women and toward
a classical construction of masculine genius continues to skew our
sense of the novels value. Franzens invocation of the predomi-
nantly female readership of novels is significant, and the destructive
disconnect between that audience and the critical establishment
he cites is substantial. This disconnect is not, however, limited to
one years National Book Award season. This process, what Im
calling a ransom, is longstanding and continues to disrupt literate
culture in the United States. It keeps scholars and reviewers from
being serious about what most Americans read. And as the writ-
ers on jezebel noted, it marginalizes as popular all but the most
privileged novelists in an era when publishing is desperately seek-
ing successes.35 Popular novels and literary novels are, now more
than ever, figured as two completely different creatures.
This affects both readers and writers, of course, but it also
affects novels. In order to make the popular and democratic novel
legitimate for elite and privileged scholarly study or critical recog-
nition, we had to leave behind the qualities that characterized the
genre from its earliest days. Early critics purposefully condemned
the way the novels authors imagined and addressed readers,
angling for sympathetic connections and emotional engage-
ment (Sentimental!). Even today, English teachers discourage
COME AND GET IT 25

students from passionate connection with characters who are


vividly alive for them (Simplistic!). Too often, literary scholars
belittle the novels function as art and communication, how it
inspires readers to talk to other readers and to pass books along to
encourage new conversations, even heightened social or political
awareness (Middlebrow!). Finally, they decry the popular nov-
els call for participation in the marketplaceto shop for books
(Consumerist!). Critics have maligned as clich the comforting,
predictable romance plot that readers continue to love and with
it the attention to the developing relationships that were novel
staples (Conformist!).36 As a result, a diverse and democratic
genre has been reduced to a few monumental texts, all by seri-
ous literary artists who tend to resemble the great writers who
came before them. Our Great Novels, then, are typically defined
by their difference from other novels, so that the best end up
being the ones least like novelsfor example, again (say it with
me) Ulysses.
Even more, what we lose in the professionalization of the study
of the novel to suit higher education, segregated as it has been by
gender, race, and class, are some of the essential qualities that drew
readers to the American novel in the first place. In our eagerness to
embrace the lone genius (and, in the United States, to name him
the keeper of the national values of independence and stoicism), to
participate in the mid-century modernist fascination with experi-
mentation, and, with the high culture anti-capitalists, to reject
anything perceived to have bourgeois or commercial merit, critics
and scholars have defined the novel narrowly and ahistorically as a
mainly (manly) artistic enterprise.
In short, while the actual history of the novel is feminine, pop-
ulist, and diversea story of engrossing storytellingthe over-
laid history of aesthetics has been masculine and elitista story
of disinterested artistry. Trained to value traditional standards of
aesthetic merit (Annette Kolodnys shared cultural assumptions
so deeply rooted and so long ingrained that, for the most part,
our critical colleagues have ceased to recognize them as such
[149]), most literary professionals accept the terms of judgment as
26 THE ULYSSES DELUSION

we receive them, even when roaming adventurously in feminist or


popular culture territory. We judge even our most populist novels
by standards that were never meant for novels.
As Kershner notes, The fundamental characteristic that dis-
tinguishes the novel from most Western literature that preceded
itits appeal to the readers daily experienceis what made it
difficult to defend against . . . charges of triviality and pernicious
worldliness (1). The nature of the novel, both accessible and
skilled, and the way it bridges the realistic and imaginative, the
everyday and the artistic, calls for standards of merit different
from those we use for other works of art or literature. Novels
arent only objects of admiration, products of genius, or vehicles
for artistic or linguistic experimentation, nor are they simply mes-
sages wrapped in stories. While they are often engaging and real-
istic slices of life, they are also (and sometimes simultaneously)
whimsical and escapist.37 And readers understand and cherish
the novels complex nature. As Anne Sheppard writes, however
much Dickenss original readers wept for Little Nell in The Old
Curiosity Shop they knew quite well that there was no Little Nell
in the real world and if there had been, their tears would have
been much less enjoyable (11).
Novels are easily mapped, dissected, and deciphered and just
as easily laughed through and cried over. We find them pristine,
among our most treasured possessions, and sprinkled with sand
and blotched with lotion on our beach towels. Because novels
are unique, because they live with their readers in idiosyncratic
ways, they require evaluative tools constructed to suit them. To be
effective, then, our standards of literary merit need reworkingto
encompass this genres particularity, to account for its continued
popularity.38
I maintain that there is something insistent about a good novel,
something that pushes beyond the boundaries of the classifications
and evaluations of scholarly methods. Have I mentioned that I love
novels? I love their predominance in more democratic forums,
nineteenth-century womens improvement societies, the Book-
of-the-Month Club, Oprahs Book Club, and todays ubiquitous
COME AND GET IT 27

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

Indulging my metaphor for a moment, lets look at Charlie as


the imagined novel readers that the New York Times Book Review
editors were addressing with their description of trade paperbacks
in chapter 1, the ones trying to impress Simone de Beauvoir.
I know these readers, primarily because I became one in college,
when I began drawing The Tradition in around me, gathering
literary knowledge and accumulating allusions in an attempt to
become educated. (Imagine the access to exotic realms of cul-
tural authority this pursuit involved for a working-class girl from
a Western Pennsylvania mill town.) These readers want to develop
and display good taste, an aesthetic appreciation for literature;
we will spend years rereading Moby Dick or Middlemarch, taking
an occasional break to revisit a Shakespeare play, to catch up on
the latest Philip Roth or Toni Morrison novel, or to check in on
the National Book Award or Booker Prize winners. Beginning,
usually, with college preparatory courses in high school, these
proficient readers are taught to look for metaphor, symbols, and
structure, philosophical underpinnings, universal themes, and
artistic experimentationto learn and then to assert our tradi-
tional standards of merit. In the classes I teach, I have found well-
prepared students like these eager to discuss the green light at the
end of Daisys dock or Fitzgeralds fascination with mythology but
hesitant to conjecture what makes Gatsby so damned appealing,
despite his clear moral bankruptcy, unremitting acquisitiveness,
and studied misdirection. They understand the careful technique
of literary study, but, often, not the speculative fascination or the
gnawing, drooling joy.
Most of my students, and other adult readers I know, are more
like that over-caffeinated Trix Rabbit, intent on fulfilling their
desire for a good read. They are the targets of Nancy Pearls Book
Lust books, her quirky compilations of recommended book lists
for every mood, moment and reason, or of Oprahs reading
lists (Books to engage and transport you). When I meet these
readers at library book discussions, they have their notebooks
out, ready to write down recommendations from every corner of
the room. When I encounter them in class or in coffee shops,
BRING MONEY 31

they often tell me what I should read, from Haruki Murakami


to Diana Gabaldon to Charles Bukowski.1 Unaffected by the
approved standards or lists of Great Books, they relish talking
about the books they love, especially with someone they see as
an expert.

Accounting for Taste


What I have found most surprising about these two categories of
readers is that they are almost entirely predictable. If there is a
less accurate statement ever made than Theres no accounting for
taste, I dont know what it is.2 We can, in fact, account for taste.
And do, with remarkable accuracy. Theorists such as Herbert J.
Gans in the United States and Pierre Bourdieu in France have
described minutely the preferences of various groups or taste cul-
tures. Gans, in his Popular Culture and High Culture, divides
the ostensibly classless United States into five distinct taste cul-
tures, and then tells us what people in each group read, watch,
eat, and do in their spare time. He asserts that the best predic-
tor of what you will like is not natural sensitivity or predilection,
not even socioeconomic class, but rather educational opportunity,
classs American midwife. As Gans notes, every item of cultural
content carries with it a built-in educational requirement, low for
the comic strip, high for the poetry of T.S. Eliot (95), or, in the
world of novels, low for Danielle Steele and high for David Foster
Wallace. The work of professional poets and serious novelists,
as well as composers of contemporary music, remains off-limits to
most people who only went to high school, as does scholarly writ-
ing, he explains (11). Turns out, my Charlie the Tuna readers are
perfectly trained, well-educated highbrows, and the Trix Rabbit
readers are classic middlebrows.
While Americans are famously class-averse and tend to identify
essentially as individualists, finding our place in the class hierar-
chy draws us irresistibly. Naming your category became a par-
lor game in the middle of the twentieth century, after Harpers
magazine published an essay entitled Highbrow, Lowbrow,
32 THE ULYSSES DELUSION

Middlebrow, and asked tantalizingly, Which are you?


(Kammen 95). Two months later, Life magazine exploited popular
response to the Harpers article with a two-page illustrated chart
that let Americans locate themselves in one of four categories
highbrow, upper-middlebrow, lower-middlebrow or lowbrow. If
you like ballet for your entertainment, for example, you would
be a highbrow. Western movies were lowbrow, with theater
and musical extravaganza films in the middle. A fuzzy Harris
tweed suit was casual attire for a highbrow, while old army
clothes were for the lowbrows (Kammen 9899). A similar essay
appears in The New Republic in 1992, with a send-up later that
year in The Utne Reader. These tongue-in-cheek essays invited
Americans to categorize themselves by their aesthetic choices,
from teas (high to low: Lapsang shouchong, Long Island Iced,
Earl Grey, Mr.) to pop music (Elvis Costello, Dee-lite, Madonna,
Metallica) (Kammen 127128). The last time I checked, New
York Magazine still regularly ran a Highbrow/Lowbrow meter
categorizing recent phenomena in the news and entertainment,
while many contemporary magazines and websites carry an In/
Out list with similar class undertones.
There is an insight advantage here for the many among us who
have shifted class. Just as you never feel more American than when
you are abroad, class mobility exposes hidden socioeconomic
values. As an academic, I can occupy the highest realms of taste
(so high that money hardly matters anymore, so we say), but as the
daughter of an unemployed blue-collar worker, Ive been down
there with Mr. T listening to Metallica. I can trace my upward
move, from losing my Pittsburgh accent, marrying a middle-class
boy, and buying my first new car, to grocery shopping at the co-op
and getting season tickets to the opera. I can tell you what old
tastes I retain (the WhipsMiracle and Cool) and which new ones
I have taken on (arugula and gorgonzola) and recognize their class
associations. I still cant watch Blue Collar Comedy on cable TV
with enough affinity, or enough disdain, to laugh at it. Same with
country music. OK, I watch PBS. And The Daily Show. And I lis-
ten to NPR. But you knew that already. Or perhaps you suspected
BRING MONEY 33

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

bale of hay. Why the effort to distance themselves from highbrow


tastes?
Because the history of class in America is such a tangled one.
Democratic rhetoric promised us a classless society, with equal
opportunity for all without reference to the circumstances of our
birth, and even though it hasnt delivered for most Americans,
the promise beguiles us.3 We want to believe. Class mobility is
the foundation of our most widely circulated rags-to-riches, pull-
yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps myths, from Abe Lincoln to Pretty
Woman, Benjamin Franklin to Lady Gaga. Even when the class
divide grows deeper, the rich get richer, and more Americans go
hungry and unemployed, we never tire of keeping up with the
Kardashians or the Real Housewives, of retelling our favorite suc-
cess stories.

Seeking the Genial Middle


In a 1915 book that nearly every American Studies scholar I
know cites regularly, Pulitzer Prize-winning critic Van Wyck
Brooks famously divided American culture into Highbrows and
Lowbrows. In doing so, he cemented a distinction that had been
building since our earliest days as a nation. And, really, how could
it have been otherwise? How could we understand ourselves as
unified and democratic when most early immigrants came from a
civilized Europe brutally divided by class, then promulgated a
hearty suspicion, that led to genocide, of the uncivilized native
communities that werent so obviously divided? When even as we
claimed that all men are created equal, we were buying and sell-
ing other human beings? While the founding national documents
we cherish aimed much higher, toward equality and opportunity,
our reality never quite lived up to the language.4
In that early influential book, Americas Coming of Age,
Brooks was essentially optimistic, imagining a less fragmented
and more democratic American society. Condemning the divi-
sion of American life between effete guardians of art and practi-
cal, vulgar materialists, Brooks looked in vain for a genial middle
BRING MONEY 35

ground on which cultural life could thrive, Joan Shelley Rubin


explains (xii).5 Instead, the opposite happened. Brookss catego-
ries tapped into the consciousness of a divided society and were
reaffirmed repeatedly throughout the twentieth century. And
they are with us today, more deeply still, from the divided New
York Times paperback bestseller list to the latte-sipping liberals
and NASCAR moms of punditry to the deep political divisions
between Washington insiders and Tea Party activists. That genial
middle still eludes us.
A compelling explanation of how this division came to char-
acterize American culture is in historian Lawrence Levines now
classic Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy
in America. He details how the highbrow became sacralized
in the late nineteenth century, and was increasingly cordoned
off from the rest of American culture, defining itself vigilantly
against the philistine and debased influences of the lower classes.
Levine laments the loss of what he describes as a rich, shared
public culture that once characterized the United States, not a
stable, unvarying, undifferentiated culture without the ethnic,
class and regional distinctions that have always existed here, but
a shared culture. He argues that in the nineteenth century,
especially in the first half, Americans, in addition to whatever spe-
cific cultures they were part of, shared a public culture less hierar-
chically organized, less fragmented into relatively rigid adjectival
boxes than their descendants were to experience a century later
(9). He demonstrates that diverse audiences knew Shakespeares
plays and eagerly attended performances of them together. One
of Shakespeares contemporaries commented that the theater was
frequented by all sorts of people old and younge, rich and poore,
masters and servants, papists and puritans, wise men etc., church-
men and statesmen. The nineteenth-century American audience
was equally heterogeneous, he writes (24).
Levines descriptions of participation from the raucous gallery
where the poorer population sat are hilarious invocations of the
disorder of our early democracy. Vegetables and eggs flew, vocifer-
ous calls for a refrain of Yankee Doodle rang out (and performers
36 THE ULYSSES DELUSION

often obliged, even in the middle of a classical music recital or a


play), applause was accompanied by whistles, stamping, and sav-
age yells, and audience participation was constant and voluble.
(I wish my season tickets at the opera delivered this sort of Steeler-
fan ambiance.) Soon, however, the wealthier patrons in the balcony
began to complain about the lack of decorum they encountered;
the spitting and whooping, the noise and the smell were too
much. As immigration increased, slaves were freed, and the work-
ing class expanded in response to the Industrial Revolution, these
cultured patrons felt more threatened, and became more insistent
in their demands for silence and respect. They required reverence
for Shakespeare, and they got it.
The result, Levine explains, was that in the twentieth century
Shakespeare became a cultural deity and was often the target of
popular parody of the haughty upper classes and their high cul-
ture pursuits (53). Shakespearean drama had moved from pop-
ular culture to polite culture, from entertainment to erudition,
from the property of Everyman to the possession of a more elite
circle (56). Levine traces a similar transformation for opera, sym-
phonies, art museums, even public parks, until the word culture
itself became synonymous with the Eurocentric products of the
symphonic hall, the opera house, the museum, and the library, all
of which, the American people were taught, must be approached
with a disciplined, knowledgeable seriousness of purpose, and
most important of alla feeling of reverence (146).
Ironically, this transformation was so effective that American
orchestras, museums, and theaters today spend a good deal of their
resources trying to reverse it, to develop an audience that looks
more like Levines nineteenth-century audience, more diverse,
younger, and less wealthy; you could say they are still seeking
Brooks genial middle. Even in Minnesotas Twin Cities, where we
are notoriously earnest patrons of the arts, we are a long way from
a return to the diverse crowds of Levines celebrated Shakespeare.
It took me one trip to the Minnesota Opera to learn that the dress
code is higher there than for any restaurant in the Twin Cities and
that I could easily, at somewhere past 50, be the youngest person
BRING MONEY 37

in the room. (That happens so seldom now that I put on my high


heels and go to the opera whenever I can, even though, truthfully,
I prefer a bawdy Broadway musical.)
More disturbing to me than the exodus of diverse audiences
from nineteenth-century cultural productions was the require-
ment for reverence that Levine cites, the careful move to align
the appreciation of art with a higher, more refined character, even
proximity to God. Moral uprightness is something Americans have
long imagined we could excel at, even if decadent Europe could
corner cultural sophistication.6 So at the turn of the twentieth
century, those who saw themselves as moral leaders felt obliged to
teach the masses how to behave in the presence of art. Aesthetic
appreciation was no longer seen as a natural inclination, a shared
human sensibility. With the enforced silence in the theaters and
concert halls, Levine tells us, came a new docility and willing-
ness to trust the experts. By the early 1900s, Art was becoming
a one-way process: the artist communicating and the audience
receiving. Silence in the face of art was becoming the norm and
was helping to create audiences without the independence to pit
their taste, publicly at least, against those of critics, performers
and artists (195).
As we moved through the twentieth century, modernism, with
its emphasis on disturbing, experimental art, further separated
American taste cultures. Then the post-war expansion of higher
education institutionalized these divisions, as we saw with the
post-Dickensian novel in chapter 1. As Herbert Gans explains, by
the late twentieth century, high culture had claimed its place as
setting aesthetic standards and supplying proper culture to the
entire society (103). And though all taste cultures claim their
standards are best, high cultures claim receives more deference
today because its standards are carefully codified (by people like
me): They are constantly applied in literary journals, discussed by
scholars and critics, and taught in the most prestigious universities.
In fact, they are even taught in less prestigious collegeswhere the
English department is often a lonely bastion of high cultureand
often as the only set of aesthetic standards in existence (143).
38 THE ULYSSES DELUSION

As I was apprenticing to this system in English departments in


the late 1980s, some of the most famous professors in my field had
declared an all-out Culture War on the competing claims of pro-
fessors who came out of the social change movements of the 1960s
and 1970s. Insisting that we should teach the best which has
been thought and said in the world, and that we all knew what
these great books were, they resisted the incursion of populists
in area studiesAfrican-American Studies, Womens Studies,
Chicano Studies, Cultural Studies, and others.7 Levine sums up
this sentiment:

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)

Many professors I know, even in area studies, share at least part


of this understanding of high culture, the notion that the best
art is complex and difficult of access, as in the Armin Arnold
quote about Ulysses in this books preface. Some see their job as
helping train more people to negotiate it, sharing the access codes,
if you will. But the effect of more than a century of division is
clear. Proponents on both sides can agree that art is something we
have to be educated to understand. Again, like Joyces Ulysses, it
requires the mediation of trained professionals.
Yet what do we do with the recalcitrant lowbrows who refuse
to be taught? Some of those formerly disorderly crowds answered
the highbrow demand for reverence not with docility and silence
but with characteristically American anti-authoritarian disdain,
a disdain that grew over the course of the twentieth century.
Keep your Shakespeare and opera, they said, well have burlesque
houses, horse racing, movies, bowling, MTV, and YouTube; keep
your literary-award-winning novels while we tend to the bestseller
lists. Highbrow became a term of derision with accompanying
BRING MONEY 39

stereotypes, perhaps best embodied in recent years by TVs Frazier


and Niles Crane, the Harvard-educated psychiatrists, with their
lowbrow, beer-swilling, sports-watching, straight-talking, former
cop dad as a foil (the one audiences easily recognize as the smartest
of the three).8
With anti-intellectualism on one side and snobbery on the
other, you would think that genial middle that Van Wyck Brooks
aimed for would be our cultural ideal. But it hasnt turned out
that way. In fact, the most contested territory is that muddy,
muddy middle, mainly because it has been aligned with empty
materialism and mass culture, in short, with consumption. Early
on, Brooks placed this burden on the lowbrow culture, which
he characterized as acquisitive, concerned with catchpenny reali-
ties, antithetical to high ideals. While he expected leadership
from the highbrows, from poets and writers who would infuse
personality into America, he blamed the lowbrows for the sorry
state of American culture. In the final chapter of his influential
work he challenges: How can one speak of progress in a people
whose main object is to climb, peg by peg, up a ladder which leads
to the impersonal ideal of private wealth? How can the working-
man have any reality or honesty of outlook when he regards his
class merely as an accidental, temporary group of potential capi-
talists? (84).
By the mid-twentieth century, however, the sound of clinking
coins followed the middlebrows, and the lowbrows developed a
kind of purity in its absence. Art critic Clement Greenbergs famous
division of American art into avant-garde and kitsch reflects this
shift. In his 1939 essay, both the highbrow and the lowbrow gain
respectability in their distance from commerce. But the middle and
its mass-produced, imitative products of the Industrial Revolution
bear the brunt of his contempt, as in this suggestively metaphori-
cal passage:

Because it can be turned out mechanically, kitsch has become an


integral part of our productive system in a way in which true cul-
ture could never be, except accidentally. It has been capitalized at
a tremendous investment which must show commensurate returns;
40 THE ULYSSES DELUSION

it is compelled to extend as well as to keep its markets. While it is


essentially its own salesman, a great sales apparatus has neverthe-
less been created for it, which brings pressure to bear on every
member of society. (11)

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

interesting and emotionally real; the latter isnot, brings to


mind Bob Dylans breach of that very aesthetic in that very venue
a few years later. Now Bob Dylan, even post-electric Bob Dylan is,
for many, as pure as folk, and much of rock and roll, from punk
to rap to Bruce Springsteen, is characterized as the peoples music.
Jazz, on the other hand, has stormed the walls of high culture;
today it is often the exclusive province of the educated elite, living
in close proximity to Bach and Beethoven.
Yet any way you look at American culture, selling out is the
worst thing artists can do, placing them plainly among the cor-
rupt commercial middlebrowbecause real art is, again, defined
by its disdain for capitalist success (thus, the irredeemable nature
of the cash-hungry Broadway musical). Levine argues that part
of the pull of the sacralization of culture was that it removed art
from the threat of commercialism, which, in nearly every tell-
ing of the cultural history of America, becomes the villain. The
commodification of culture stifles our creative faculties, induces
alienation, degrades artworks, and protects the capitalist system
against internal challenges, as one scholar summarizes this view
(Cowen 10). MacDonalds careful distinction between folk art
and masscult depends on this divide between pure art and the
commercial. The first grew mainly from below, while masscult
comes from above. It is fabricated by technicians and hired by
businessmen (217).
The artists linked to folk art are most often and most indig-
nantly policed across this dividefrom Bob Dylans irreverent
electric guitar to the extravagant lifestyles of successful rap stars.
Yet in our determinedly capitalist culture, how can we possibly stay
clear on who is organic, growing from below, and who is hired
by businessmen and, thus, artistically corrupt? Strangely, in a
country that idolizes free market entrepreneurs and venerates suc-
cess, artists who become successful are always suspectbecause of
this divide. How often have I heard friends claim to have liked a
band before they went commercial or to have discovered an author
before they made it big? I still get a kick out of the readers who
insisted a few years ago that their copies of Jonathan Franzens
42 THE ULYSSES DELUSION

The Corrections come without an Oprahs Book Club sealbut


not, of course, without the publishers imprint (though, unlike the
publisher, who insisted on embedding the Oprah O on the cover,
Oprah didnt profit from that O).9
Arts discomfort with commerce is delightfully depicted in
Laura J. Millers study, Reluctant Capitalists: Bookselling and the
Culture of Consumption, in which she examines the divided con-
sciousness of booksellers, reverencing good books and the moral
value of reading even as they are compelled to turn a profit on
their product. As Praveen Madan, co-owner of The Booksmith,
an independent bookstore in San Francisco, told the New York
Times in 2010, Its the business of recommending and selling
books based on books we love. Its the love business (James).
Madan brings to mind Meg Ryans character in Youve Got Mail,
a small bookshop owner (a lone reed . . . in the corrupt sands of
capitalism) outsold then courted by Tom Hanks, mega-bookstore
mogul, who apparently only needs a little more Jane Austen in his
life to be truly happy. He gets her flawless taste while she claims
a joint marital share in his profit. Voil: happily ever after.10
Like the other arts Levine traces, Literature (with a capital L)
has not enjoyed such a fortunate union. As we saw in chapter 1,
highbrow novels insisted on an increasing separation from popular
fiction throughout the twentieth century, even as the publishing
industry swelled and bookstores got bigger and bigger, bloated
with a vast array of choices. Again, as one hundred years of best-
seller lists proves, Americans are reading, just not the right stuff.11
The big sellers of the century, the most-loved novels, were gener-
ally ignored by English professors, from A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
to Peyton Place, from To Kill a Mockingbird to Roots. These are the
novels professionals pegged as sentimental, as much too popular,
as simplistic, or as political (feminine, gay, ethnic, or Black); in
short, as middlebrow.12
But, as Tom Hanks almost convinces us, the (now flounder-
ing) middlebrow mega-bookstores may have served a useful func-
tion. Along with my argument for taking the aesthetics of popular
reading seriously, I also contend that the market can sometimes
BRING MONEY 43

reflect popular tastes (which are, in fact, legitimate tastes) and


stand in for democracy. Commercialism doesnt inevitably indi-
cate corruption.13 Levine suggests as much in his conclusion:
As long as [Shakespeare, opera, and art] remained shared culture,
the manner of their presentation and reception was determined
in part by the market, that is, by the demands of the heteroge-
neous audience. When they were rescued from the philistines,
they were freed from the demands of the marketplace. In opera
houses that often resembled temples, singers didnt have to per-
form Yankee Doodle anymore. The arts were removed from
the pressures of everyday economic and social life. In the glorious
concert halls and museums built for them with the nations grow-
ing wealth, they were to be perused, enjoyed and protected by
the initiatedthose who had the inclination, the leisure, and the
knowledge to appreciate them (230). In other words, the loss of
a diverse capitalist context, in part, accounts for the recalcitrance
of our highbrow/lowbrow divide.
Popular economist Tyler Cowen makes a similar argument in
his 1998 book, In Praise of Commercial Culture. His thesis is
thought-provoking: that the capitalist market economy is a vital
but underappreciated institutional framework for supporting a
plurality of coexisting artistic visions, providing a steady stream of
new and satisfying creations, helping consumers and artists refine
their tastes, and paying homage to the eclipsed past by capturing,
reproducing and disseminating it (1). In other words, for artists
greed has been good, Cowen argues, and we are its beneficiaries.
The pursuit of financial success guided, inspired, and improved
Shakespeare, Mozart, and Picasso. All of them ably blended their
desire to create art with a desire to make a profit while doing so.
(Then came my hometown hero Andy Warhol, whose simultane-
ous sending-up and celebration of commercialism still flummoxes
some art-lovers.)
Cowens perspective, not that commercialism is the sole moti-
vator for art or the all-important consideration in aesthetics, but
that we should take more seriously the effect of the market on
art, persuades me. In opposition to the typical academic approach,
44 THE ULYSSES DELUSION

which assumes that capitalism can only dominate and corrupt, it


is provocative. Certainly, capitalism has shown a tendency to dom-
inate and corrupt, as any historically aware Pittsburgher knows
(In the house I grew up in, the name Andy was invoked to make
fun of out-of-touch or cruel rich people, as in Andy Mellon and
Andy Carnegie). But by trying so hard to blame capitalism for all
our national evils, we may have increased its importance in the
dissemination of culture. It may be that the market is one factor
among many in encouraging good or bad artnot the best, not
the worst, certainly not the only.
Indeed, the famously divided nature of the bestseller lists
would indicate just that. Remember that these lists are accounts
of commerce, not quality, and they dont pretend to represent
any judgment but the markets.14 In studies of these lists, cultural
critics frequently note the surprising presence of a good book.
Discussing the bestseller lists of 1919, for example, Michael Korda,
in Making the List, points to Joseph Conrad, a writer of genuine
and lasting importance at number two for the year (though for
a novel seldom remembered: The Arrow of Gold), followed by a
Zane Grey novel at number three. On the nonfiction list that same
year, at number one, was The Education of Henry Adams, notable
for Korda in that it is a major work of enduring importance,
where books like Better Meals for Less Money (even then) tended to
dominate (18). Likewise, in his study of bestsellers, British scholar
John Sutherland concludes that what will make it to a bestseller
list is completely unpredictable, from high literature (such as
E.L. Doctorows Ragtime, #1 American bestseller in 1976), bru-
tal pulp (Spillanes I, The Jury, #1 paperback in 1946), or cyni-
cally conceived schlock (Erich Segals Love Story in 1970) (22).
This mash-up, while admittedly creating prediction problems for
publishers, indicates clearly that commerce does not corrupt abso-
lutely. Sometimes a classic creeps through the clutter.15
It is possible to argue that novels by Doctorow, Conrad, et al,
are not the exceptions that prove the rule of how commerce ruins
art, but that they are rule: in the United States, commerce and
art have cohabitated quite comfortably. I can easily conclude after
BRING MONEY 45

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.

Profiting from Division


I believe that this division is a more serious effect of commerce
on art than the corruption of arts alleged purity ever was. If,
as Levine posits, nineteenth-century audiences made individual
artists and performers responsible to their diversity, in the twen-
tieth century each fragmented taste culture found its own audi-
ence while marketers adapted to each of them. Fragmentation
46 THE ULYSSES DELUSION

emphasized personal preference and played into the American


value of individualism. Our mantra became No one can tell me
what I should like, even as educational institutions and advertis-
ing agencies aimed to do just that. Depending on which book you
consult, class distinctions based on taste have recently become
even more marked or completely blurred. With the prolifera-
tion of media outlets, it may be both/and. Today, with so many
options and aggressive niche marketing, its to each taste culture
its own TV stations, news sources, entertainment extravaganzas,
and websites. We know our place, and theres a section for each
of us at Barnes and Noble, a preference list waiting on amazon.
com, a recommendation from a friend at Goodreads, a blog for
us on Tumblr.
With such a multitude of alternatives to choose among, most of
us cross lines constantly, as when Im compelled to put down my
New Yorker and watch What Not to Wear or slap a little Miracle
Whip on my prosciutto panini. We can (and do) exist in various
taste cultures simultaneously. But that doesnt mean we dont
know our place. In the United States, these locations are easily dis-
tinguishable and laden with cultural meaning, which is why they
are so often referenced in political campaigns. And they evidently
guide our aesthetic choices, even as we claim to be choosing freely.
This is what makes our choices so wonderfully predictableand
so prone to manipulation for marketing purposes. (Can any plaid-
clad presidential candidate visit Iowa or New Hampshire now
without the accompaniment of country music?)
This manipulation can, in turn, limit fragmentation, but by
presenting an even more disturbing alternative. It is shocking to
todays book lovers both how few and how many books are sold
at Wal-Mart, Costco, and Targethow small the selection, how
large the volume. The New York Times reported in 2003 that the
total share of book sales for mass merchandisers and price clubs
had risen significantly in ten years, from 9.1% in 1992 to 12.6% in
2002. With the rise of e-commerce, the share was back down to
9% as of 2013 (with e-books at 42%, up from 25% in 2010, intro-
ducing the looming Amazon threat).16 The challenge is that these
BRING MONEY 47

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

from below here, it has certainly become increasingly hired by


businessmen.
As hungry niche marketing undermines cultural unity and even
healthy fragmentation gives way to market dominance, the neces-
sity for informed choice becomes even more urgent. Sadly, this
crucial moment arrives exactly when professors are at an impasse
about what standards to apply when evaluating books. As Gans
contends, while the critics demand that everyone should live by
their standards and embrace high culture, this demand is not jus-
tified in a democratic and pluralistic society, any more than the
similar claims of other state publics that their standards alone are
desirable (164). Sounding a bit like Nancy Pearl, he argues that
we should let other taste cultures be: All people have a right to
the culture they prefer, regardless of whether it is high or popular
(xi). The central claim of Ganss study is that all taste cultures are
equally respectable and useful and dont need to live up to high
culture standards but only to the standards of their respective
users and creators (165). Art should serve its users without doing
them any harm and without becoming a Platonic ideal which
must be served by its users and creators (166).17
Sociologists, historians, and cultural theorists, like Levine or
Gans, are generally less willing than critics or aesthetic theorists,
like Brooks, Greenberg, or MacDonald, to claim superiority for
any cultural group or tradition. This is where critics like me must
come in to defend aesthetic standards and the values that we
have devoted our scholarly lives to. This is also where I am com-
pelled to part ways with the general tone of the sociologists and
librariansnot because they are wrong, but because our jobs are
different. I am a literature professor, schooled (and paid) to guide
my students tastesnot, on the one hand, to direct them, or, on
the other hand, simply to observe them and report back. I view
my role as a scholar and critic similarly: to encourage thoughtful
conversations about literature in my communities and to recom-
mend, based on my training, good books. To do this, I employ
aspects of highbrow ideals that have served us well historically,
helping to distinguish cultural and artistic productions that are
BRING MONEY 49

provocative and trend-setting, mind-expanding and intellectually


challengingand sometimes just beautiful. These are the stan-
dards that help us see the differences between Northanger Abbey
and that Victoria Holt-like romance novel I thought I was getting,
or between Picoults novels and Franzens.18
Yet while I find some high culture claims convincing and use-
ful, I maintain, with other postmodernists, that high culture is a
social construction, its standards created by generations of thinkers
and powerbrokers, not, as one of my favorite quotes goes, deliv-
ered on tablets of bronze into the hands of T.S. Eliot (Lauter
xvii). As Levine points out, That panoply of cultural creations,
attitudes, and rituals which we have learned to call high culture
was not the imperishable product of the ages but the result of a
specific group of men and women acting at a particular moment
in history (241). While standards of literary merit are certainly
constructed and not immutable, while they are often skewed and
elitist, even oppressive and harmful, they have often proven useful
and discerning, as I will explore further in the Investigations
section that follows.19
I find most jarring the stark polarities that are the stock in trade
of American discussions of art and culture (and politics)the
good and bad, high and low, classy and tacky, inspiring and apoca-
lyptic. They separate us, and they keep us from being thoughtful
about our choices or nuanced in our judgments. Then the tangled
discourse of academics contributes to the confusion, confirming
rather than conquering a widespread (and dangerous) distrust of
experts and intellectuals in American culture.20
So we lose at both ends. The middlebrows (and lower-middlebrows
and lowbrows), my Trix Rabbit readers, lose access to some of
our finest cultural productions, like my students and friends
in Minnesota who resist reading the highly accessible and oh-
so-Midwestern Willa Cather because she is assigned in English
classes; obviously, she is, like medicine, meant to make them better.
No thank you.
The highbrows, my most eager Charlie the Tuna readers, some-
times suffer for their education. They become passive, enthralled
50 THE ULYSSES DELUSION

by experts, incapable of making their own assessments as they read


their way down The List. As Levine observes of his nineteenth-
century subjects, Too many of those who considered themselves
educated and cultured lost . . . [their ability] to sort things out for
themselves and understand that simply because a form of expres-
sive culture was widely accessible and highly popular it was not
therefore necessarily devoid of any redeeming value or artistic
merit (233). Again, just because everyone likes it doesnt neces-
sarily mean its bad. The price of becoming a Charlie the Tuna
reader is that it makes the reader disappear; like Charlie, they
seek their own obliteration in the given opinions and wisdom
of others. When the mark of a good education is that youve
learned to like what youre supposed to like, something is seri-
ously wrong.
In short, good taste and tasting good are two very differ-
ent things, especially if youre Charlie the Tuna or an American
reader (or a happy baby). Again, for most readers, novels are about
tasting good, about desire and indulgence, consumption and
satisfaction. For critics, at least in our professional work, novels
are about good taste, about long-cherished standards of literary
meritand, maybe, annihilation. It disturbs me that, as scholars,
we hardly speak the same language as readers anymore, and that
our conferences are often stiflingly esoteric and insular, featuring
few book titles relevant to anyone outside the Academy. Excuse
me, but after visiting book clubs for years, I have to ask: shouldnt
a literature conference be the liveliest place around? And, while
Im at it: shouldnt BookTV be even more engaging than the
science or history channels? Seriously, even the cooking chan-
nel is better. Even HDTV, where they literally watch paint dry.
I keep looking for a Reading Rainbow for grown-ups or a literary
Mythbusters. I blush when I listen to critics, writers, and schol-
ars on CSpan, PBS, and NPR. Why do we get so solemn when
we talk about books, modulating our tones and reining in our
enthusiasms? This is terrific stuff were dealing with. Now and
then, at least, we should sound like Adam and Jamie at the scene
of an explosion.21
BRING MONEY 51

Clearly, our proudly pluralistic and democratic nation has con-


structed a solid aesthetic divide on a foundation of gold, on class
elitism and anti-capitalist disdainand on higher education,
which makes me an unwillingly co-conspirator (Its as if Im work-
ing for Andy). The chasms between us are becoming harder and
harder to bridge, compromising our most basic social principles
and eliminating our common culture. They also reduce the reach
of the American novel, circumscribing our experience with read-
ing and limiting the scope of our literacy. As a book lover and
educator, I object. And, presumptuously speaking for the novel,
I object on its account. Our joint, vehement No is the motivation
for this book 22 and the subject of its remaining chapters.
PA R T I I

Investigations

To love a thing is not only to embrace its most banal iconic


forms, but to work those forms so that individuals and popula-
tions can breathe and thrive in them or in proximity to them.
Lauren Berlant

And no one rose to ask the question: Good?by what standard?


Ayn Rand

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

Reading Lolita at St. Kates

What happens when a Kantian standard of aesthetic merit


particularly the idea of a disinterested appreciation of the
beautifulis applied to a novel to the exclusion of other approaches?
In this case, the traditional aesthetic approach fails its readers.

In 20102011 at St. Catherine University, we were living The


Year of the Liberal Arts. In honor of that designation, we had
arranged for Azar Nafisi, author of Reading Lolita in Tehran, to
give a public lecture in April (before the academic year ended in
May). That combination kick-off/culmination event would begin
and end the transitory elevation of the liberal arts in one glorious
celebratory day. It was going to be a big day. And because we are
Midwestern and Catholic, serious purveyors of womens education,
we prepared ourselves for Nafisis arrival by conducting two com-
munity-wide book club events, one to read Reading Lolita and one
to read Lolita. More than 30 people came to discuss Nafisis book,
as I recall, a few armed with carefully researched condemnations
of her collusion with Western economic and political interests.1
Only about 15 of us attended the second meeting, Nabokov in
hand, to discuss this pillar of twentieth-century Western literature
(number four on the Modern Librarys 100 best novels, the one
topped by Ulysses). The group was comprised mainly of students,
but it also included a few faculty and staff members.
What struck me most about our conversation that evening, and
what has stayed with me since, was the determined effort of this
group of earnest women to figure out how to admire Nabokovs
56 THE ULYSSES DELUSION

novel, as they knew educated women should, when nearly every-


thing in them was repelled by it. Because our four-year degree
programs are women-only, our liberal arts curriculum trends irre-
sistibly toward feminism. Scan our course titles and you will find a
lot of Women and X or Women in Y, even Feminist Z. Our
first-year core course is called The Reflective Woman, and our
senior capstone The Global Search for Justice has topics such
as Women and Health and Women and Work. As a Catholic
womens institution, we deliver two messages pretty clearly as we
dispense higher education: (1) Women matter, and (2) Its your job
to make the world a more just place.
Reading Lolita was, I see now, the perfect set-up for a combus-
tible collision of core values.
Give any group of women, parents, or justice advocates this
book and our gut response will be revulsion. A child, a 12-year-old
girl, is the space at the center of the story, the character the novel
revolves around but doesnt concern itself with. She is the blank
slate for the projected fantasies and violent incursions of Humbert
Humbert, the pedophile main character. That might be acceptable
if we could take a little distance, view the novel disinterestedly as
an art object and then analyze it, but before we even encounter
the characters we are invited by the back-cover blurbs to see this as
a love story, indeed the only convincing love story of our cen-
tury, as my Vintage fiftieth anniversary edition proclaims (2005).
Pre-adolescent, kidnapped, and raped Lolita is overtly sexualized
as a participant in a love story, not just by Humbert but also by
critics.2 Indeed, her name has become synonymous with youthful
seduction in American culture.3
Lionel Trilling wrote about this complicit reading that sees Lolita
as a seductress in his 1958 (admiring) assessment of the novel:

We find ourselves the more shocked when we realize that, in the


course of reading the novel, we have come virtually to condone the
violation it presents [ . . . ] we have been seduced into conniving in
the violation, because we have permitted our fantasies to accept
what we know to be revolting.4
READING LOLITA AT ST. KATES 57

Granting Trilling his status as one of the most respected literary


critics of the twentieth century, I nonetheless disagree vehemently
with this assessment. With many readers I know, my fantasies
never traveled with Trillings or Humberts; they were occupied
differently, with that child in the passenger seat, quite literally (lit-
erarily) a sex slave. What would this character be thinking? How
would a girl like this ever escape or recover? Trillings conniving,
condoning, and permitting were not my reading experience. Not
for one minute.
But Im getting ahead of myself. I shouldnt be opening myself
up to accusations of shrill, prudish feminism (though, full disclo-
sure, I was once identified on Wikipedia as the original femi-
nazi). I should stop resisting the literary lure of this novel before
I lose credibility with my readers. Clearly, Im doing it wrong,
especially if I want you to believe that I, too, am an astute critic
of literature. Lolita is, after all, a story. There is no Lolita, really,
only a Lolita function in this text. No children were harmed in the
making of this novel.
Truth be told, I have been haunted by this novel. I had been
picking it up and putting it down for years before I finally managed
to read it through during that Year of the Liberal Arts. And then
I couldnt let it go. Watching my students and colleagues wrestle
with the text, I began to suspect that the reason this book is con-
sidered one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century5 may be
that it is the best test of a trained aesthetic response. Perhaps more
than any novel I know, it separates the educated response from the
passionate one, the highbrow from the middlebrow. It prods: can
you check your (located, interested, political) judgments at the door
and see this book as the tour de force of a Kantian genius, or are
you distracted by empathy for the imaginary damaged little girl?
In other words, can you read this novel like a twentieth-century
critic or are you, dear reader, still crying over Little Nell?
Place this novel in the context of the contradictory values we
have just exploredthe highbrow, universally beautiful, experi-
mental, allusive, rich, philosophical novel admired by literary pro-
fessionals versus the middlebrow, absorbing, relatable, discussable
58 THE ULYSSES DELUSION

and information-filled novel embraced by everyday readers. Lolita


compels us to read it as the former. If you fall into the trap of
absorption or relatability, you find yourself being persuaded to
either detest or admire Humbert (He is so self-reflective, so lit-
erary, so damn cultured. His perspective seems so reasonable!).
Either way, you end up thinking about social issues not beauty,
people not characters. You are in a pre-modernist mode. Its like
trying to find the flowers in a Jackson Pollock painting.
A generous reading of the novel gives Nabokov credit for con-
structing this conundrum, this tangle of the middlebrow and the
modernist. Clearly Lolitas stance is not unproblematically pro-
Humbert. The satirical Forward sets up a traditional novelis-
tic frame tale, informing the reader that this story is true, this
remarkable memoir is presented intact (3). Like Hawthornes
scarlet A, this story has fallen into the hands of an impartial party
who confirms its historical accuracy. References to H.H.s
crime may be looked up by the inquisitive in the daily papers for
September-October 1952, writes the (ridiculous) John Ray Jr.,
PhD (4). Pro forma, he condemns Humbert. No doubt, he is hor-
rible, he is abject, he is a shining example of moral leprosy . . . and
the desperate honesty that throbs through his confession does
not absolve him from sins of diabolical cunning (5). Ah, but
heres the aesthetic gem:

He is abnormal. He is not a gentleman. But how magically his sing-


ing violin can conjure up a tendresse, a compassion for Lolita that
makes us entranced with the book while abhorring its author!
As a case history, Lolita will become, no doubt, a classic
in psychiatric circles. As a work of art, it transcends its expiatory
aspects. (5)

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

and vision to the task of bringing up a better generation in a safer


world (6).
If you love the history of the novel, you have to love this
Forward. As the earliest novels aimed to placate their priggish crit-
ics, Lolitas Forward similarly informs us that though this story
may appear to be morally degrading, its not! Its a lesson. And,
besides, its true! Job done. Feel free now to read with pleasure
(and we do mean pleasure). And remember that Lolita was com-
plicit, the wayward child of an egotistical mother. Let reading this
novel help you raise your kids better.
But the gotcha! of this satire is the tiny bit of truth buried in the
send-up of the novels conventions. While the story of Lolita paral-
lels the plots of many early novels of seduction (see Richardsons
Pamela), the confident assertion of artistry is quintessentially mod-
ernist. Novels arent for teaching lessons. They arent about psy-
chological insights or parenting or even prurience. That magical,
conjuring, singing violin of language is Nabokovs instrument,
and this novel is his concerto. Yes, he says, yes, a work of art can
transcend its expiatory aspects. Art isnt about right or wrong,
transgression or atonement. Listen to the language sing the ten-
dresse when the content all around it belies its beauty. Perhaps the
truest pleasure of this text, then, comes from the dance it invites
the reader into, resisting and succumbing to Humberts voice, to
this story, to The Storyto beauty, to art.
But who is leading this dance? In the tradition of mainstream
Western art and literature, Beauty has often resembled Lolita, the
nymphet with budding breasts, rounded womanly hips, and a
childs lack of pubic hair, all attesting to the fetishized moment of
pubescent virginity. I have seen her in the Louvre and the Uffizi,
the Prado and the Met. Looking at her from a Kantian aesthetic
perspective, she represents the universal response to beauty,
a frisson of desire and appreciation. She is Joyces bird girl from
Portrait of the Artist and Woody Allens Tracy from Manhattan.
Since Kants theories aim to clarify how the aesthetic experience
differs from other intellectual, emotional, or spiritual responses, his
argument in The Critique of Judgment explores the distinctiveness
60 THE ULYSSES DELUSION

of the human reaction to beauty. In order to sort out the idea of


the aesthetic, he (and others before and since) stands on his own
particularity to define disinterest. He explains that: Taste is the
faculty of judging of an object . . . by an entirely disinterested satis-
faction or dissatisfaction. The object of such satisfaction is called
beautiful (286). In postmodern terms, Kant sees the beautiful
from a position of privilege, where his own values and prejudices,
his particularities, are invisible to him. From that position, he can
recognize his own disinterest only if it involves conscious disengage-
ment, making his desire visible in order to judge dispassionately in
its presence. In the most successful aesthetic response, then, this
dispassion is earned; it ought to be an intentional move away from
the more natural passionate desire for the object of beauty, for
Lolita or Olympia. In other words, perception of the beautiful
involves the choice to be an aesthete, not a beast.
As Kant writes, pleasantness concerns irrational animals also,
but beauty only concerns men (285). If that which gratifies a
man is [simply] called pleasant, and perception of beauty requires
disinterest, then in Kants theory, men must move away from grati-
fication to exercise judgments of taste. Kant argues that taste is
always barbaric which needs a mixture of charms and emotions in
order that there may be satisfaction, and still more so if it makes
these the measure of assent. For Kant, a pure judgement of
taste is a judgment on which charm and emotion have no influ-
ence (296).
Placing his nymphet Lolita at the center of the novel, Nabokov
can structure a Kantian aesthetic response, making desire visible
to allow (similarly positioned) readers to move consciously away
from it. Reading Lolita in a modernist mode invites us to repeat
that pattern; we will (of course) be drawn to Lolita, but then we
must pull deliberately away, to objectify her. Shes not a person,
shes a story, a statue, a painting. She is art. Humbert concludes:

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

trial . . . In mid-composition, however, I realized that I could not


parade living Lolita. I still may use parts of this memoir in hermetic
sessions, but publication is to be deferred.
Thus, neither of us is alive when the reader opens this book. But
while the blood still throbs through my writing hand, you are still
as much part of blessed matter as I am . . . I am thinking of aurochs
and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the
refuge of art. And this is the only immortality you and I may share,
my Lolita. (308309)

It takes only a short stretch, then, to see Trillings criticism respond-


ing to this call. Occupying Kants universal space, the space that
allows him to see his located interest as disinterest, his patriar-
chal passion as dispassion, he figures his reading as, finally, trium-
phantly, aesthetic. To use Nabokovs own metaphor: I would say
that of all my books Lolita has left me with the most pleasurable
afterglowperhaps because it is the purest of all, the most abstract
and carefully contrived.6
In the shadow of this structured aesthetic response, reading
Lolita at St. Kates posed some obvious challenges. Since none
of us in the group were heterosexual male-identified readers, the
responsiveness that Kants theory locates at that nexus and calls
universal had to be refigured or consciously adopted. As we saw
with white women writers and writers of color in chapter 2, the
St. Kates readers could not access a space of disinterest very eas-
ily; their gender, race, or other difference (from Nabokov, from
Kant, from Trilling) was only with difficulty rendered invisible.
(Several feminists in the group, for example, would confess to
walking through art galleries and seeing naked ladies, in Lynda
Barrys words, where the critics would see nudes.) To come up
with an alternative reading of Lolita that overtly rejects Humberts
perspectivewhat Judith Fetterley has called a resisting reading
would require attention to our divergent locations, to our poli-
tics, to our insistent advocacy for the child character. It would, in
other words, interfere with our perception of the beautiful at every
stage, from first attraction to final objectification.
62 THE ULYSSES DELUSION

But, oh I want to do that reading, the resisting reading from


Feminism 101! Here is what is clear to any beginning Womens
Studies student: Lolita should have a voice. A feminist reading
insists on her humanity. We call out her character for the ste-
reotype, the empty, operational plot device that it is. Constantly
looked at, Lolita is appropriated, renamed, objectified, sexualized,
and sexual. Shes asking for it. While it is true that girls may ask
for it, as curious, hormonal, affectionate pre-teens, our cultural
values and laws agree that their childhood ought to be protected.
Our feminist principles insist that a Lolita-like character should
be allowed to grow into her sexuality, joyfully and safely. Feminist
parents and activists work to eliminate unpleasant, uninvited, or
violent first sexual experiences for all of our children. Engaging
with this text invites complicity in its imagined abuse of a child; it
involves us in its excuses and justifications.7 Remember that crit-
ics still regularly call it a love story, a romance novel, even erotica.
Honest to god. Not a captivity narrative.
After an initial feminist analysis, though, reading this novel gets
a bit more tangled. What if, like most of the women in our dis-
cussion group, I want that other reading, that reading my liberal
arts education trained me for? What if I want to hear the violin,
to value the artistry and the glorious fictionality, to admire the
song? What if I want to understand and participate in the values
that ground our aesthetic traditions? I would certainly observe
(and carefully support with textual evidence) any of the follow-
ing things I heard the night of our book discussion: the language
is gorgeous; the moral, psychological, and philosophical delibera-
tions are engrossing; the plot development is concise to the point
of poetic sparseness; the narrative voice, though unreliable and
solipsistic, is extraordinarily engaging. I might even add that it was
satisfying to capture together the many allusions and moments
of intertextuality, to translate the French phrases and appreciate
Humberts cultured European sensibilities.
But my argument in this first investigation is that a modernist
aesthetic analysiseven, more generally, a highbrow analysis as we
most often practice it in literature classescannot accommodate
READING LOLITA AT ST. KATES 63

the myriad fascinating, complex, and responsible ways that readers


interact with this novel in particular and with novels in general. It
is too limiting. A Kantian model elevates modernist projects like
Lolita, experiments with perspective or challenges to mainstream
morals, because it conceives of them as more purely artistic. In the
twentieth century, we placed innovative texts like Nabokovs cen-
ter stage, where they remain and where they continue to influence
contemporary criticism.8 For most readers, notably those outside
of academic circles, these novels still carry the clout of the univer-
sally beautiful, of The Great Books.
At St. Kates, preferring a well-educated aesthetic reading mode
meant placing our liberal arts values up against our identification
as women, our attraction to the exquisite against our social justice
mission. And it meant confronting a paradox: a trained highbrow
reading requires the readers complicity in Lolitas (Lolitas) objec-
tification. Perception of the novels beauty assumes attraction to,
not identification with, Lolita.
Opening this novel up to middlebrow reading modes, on the
other hand, allows us to assess more accurately its success and its
relative value. If, for example, we can see a sentimental response
as compelling rather than debased, compromised or unsophisti-
cated, we can get closer to assessment of what most passionate
novel-readers go through when they take on Nabokov. What
does it mean to enter the novel from Lolitas location, as woman-
identified (recalling, again, that the majority of novel-readers are
women)? If we could examine the novels aesthetic values as well as
its social ones, its tendresse and its violations, we could weigh them.
Reading Lolita with the insights of both highbrow and middle-
brow reading modes is a much more revealing exercise, one that
offers a richer reading experience and gives us more to talk about.
Canonizing this text and insisting on its beauty without atten-
tion to its reception among diverse readers limits our discussion of
its quality. As Annette Kolodny noted in the early days of feminist
literary criticism, Since the grounds upon which we assign aes-
thetic value to texts are never infallible, unchangeable, or univer-
sal, we must re-examine not only our aesthetics but, as well, the
64 THE ULYSSES DELUSION

inherent biases and assumptions informing the critical methods


which (in part) shape our aesthetic responses (157). We have to
examine, in other words, how the preference for certain reading
modes anchors the biases of our literary assessments. Our assess-
ments will change only when our methods do. The pressing pro-
ject for (me and other) feminist critics has been not just to offer
alternate texts to Lolita (Hiroshima Mon Amour? The Bluest Eye?
Fear of Flying?) but also to take on Kolodnys challenge to rethink
what we mean when we call a novel good.
If good means challenging, Im going to value Lolita. If good
means beautiful, there is a case to be madeand critics should be
more conscious that we need to make it, examining the assump-
tions on which we ground our arguments. If good means ethical,
this novel opens a conversation. And if good means discussable,
well, we havent stopped talking about this one since it was pub-
lished. Im still talking about it now.
CH A P T ER 4

Oprahs Book Club and


the Summer of Faulkner

Oprahs Book Club, famous for catering to the everyday woman


readers taste for contemporary fiction, spent the summer of 2005
studying three William Faulkner novels. How did the Book Clubs
pairing of academic reading methods with middlebrow book club
practices work out? Lets just say there was no happy ending.

Fifteen years ago, I unintentionally became an Oprah expert when


my students challenged me to watch her TV Book Club. The pure
optimism of Oprahs reading project immediately drew me in, and
its success with millions of readers commanded attention. See (said
the ebullient feminist critic), women want to read good novels!
They like it when someone they trust recommends books, and
they really, really like it when they get to talk about literature with
other readers!
After I started watching Oprahs Book Club in 1998, record-
ing and re-examining each episode, I soon began teaching a
class, inviting my students to think about the Book Club with
me. Eventually, I wrote a book about what I learned, and then
co-edited a collection of essays by other Book Club scholars. In this
second investigation, I want to revisit Oprahs Book Club as the
spark for this project, for the ways it taught me to think differently
about how we judge books and how our judgments link to our
reading practices. Were going to join Oprahs Book Club in the
moment that it most memorably confronted the divide between
66 THE ULYSSES DELUSION

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

Club into an online classroom that summer. It was a MOOC before


the MOOCs.5 It was the culmination of Oprahs engagement with
the classics and the furthest she had separated her books from the
original talk show format. It was also a failure.
No matter how successful English teachers found it, Oprah and
her producers apparently considered it one step too far. Only a
month after the Summer of Faulkner ended, the Book Club back-
pedaled from classics when Winfrey selected James Freys addic-
tion memoir A Million Little Pieces and announced her return to a
more diverse contemporary book list. Most booklovers know how
that turned out, with accusations of dishonesty leveled against
Frey, a recall of his book, and a dramatic TV smack-down where
Oprah wielded her considerable authority more overtly and impe-
riously than ever before (juicy details, including video, are still
available on the website, oprah.com, as I write this).
In hindsight, it should have been easy to see the decamping
from classics coming. When I revisited the Faulkner resources on
the website (September 8, 2012), I was also pulled into Books
that make a difference to Julia Roberts and James Franco and
a Product guide for Kirstie Alleys Home Makeover. Friendly
notes, like Dont get lost or give up navigating multiple character
names and italic text, were scattered throughout, with Quick
Reading Tips for dealing with those challenges. Despite asser-
tions to the contrary, this was never an online college classroom.
It was always a middlebrow book club.6
And thats not a bad thing. Oprahs first foray into recommend-
ing books was marked by careful attention to ratings, to pleas-
ing her audience of daytime TV viewers, the mainly middle- and
working-class women who had made Oprah! the most successful
talk show in television history, a distinction it will likely main-
tain, as network TV increasingly loses its audience share. It was, in
short, responsive to its audience in all the consumerist ways that
have traditionally been considered bad for books.
The early and enormous success of the Book Club was some-
thing no one saw coming, despite the dominance of Oprahs talk
show. Winfrey herself had approached the idea tentatively; in its
early days, Oprah! reserved only one short segment at the end of the
68 THE ULYSSES DELUSION

one-hour program for book discussiontwenty minutes at most.


Wally Lambs Shes Come Undone, the most popular Oprah novel
ever, squeezed a brief discussion in at the end of a show devoted to
the stars of TVs Third Rock from the Sun, featuring the typical
celebrity chat that viewers expected. Early Book Club shows were
often advertised as issue-oriented, a proven daytime TV formula,
where the issue was highlighted more than the book (domestic vio-
lence with Black and Blue, Tourettes Syndrome with Icy Sparks). It
wasnt until two years in that the transcripts finally started carrying
the title Oprahs Book Club. By 2000, at the height of the Book
Clubs popular success, and at its apex for engaging literary conver-
sations, Winfrey finally fully trusted books to make good televi-
sion. She started to devote the entire show, start to finish nearly
once a month, to her Book Club. It was unabashed, uninterrupted
(except, of course, by frequent commercial breaks) book talk.7
In the years of the Classics Book Club (20032005), Oprah
returned to those twenty-minute segments, sans discussion. And
some of those few moments were taken up by celebrity endorse-
ments (This novel changed my life, they would say, strategically
donning English major glasses for the occasion) and promotional
hype about upcoming (issue-oriented but not book-related) shows.
Most of the literary elements moved online, where, again, read-
ers went to find them during the Summer of Faulkner. In fact,
Winfrey would never again return to the more indulgent hour-
long club meetings mixing true confessions with literary apprecia-
tion; after 2003, book-clubbers could vie for a chance to appear
in the audience for a Book Club show, but they no longer sat on
the stage modeling how a book discussion operates. The change
was obvious and immediate with the switch to classics. As Pereira
points out, in the discussion of John Steinbecks East of Eden, the
first selection of the Classics Book Club, the audience members
were relegated to a distant set of chairs on the lawn of Steinbecks
home . . . and allowed only two token representatives in the taped
discussion with Steinbecks son, a celebrity, an academic, and
Winfrey (202). For Faulkner, there was never a TV book discus-
sion at all, only online lectures and discussions.
OPRAHS BOOK CLUB AND THE SUMMER OF FAULKNER 69

Winfrey always claimed not to be influenced by widespread


characterization of her early book choices as lowbrow, sentimen-
tal, even schmaltzy and one-dimensional, in novelist Jonathan
Franzens words.8 Dominated by women writers and readers, the
Book Club had suffered the same condemnations that have plagued
the novel from its earliest days.9 Despite Winfreys protests, it was
clear that, after six years of successfully promoting contemporary
novels for and about women, Oprahs Book Club had beat a hasty
retreat. It was difficult not to see the return, with its emphasis
on (capital C) Classics, as a reaction. Who were they trying to
impress? Apparently, it wasnt those women in the daytime TV
audience anymore.10
The classics focus waxed and waned through the first decade
of the twenty-first century, through Tolstoy, Marquez, and the
Summer of Faulkner. The waning was significant; there was one
full year when the only selection was Elie Weisels 100-page Night.
There were also long stretches with no new book selections, an
occasional fall back to big, absorbing novels (The Story of Edgar
Sawtelle, The Pillars of the Earth) and, again, several memoirs
(even after Frey). Before Oprah! ended its 25-year network TV run
in 2011, Winfrey selected two Dickens novels for the final meeting
of the Book Club. Then she set off for her OWN network, and no
new book announcements came for nearly two years.
In June 2012, Oprah debuted Book Club 2.0, with Cheryl
Strayeds Wild, a bestselling (and decidedly Oprah-reader-
friendly) memoir. Almost exclusively online, this brand new
interactive book club aims to engage readers via social media
to create a true community of book lovers. My Kindle version
of Strayeds book, for example, had a function that allowed me
to view Oprahs comments as I read. And I could track other
Oprah readers highlights, follow Oprah on Twitter, or visit the
oprah.com website to join a (virtual) discussion. As if to make
up for lost time, members of Book Club 2.0 were subject to a
multi-media barrage of book recommendations as well, lists
like Crazy Compelling Paperbacks, 8 Books to Read with a
Broken Heart, 11 Books to Devour on a Long Flight. At any
70 THE ULYSSES DELUSION

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

were by women, eleven by women of color, and every selection of


Book Club 2.0 has been by a woman writer, half of them African-
American authors. Thats a big difference.
Why the shift? Clearly, our literary and aesthetic categories were
at work, defining and limiting the experience of reading novels,
insisting that the best writing meet certain established conven-
tions and be appreciated within particular parameters. If Oprahs
Book Club wanted to play with the big boys, to be perceived as
serious not lightweight, then it needed to stop being commercially
successful and feminine (how counterintuitive is that?). Winfrey
needed to put masculine genius and artistry center stage. And she
did. She played the Faulkner card.
The Book Clubs reading practices, in turn, adjusted to accom-
modate that shift. Analysis, unlocking of universal themes,
acknowledgement of innovation, links to other writers, and
attention to languagethese are the strategies that the classics
emphasis drew out in Oprahs Book Club, particularly during the
Summer of Faulkner. But the Book Club website also worked to
make Faulkner dishy and dramatic, calling out issues, highlight-
ing tensions among characters, and focusing on relationships,
including the readers relationship with the author. These are the
gestures toward a reader-centered aesthetic, the absorption, relat-
ability, and discussability of chapter 1, and the remnants of the
earlier Oprahs Book Club.
Academics might argue that the untutored book talk we saw on
Oprah! in those first six years is more appropriately kept offstage.
Skip the tears and the epiphanies. Better to let the professionals
lead the discussion and tape the online lectures. But that misses the
magic of how novels take shape in conversation, in flux, in com-
munity, in surprising leaps off the page. In my study of Oprahs
Book Club, I found moments of striking perception and meticu-
lous analysis in the televised discussions, when everyday readers sat
with Oprah and her authors and engaged in typical womens book
club practicesmerging the aesthetic and the personal, linking
emotion and intellect, building off of one anothers insights, and
insisting that practicing empathy can lead to understanding and
72 THE ULYSSES DELUSION

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

desire for knowledge, to the aspirational yearnings of its audience,


what my colleague Amy L. Blair calls reading up.18 But to my
mind, Oprahs Book Club: Great Books Edition was less success-
ful because it stopped being a two-way conversation. Like Levines
twentieth-century Shakespeare, it was less engaged with its audi-
ence. It was also less compelling to watch, even for twenty min-
utes. To its detriment, it was more academic, more like an online
class, and less like the interactions women have with novels when
they are making them their own, reading them as a way to live
their best life.
CH A P T ER 5

Lost in a Chick Lit Austenland

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.

Now you all know my Jane Austen storyhow happening onto a


copy of Northanger Abbey in a discount bin set me up to be a litera-
ture professor. There was something seriously different about that
book, in tone and craft, that set it off from the gothic romances of
Victoria Holt I had been reading for pleasure for several years. I knew
it, but I didnt know how to talk about it. Not until years later.
Fast forward to 2013 (about 30 years later), the two-hundredth
anniversary of the publication of Pride and Prejudice. I was
set to teach our introduction to the English major course, and
my undergraduate teaching assistant, Parrin Lenander-Tholo,
and I decided to give the course a multimedia and intertextual
focusand center it on Austens novel, as a celebration. We were
both fans of the YouTube series The Lizzie Bennet Diaries, so
that was going on the syllabus.1 There was also a stage adapta-
tion playing at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, just across
the Mississippi River from St. Kates. I cant even begin to list all
of the novels we looked at as we prepared our required reading
listan abundance of adaptations, extensions, and re-workings
of the Elizabeth Bennet story. We chose to assign four pairings
of a film, TV series or multimedia text with a novel adaptation
Lost in Austen, Austenland, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, and
Bridget Joness Diary.2 We prepared the students for well-informed
78 THE ULYSSES DELUSION

literary analysis with six weeks of theoretical contextualizing and


in-depth study of the original novel. Then we took off on our
jaunt through Austenland 2013.
Even with all of that background and preparation, we found
that we had a couple of students who insistently interpreted the
novel as a love story and only a love story. There was no way to
steer them away from that familiar compulsory heterosexual plot:
girl meets (superior) boy; circumstances keep them apart, mis-
understandings abound; finally, despite it all, they get together.
Ah, so comfortable, so familiar! I realized that some of the texts
we had assigned invited that responsewill they or wont they is
unambiguously the question driving Austenland, for example, or
Lost in Austen. And Parrin and I had an ongoing joke about the
best Darcy (Its Colin Firth.) that might have reinforced that laser
focus. I found myself working very hard to foreground the things
that make Pride and Prejudice more than a romance novel, the
things I now knew how to talk aboutthe cutting social satire,
the brilliant subtleties of the multiple domestic interactions, the
detailed observations of people, places, and class distinctions,
the sleek structure and judicious language, and the sly winks of
the narrative voice (Janes talking to me!). I wanted the students
to see beyond the romance plot to the ways Pride and Prejudice is
outstanding capital-L Literature.
The further we delved into the multimedia world of Jane Austen
in twenty-first century America, the more it became apparent
that this romance turn was not just the preference of a few of our
students. They were following a cultural script typical of todays
Jane Austen. Pride and Prejudice has become the urtext of
chick lit.3
By now most of you have encountered the literary genre we call
chick lit.4 With bright pink and purple covers like the ones I found
in that South Dakota bookstore, chick lit novels are hard to miss.
A few years ago, a (pink) collection of scholarly essays on the topic,
Chick Lit: The New Womans Fiction, was published, announcing
the significance of what the editors call a form of womens fic-
tion, a fresh niche in the history of the novel.
LOST IN A CHICK LIT AUSTENLAND 79

Beginning with Bridget Joness Diary, the genealogical roots of


chick lit, as outlined by the collections editors Suzanne Ferriss
and Mallory Young, are simple to tracedirectly to Austen. Helen
Fieldings 1996 novel parallels Pride and Prejudice in plot and
characters; thats why Parrin and I selected it as one of our inter-
textual riffs on Austens novel. Yet some of its appeal is found,
the editors of Chick Lit note, in its difference from Pride and
Prejudice, in its spontaneity and candor in its contemporary
and realistic portrait of single life (Ferriss 4, 3). As Rosalind
Gill and Elena Herdieckerhoff emphasize in an article in Feminist
Media Studies, Bridget almost immediately became an icon, a
recognizable emblem of a particular kind of femininity, a con-
structed point of identification for women. She was bigger than
the book. She was the embodiment of post-feminist sensibility
(489). Clearly a compelling character, Bridget allowed critics of
chick lit to define the genre after her, and characterize it, then, by
its Bridget-like main characterswhite, middle-class twenty- or
thirty-something professional women (Ferriss 7); they tended to
be single, heterosexual, and absorbed with finding a man, losing
weight, and, in the American Carrie Bradshaw iteration, shopping.
Frequent visitors to bookstores might define chick lit more read-
ily by those bright covers, which often tellingly featured purses,
dresses, and high-heeled pumps.
The problem with this story is that it isnt true: Bridget Jones was
not the first chick lit heroine. Four years before Bridget dropped
cheeks-first down a fire pole, Terry McMillans novel Waiting to
Exhale had grabbed the attention of US women. Despite its quint-
essentially chick lit themes of sisterhood and identity, fashion and
romance, despite its privileged, professional main characters, and
despite its fabulous commercial success, all defining qualities of
chick lit, McMillans 1992 novel about African-American women
in Atlanta is almost always bypassed for the very British Bridget
Jones, published in 1996, the same year as Bushnells Sex and the
City, Rebecca Wellss Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, and
McMillans second successful chick lit novel How Stella Got her
Groove Back. And Jane Austen is partly to blame.
80 THE ULYSSES DELUSION

To take chick lit seriously, scholars who write about it have to


begin with literary historical analysis, with the genres links to
a tradition of womens literature, almost always through Austen
(though Fanny Burney and Maria Edgeworth might have some-
thing to say about that). It had to be Austen, you see, because she
is one of the few women with a solid stake in the (tiny tent of the)
literary canon, a foothold among the Great Books. After establish-
ing literary bona fides with Austen, critics move quickly to social
commentary: Can women have it all? the essays in this particu-
lar collection ask. Have we come a long way? Is chick lit good
for women? Exploring the relationships todays women have with
work, food, shopping, traditional roles, men and romance, and
our own bodies, chick lit can help us understand where we stand
after the feminist revolution, these essays argue. Ferriss and Young
ask: Is chick lit advancing the cause of feminism by appealing to
female audiences and featuring empowered, professional women?
Or does it rehearse the same patriarchal narrative of romance and
performance of femininity that feminists once rejected? (9).
There is a lot to be said for this focus on cultural work.5 Some
critics writing about chick lit use it exclusively; these contempo-
rary novels certainly seem to invite it. They are often refreshing
in their candor about the challenges their young heroines face.
While they are as much the product of fantasy as their grand-
mothers Harlequin romances (or Victoria Holt gothics) chick lit
novels seem, in some ways, more realistic. They jettison the het-
erosexual hero to offer a more realistic portrait of single life, dat-
ing and the dissolution of romantic ideals (Ferriss 3). Sometimes
they even forego the traditional happy ending and conclude with-
out a wedding. When rewards and punishments are meted out in
the epilogue of Candace Bushnells Sex and the City, for example,
there isnt an old-fashioned marriage to be found, except, ironi-
cally, Mr. Bigs: Mr. Big is happily married. Carrie is happily
single (243).6
But there is another reason this cultural approach is attractive.
It allows critics to move away from literary criticism, whose aesthetic
standards, as we have seen, would demand censure of commercially
LOST IN A CHICK LIT AUSTENLAND 81

successful womens novels. Instead, they tend to embrace popu-


lar culture studies where they can find some value in the beguil-
ing characters that people these novels or in the social issues they
raise. Cultural analysis opens an avenue for chick lit critics, who
obviously enjoy their project, to take the novels seriouslybefore
hedging their scholarly bets in the end with ambiguous or nega-
tive aesthetic evaluations. For critics interested in womens novels,
literary analysis can be a minefield, as Annette Kolodny pointed
out in the early days of feminist literary criticism, and negotiating
it can be treacherous. Chick lit critics tend to avoid these pitfalls
by passing over two whole centuries in their rush back to Austen,
an acceptably artistic woman writer, or by commenting exclusively
on contemporary issues. Chick lit critics seem both captivated
and repelled by, drawn to, yet obliged to condemn, their genre.
Their lighthearted cultural explorations play against deeply held
aesthetic or feminist values and lead most of them, in the end, to
dismiss the novels they study.
For example, my colleague Juliette Wells (a Jane Austen scholar),
in an elegant essay in the Ferriss and Young collection, concludes,
chick lit positions itself firmly as entertaining rather than thought
provoking, as fiction rather than literature (49):

When we look in chick lit for such literary elements as imagina-


tive use of language, inventive and thought-provoking metaphors,
layers of meaning, complex characters, and innovative handling
of conventional structure, we come up essentially empty-handed.
Only in its deployment of humor can the best of chick lit stand
up favorably to the tradition of womens writing, and humor
perhaps unfairly, as many have arguedhas never been the most
valued and respected of literary elements. . . . Richly descriptive or
poetic passages, the very bread and butter of literary novels, both
historical and contemporary, are virtually nonexistent in chick
lit. (6465)

Holding these novels up to an aesthetic standard exemplified


here by Austen draws them up short as art. Chick lit amuses and
engrosses, Wells concludes, but it does not richly reimagine in
82 THE ULYSSES DELUSION

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:

The Shopaholic trilogy presents a consumerist fantasy world in


which reality never fully intrudes. Becky repeatedly staves off
her creditors . . . and she never suffers bankruptcy, deprivation, or
LOST IN A CHICK LIT AUSTENLAND 83

poverty. This allows readers to identify with Beckys struggles and


dreams, make comparisons to their own lives, and live vicariously
through Beckys shopping trips, without being troubled by the
intrusion of reality in the form of expected real consequences. The
novels are the perfect purchase for readers hoping to engage in
carefree conspicuous consumption and to dream of fashion and
romance! (237)

In examining chick lit as a positive or negative trend, critics find in


this complicity with consumerism the undermining of the genre,
the big reason not to take it seriously, just as we saw in chapter 2.
Its like buying a book to match your bag (because every great bag
deserves a great book!), as Stephanie Harzewski notes (35), which
is clearly as bad as buying art to match your couch. Wikipedia tells
us that Publishers continue to push the sub-genre because of its
viability as a sales tactic.7 Chick lit has high marketability, and
again, in the world of aesthetics, that is never good.8
In this dominant approach to chick lit, consumerism reinforces
sexism, and the take-home message of the novels, the critics con-
clude, is to buy things to fix yourself; if youre lucky, you will
be rewarded with romance. As Gill and Herdieckerhoff argue, in
these contemporary novels, womens salvation is to be found in
the pleasures of a worked-on, worked-out body, and the arms of
a good man (500). After tracking many playful scholarly romps
through chick lit novels, I found that similar conclusions prevail.
And there you have it. Despite the existence of an avid readership
(including, apparently, many literature PhDs), a collection of solid
scholarly essays, and a wealth of interesting and entertaining com-
mentary, chick lit is thus minimized and undermined.
And in a disturbing turnabout, Pride and Prejudice, number
two on the BBCs list of the United Kingdoms Best Loved
Books and judged by Australians in a 2008 poll as number one
among the 101 best books ever written, is being swept up in the
chick lit industry by Shannon Hale, Emma Campbell Webster, Jo
Baker, and others, and is starting to look a little pink itself. Im
beginning to suspect that Tom Hanks in Youve Got Mail may
have been the last man to read it.
84 THE ULYSSES DELUSION

In this third investigation, I want to make a case that there is


hope for chick lits redemption in the context of (what I now think
of as) The True History of the Novel. Looking past the dismissive
name and the strategic feminization, I want to suggest that if we
spend more time on the many ways literary history leads inevita-
bly to chick lit and less time on the charming but embarrassing
antics of its purportedly post-feminist heroines, this history may
also offer more insight into why chick lit has proven so successful
in our twenty-first century economy. Instead of taking an exclu-
sively cultural approach and ceding the territory of literature to
Kershners serious literary artists in opposition to social norms
of the time, with their tiny but discriminating audience, I pro-
pose we more carefully link chick lit to the rise of the novel as a
genre and acknowledge how that genre has catered and marketed
to its mainly women readersand how the parallel history of aes-
thetics has shaped our rejection of the womans novel.
Separating chick lit completely from our aesthetic practices has
left it to be easily dismissed as silly and trivial. There was a reason
I was so eager to get my students to see Pride and Prejudice as
more than a romance novel, rather than also a really good
romance novel, the first romance novel, or a romance novel
and . . . (which, in fact, it is). In chick lit, the good novels cant be
separated from the excellent onesand there are excellent chick lit
novels. Worst of all, womens writing across the board suffers from
being painted with a chick lit brush (or vice versa). Jennifer Weiner
(author of some of the good chick lit) has led a public protest of
this prejudice, calling out this sexist double standard thats still
too swift to dismiss womens work as small, trivial, unimpressive,
and unimportant (Mead).9
What if, instead, we began from the premise that the novel has
been and continues to be a diverse but predominantly feminine
genre, that, in effect, the novel is chick lit? Then we could place
evaluative questions about chick lit novels in the context of an aes-
thetic tradition that has relentlessly worked against this premise,
redefining the novel around the chronically unread classics, thus
narrowing its reach and its scope. In the context of what I call
LOST IN A CHICK LIT AUSTENLAND 85

the whole good/bad thing (after Ghostbusters), if chick lit isnt


Literature, what is it? Aside from being the foil that aesthetic the-
ory needs to name feminine in order to police the borders of the
novel as art, what function does it serve for its audience?
And were back to the outstanding qualities of the novel
our scholarly codifications leave out, the ones that readers
admire most: ARDIabsorption, relatability, discussability, and
information.10 Chick lit readers, like most avid bookworms, value
exciting stories they cant put down, stories that inspire conver-
sation. They want characters they can connect with, historical,
political, or geographical information subtly shared, comfort-
able settings that tend toward the domestic, and, sometimes,
social messages that call them to action. And they want to be
entertained. Is that so wrong?
Any one of these qualities, skillfully executed, can send a novel
to the top of the bestseller listsand the bottom of critical assess-
ments. A recent (September 28, 2014) New York Times Bestseller
List, the mega-list combining print and e-book fiction, features
in its top fifteen only two books positively reviewed and seriously
analyzed in its pages, Ian McEwans latest novel The Children Act
and Gillian Flynns Gone Girl. The others, even when written
about at any length (as three others had been), are dismissed as
something other than literary (mind-numbing kitsch is what Joe
Queenan called The Alchemist), or as genre fiction (as was Flynns
novel, to some extent).
To be sure, this list is mostly genre fiction, including fantasy,
detective, legal thriller, crime (lots of crime), historical romance,
and chick lit. In short, there were plenty of exciting stories (a just-
published John Grisham novel and Gone Girl, on the list for 94
weeks), characters that readers like and enjoy re-revisiting (Lee
Childs Jack Reacher and Diana Gabaldons Claire Randall), and
some historical and geographical information (in Christina Baker
Klines Orphan Train and Paulo Coelhos The Alchemist).
Imagine a history of the novel that takes these genres and their
outstanding qualities seriously and begins to assign them aesthetic
not just cultural or social value. Imagine a history of the novel that
86 THE ULYSSES DELUSION

notices when these qualities are deftly deployed, with precision or


craft (as Janet Maslin did in her May 2012 Gone Girl review). The
scope of aesthetics widens intriguingly, and the novel becomes a
different animal, one tied more responsibly to its history, to its
democratic roots and wide readership. If we acknowledge that the
history of the novel is the history of chick lit, then we can define
this recent pink subgenre more generously, acknowledging what it
does well. (Engaging plots and realistic characters? Check. Social
commentary? Check. Impressive commercial success, i.e. wide
appeal to many readers? Check.) And we will be less likely to use
chick lit to narrowly define and minimize womens interests and
reading habits, which are, again, as wide-ranging and varied as the
history of the novel.
This more magnanimous view of the novel grounded Oprahs
Book Club and, given its more general acceptance, might have
made the Book Clubs success come as less of a surpriseand
might have saved its readers the whiplash of the Summer of
Faulkner and the Fall of Frey. The same women who loved What
Looks Like Crazy on an Ordinary Day, Pearl Cleages early (and
mostly ignored) chick lit novel, read Toni Morrison (five times)
and Gabriel Garcia Marquez (twice) with equal enthusiasm.11
Even literature professors dont generally limit their reading to
The Classics, as the rich collection of scholarship on chick lit (and
detective novels and lesbian pulp and romances) attests. If today,
in my office, Im reading F. Scott Fitzgerald, tomorrow, in my
hammock, it could just as well be Janet Evanovich. By viewing
womens concerns this broadly and taking them seriously, Winfrey
became a master at marketing to womeneverything from novels
to diets to presidential candidates. This is not niche marketing, but
savvy mass marketing to a recognizably diverse audience.
If applied to the novel, this attitude could bring more accuracy
and insight to our scholarship. If you gender a genre, after all, the
genre will be limited by these definitional parameters. For example,
why havent the critics connected Bridget Jones to Tom Jones, Helen
Fielding to Henry Fielding as often as to Austen? The picaresque
adventures of a hapless heroine moving toward self-realization seem
LOST IN A CHICK LIT AUSTENLAND 87

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

What I Learned from


The (Book) Group

How skilled women readers cultivated the tools to lead a revolution.

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

values, perhaps in the midst of momentous change? Or maybe,


bad as they are (and they are bad by nearly all of my aesthetic mea-
suresawkwardly written, often implausible, full of clichs and
cheap narrative shortcuts), perhaps they manage to include relat-
able characters, a cant-put-it-down story, or some new and inter-
esting information.2 Did they give us something to talk about?
I have my pet theories (hard-earnedI read the books), as do
most of my professor friends and book club buddies (who, if I am
to believe them, have not read the books. Uh huh). Im guessing
you have theories, too. Now Ill ask you to hold that thought while
we revisit another cultural moment like this one and a similarly
shocking novel: Mary McCarthys The Group.
First published in 1963, McCarthys novel about eight 1933
Vassar graduates was, as one reviewer wrote, the novel that every-
one read but no one admitted reading.3 Controversial and scan-
dalous, it remained on the bestseller lists for two years. Tame
by todays standards, and certainly in comparison with Fifty
Shades of Grey or Sex in the City, McCarthys novel nonetheless
introduced into public discourse the possibility that nice young
women were having premarital sex, using diaphragms, taking
their career ambitions seriously, breastfeeding, cheating on their
husbands, masturbating, flying airplanes, enjoying sex, and being
openly lesbian. In short, it tells some truths that buttoned-down
US society was apparently just about ready to hear in the era of
Mad Men.4
The Feminine Mystique, the feminist classic credited with spur-
ring the second wave womens movement, was published just
months before The Group in 1963 and has some surprising over-
lap. Based on interviews Betty Friedan did with her fellow Smith
College Class of 1942 graduates, The Feminine Mystique also cen-
tered on the lifestyles of privileged, educated white women. It
makes similar claims about womens stifled potential and enforced
passivity. But because it was nonfiction, it spent only six weeks
on the bestseller list. In the womens liberation movement that
followed, The Feminine Mystiques influence is acknowledged and
debated. We seldom talk about The Group.
WHAT I LEARNED FROM THE (BOOK) GROUP 91

There is certainly an argument to be made for The Group


being more commercially successful. I could also argue for its
superior artistry, the complex blend of autobiography and fiction,
the precise prose, meticulous descriptions, and wickedly enter-
taining character assessments/assassinations. While its focus is
a bit crowded, with eight central players, a few of the women
nonetheless become quite vivid. And the account of their rela-
tionships still comes across as refreshingly honest. Hilary Mantel
has praised the novel as a masterpiece and noted its influence on
her. A. S. Byatt has admired its candor. It is, quite simply, a really
good story, more fun to read than an essay or the deductions
of an ethical treatise.5 I find it much more absorbing than The
Feminine Mystique (but then I do have a bit of a predisposition
toward novels).
There is another argument to be made for McCarthys novel as
wellthat its author may be one of our neglected women writ-
ers, a victim of the chick lit syndrome that we just explored, and
that she deserves a more objective reassessment. Taking up this
position on behalf of a woman of McCarthys heralded intellect
and her solid connections among New Yorks elite (the midcen-
tury Partisan Review crowd) seems a stretch. But when we revisit
how the men in that crowd panned The Group, as Norman Mailer
famously did in The New York Review of Books, it is not so far-
fetched. Mailer wrote that McCarthy had failed miserably to do
more than write the best novel the editors of the womens maga-
zines ever conceived in their secret ambitions and insisted that she
is simply not a good enough woman to write a major novel . . . She
is in danger of ending up absurd, an old maid collector of Manx
cats, no tails and six toes, an anomaly of God. Aside from the fact
that this is completely inaccurateMcCarthy was seldom single,
and was, in 1963, married to the man she would be with until
she diedit is also incredibly personal and shockingly dismissive
(a tone that is all too common even today, as any women blogger
or victim of GamerGate could tell you). I could also point out that
her being reviewed at all was not a given. When activists revealed
the first VIDA count, the ratio of male to female literary authors
92 THE ULYSSES DELUSION

reviewed in prestigious publications in 2010, the worst was the


New York Review of Books with an 84/16 split. The best was the
New York Times Book Review with 65/35. The Atlantic, Harpers,
The London Review of Books, and the Times Literary Supplement
fell in between.6 This was after years of progress from the time
when women writers wore pillbox hats.
Controversial, truth telling, commercially successful, aestheti-
cally pleasing, absorbing, and arguably underratedmany factors
validate the significance of The Group as a literary and cultural
phenomenon. But the novels most substantial contribution, the
one that concerns me here, is its political impact. In this fourth
investigation, I want to shift focus briefly from the good to the
useful. Though, again, feminist historians more often cite the
nonfiction Feminine Mystique as the catalyst for US feminisms
second wave, I contend that novels like Mary McCarthys The
Group impelled the movement forward using the proven tools of
bestselling womens novels, transposed a few years later into the
practices of consciousness-raising. While social change is inevitably
over-determined, our cultural predilection to consider womens
novels sentimental or silly has led us to overlook the magnitude of
their effect on culture.7
Lets return to ARDI for a moment. As I interview book club
members and avid readers in my research, I always ask, What
do you look for in a book? and the most frequent answer has
been, Characters I can relate to. Though voyeurism seems to
account for some of the curiosity about The Group in its time (as
well as a Real Housewives-type preoccupation with the wealthy),
when it comes down to it, several of the women in McCarthys
novel are just plain compelling characters. And the fact that the
novels focus shifts among several of them is also engaging. The
technique of offering multiple main characters to enter the text
through has been repeated purposefully since, for example in Sex
and the City, Waiting to Exhale, and the Travelling Pants series.
You may remember it from Little Women. Multiple points of con-
nection offer multiple pathways into the novel and the potential
for more involved readers.
WHAT I LEARNED FROM THE (BOOK) GROUP 93

Just as an aside, I would add that if you want evidence that


passionate identification works, start tracking social media quiz-
zes. Because I teach popular novels, my students forward these
quite oftenwhich Sex and the City character are you? Which Jane
Austen heroine? Which house would you be in at Hogwarts? Im
guessing that some of you can answer these as readily as I can
(Miranda, Emma, Gryffindor). Fandom draws out the intensity of
these connections, as the quizzes fly around Facebook.
You may recall that another frequent response to my FAQ about
what readers look for in novels is this one: I want to learn some-
thing. That one surprised me, in part because I had been led to
believe that most women read novels purely for pleasure. But it has
become clear to me that avid readers seek opportunities to gather
information and insight, especially about alternate possibilities for
womens lives. Here, again, The Group is rich with promise, as the
protection of economic safety nets and the lure of bohemian New
York lead the main characters into experiences many of us would
never encounter in St. Paul or Dubuque. The eight women wan-
der freely around the city, engage in political debate, drop French
phrases, visit museums, and, of course, have a variety of sexual
encounters. They imagine a life unmoored from family and Middle
American values, an exploratory life, an erotic one. I love that
the novel ends with Lakey, the Godot-like lynchpin of the group
absent from most of the novel, returning in style from Europe to
live openly with her woman lover. In her self-assured presence,
in the last few pages, the arrogant bad-guy Harald unravels, and
she drives on in her smart, bottle-green European two-seater,
completely unaffected. Now thats a story I want to talk with my
book group about.
Which brings me to one final technique of middlebrow womens
novels that made The Group work for the feminist movement that
followed itthe provocation to conversation. My mom and her
sisters and friends used to lower their voices and take hushed tones
when they talked about Peyton Place and The Group, just as they
likely do with Fifty Shades. Sometimes I even credit those over-
heard snippets of conversation with my early interest in reading.
94 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:

I well recall returning home from college my freshman year to the


flushed and fuming presence of my mother, who had just finished
The Womens Room. She felt, she said at the time, as if French had
taken up residence in our living room and transcribed every detail
into a novel. Then she realized that the similarities were no coin-
cidence, because what had happened to her had happened to the
wife across the street and the one next door to her. They had all
been had, or let themselves be had, and she was filled with the sort
WHAT I LEARNED FROM THE (BOOK) GROUP 95

of anger that is peculiarly bracing, the kind of fury that fuels small
and big changes. (469, qtd in Loudermilk 18)

As Lisa Maria Hogeland writes in Feminism and Its Fictions: The


Consciousness-Raising Novel and the Womens Liberation Movement,
The CR novel was important and influential in introducing femi-
nist ideas to a broader reading public, and particularly in circulat-
ing feminist ideas beyond the small-group networks that made up
radical feminism (ix). Novels noteworthy and notorious, like The
Womens Room, The Woman Warrior, Fear of Flying, and The Bluest
Eye, brought feminist struggle into the lives of everyday readers,
and into their living rooms, as book discussions begat conscious-
ness-raising groups begat political action. Hogeland traces a tra-
jectory where The broader social forces at work . . . were brought
home in the novels depicting individual womens struggles to tell
their stories. The struggle for narrative was the struggle for iden-
tity; the struggle for consciousness was the struggle for total social
transformation (17).
I have argued elsewhere, with Jaime Harker, that this moment
of significant feminist social change was catalyzed in print, and its
activists were united by a firm belief that books could be revo-
lutionary, that language could remake the world, and that writ-
ing mattered in a profound way (x).9 This foundational belief,
purposefully linking art and activism, left behind an invigorating
and diverse feminist canon, we assert.10 But the novels political
power of the pen didnt just appear fully formed with womens lib.
It had long been a constant in US womens lives. It was, as Audre
Lorde explains in her 1985 essay Poetry is Not a Luxury, the
power of imaginative writing:

For women, then, poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of


our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we
predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first
made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action.
Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be
thought. (37)
96 THE ULYSSES DELUSION

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

The information we need to assess womens novels well is in the


careful craft of its writers and the nuanced practices of its readers.13
We cant do justice to these novels if we theorize them as only
popular, only consumerist and debased; we also cant fully appre-
hend them as only aesthetic or only political. They are, brilliantly,
all of these things at once. If we dont sort out the fine distinctions
of their work, we inevitably underestimate them, as we continue
to do, I maintain, with The Group. The effort to assess womens
novels (a. k. a. novels) and the work they do, aesthetically, socially,
politically, with a language suited to this unique genre is, again,
an answer to Annette Kolodnys call for new standards of literary
merit, standards that will challenge publishing houses and book
reviewers to value the work that women writers and readers do.
I am convinced that, while looking deceptively like middlebrow
womens novels, texts like McCarthys functioned as radical dis-
ruptions and transformative discourses, spurring dissent and social
change by calling on the creative practices of womens reading and
writing. Reading The Group as an early feminist intervention offers
fascinating insights into a productive era of womens social change
movementsand passionate novel readingand hints about what
some of those Fifty Shades of Grey might be adding dimension to.
CH A P T ER 7

Storytelling with Jodi Picoult

When carefully articulated reader preferences meet a professors


stubborn standards of literary merit, things fall apart.

And here is where I come to my Waterloo.


Jodi Picoults 2013 novel The Storyteller meets every alternative
criterion of literary excellence I have introduced in this book. Not
only that, but it, like every one of her last eight novels, debuted at
number one on the New York Times Bestseller List.1 Many, many
readers adore, blissfully indulge in, and consume her writing. And
the fact that her books sell well should not work against her; it
should not undermine my English professorial assessment of The
Storyteller s quality. Got it (see chapter 2). Plus, shes a woman writer
who takes herself and her own ambitions seriously, even while aim-
ing for commercial rather than literary success. While she doesnt
aspire to be James Joyce, there ought to be room in the big literary
tent I have been pitching for her invocations of Charles Dickens.
Sure (see chapter 1). Not only that, but she has spoken out, with
chick lit novelist Jennifer Weiner, about women writers being side-
lined or ignored, particularly by New York Times reviewers. Kudos
for chutzpah (see chapter 5). With degrees from Princeton and
Harvard, legions of fans, and pockets full of cash, she challenges
the relevance of our current standards of literary merit.
But lets just start this chapter out honestly. I dont believe Ive
ever read a more cringe-worthy novel than The Storyteller: A Novel.
It felt wrong on so many levels, and, lets face itits just not good.
Was that the sound of my tent collapsing?
100 THE ULYSSES DELUSION

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

let SDMomChef sleep (March 18, 2013) or Alvera put it down


(June 24, 2013).
Picoult must be credited for this quality, one that she purposely
cultivates. She told the UKs Guardian newspaper in 2007, If you
read the first page of one of my novels, I can guarantee that you
will read the last one. This isnt just social commentary. This is also
about writing good page-turners. I want people to keep reading
(France). Every reader can attest that few writers have this skill;
creating page-turners is no small feat in a world where tens of
thousands of novels are published every year, and every reader has
many to choose among.
So lets check off absorption. Picoult is, hands down, a master
of that popular literary quality.
The Goodreads reviews also evidence that readers relate to this
novel and its characters. As Stacey prettybooks writes:

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)

Joel Rickett, deputy editor of The Bookseller, concurs, commenting


in the Guardian that Women in book clubs relate to [Picoults]
characters. They can ask themselves: what would I do in the same
situation? (France).3 This, too, is a quality Picoult cultivates, aim-
ing for honesty and authenticity in her characters (even when the
plots stretch credulity). Critics often comment on her ordinary
characters in extraordinary circumstances.4 In 2012, she told
Noah Charney of the Daily Beast that her writing routine begins
with a what if question. I wonder, what would I do in that
situation? What if this parameter or that one changed? Eventually
characters start talking to meI can hear them in my head.
In The Storyteller, Picoult gives her readers Sage Singer to con-
nect with. She is, like Picoults typical reader,5 young, white and
102 THE ULYSSES DELUSION

Americana 25-year-old lost soul with cultural references from


a childhood in the 1980s. And, like most humans, shes search-
ing for love and redemption. By the time readers get to Sages
grandmother, Minka, they have practiced connecting and are
ready to take a historical leap to Auschwitz with her. Both Sage
and Minka are sketched broadly, with just a few distinguishing
characteristics (they have scars and thick hair; they like to bake;
oh, and they are both unaware of how beautiful they are), so
readers are free to complete these personalities with their own.
I call them Horoscope Characters, because there is just enough
information, but never too much, so each reader can fit comfort-
ably inside.
In this way, Picoult adeptly cultivates relatability and achieves
it. In fact, many reviewers on Goodreads write directly to Jodi;
some rave about how much they love her, even before they get
to her booksor they close their reviews with that observation.
Clearly, relatability as a literary quality is so strong for Picoult that
it carries beyond the pages of her novels, past her characters, right
to her. This may spring from her understanding of how her nov-
els work as an exchange between the writer and her readers. She
explains:

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

That crowbar, whose fulcrum balances on relatability (or is the


crowbar swinging to crack minds open?) represents what readers
find most engaging about Jodi: She makes you think. That
was the comment I recorded most often in my scan of several
hundred reviews. Related to this quality, the Guardian in the
2007 interview dubbed Picoult The Queen of the Book Club.
She told the interviewer, Book clubs need books they can talk
about . . . Not just books that are fluffy, with happy endings. To
be sure, Picoults books are difficult to classify because they arent
typical bestseller list farenot romance, not mystery, not legal
thriller, not chick lit, though with elements of each. As her literary
agent told the Guardian, Marketing departments struggled with
them . . . They said they were too clever for the commercial market
but werent literary fiction either (France).
Picoult herself sets her writing project up against mainstream
fiction. A she noted in an interview, Most people in America
want an easy read. I call it McFictionbooks which pass right
through you without you even digesting them. I dont mean a
book that has two-syllable words. I mean chapters you can read
in a toilet break. Happy endings. We are more of a TV culture,
and that is a hard thing to go up against for any writer (France).
Particularly hard when your stated aim is to open serious discus-
sion. In one interview she proudly notes that 19 Minutes is taught
as curriculum in over 100 schools in the United States as part of
an anti-bullying campaign (Charney).
I contend that Picoults ability to engage readers has everything
to do with our final two reader-generated literary qualities of dis-
cussability and information. Describing her writing process at a
reading in Minneapolis in 2010, she said that her first step when
embarking on a new novel is to ferret out what people are thinking
about right now.6 What is in the news? What questions are preoc-
cupying Americans? What issues concern us? Once she has chosen
an issue, then she moves on to research. As she told Noel Charney:
I then do a ton of researchand finally, when I know I have the
perfect first line, I let myself start to write.
104 THE ULYSSES DELUSION

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

studied in chapter 5, and, of course, the ones that put Ulysses on


top of that Newsweek list. They are also the qualities that distin-
guished Austens Northanger Abbey from Holts The Legend of the
Seventh Virgin for me back home in Butler.
With Ulysses in mind, then, I begin with complexity. It may be
a function of reading a lot of novels, but (lets use I statements)
I quickly get tired of the same old same old, of anything formulaic.
When I know what to expect (a dark alley plus a blonde girl in a
horror movie equals lots of screaming), I am less drawn to a book.9
Unless theres a new angle, a fresh insight on the formula (as when
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie recently took on the romance novel)
then I lose interest.10 I want a novel to grab my attention and keep
it, to insist I stay focused because I never quite know where its
going. And when the novelist has tossed an impressive number of
objects into the fictional air, I want to be unable to look away as
I watch her juggle them skillfully, and then collect them calmly,
one by one, until her time is up. And the more shes juggling the
better. Critics tend to like big books, ambitious books, books that
reimagine whats possible.
In The Storyteller, which clocks in at nearly five hundred pages,
Picoult has lots of ideas going. It is a romance novel, with the
unlikely pairing of dedicated Nazi hunter Leo Stein and Sage, the
agnostic baker at Our Daily Bread, at the center. Leos story of
their growing attraction is one of the central narratives. And, while
their romance guides the overall plot, Sages story also includes
her big moral decision as another key focus. She has to decide if
she, as the daughter of Jewish parents, will accept her elderly friend
Josefs requestsfirst, to forgive him of his crimes after he reveals
his secret identity as an officer at Auschwitz, and then to help
him die. It is also a confessional, as Sage witnesses Franz/Reiner/
Josefs story of how he became the ogre he was. It includes the
story of one of the victims of his abuse at the camp, who is (coin-
cidentally) also Sages paternal grandmother, Minka. And, thus, it
becomes a story of the Shoah, when the aged Minka tells Leo and
Sage of her younger years in Poland, her familys forced move to
the ghetto, and her time in Auschwitz. Minka also has a journal,
106 THE ULYSSES DELUSION

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

Stone, who objected to the requirement that we suspend belief


about absolutely astronomical coincidences (March 17, 2013),
and Dani who found it hard not to roll my eyes throughout the
whole thing (August 1, 2013). Nahal Toosi pointed out in the
Chicago Sun Times, There are too many coincidences, too many
unnecessary twists and too many quirky characters that distract
more than anything else.
Personally, I want to know if cuddly Josef who taught high
school, coached little league, and loved his wife was, in fact, stalk-
ing Minka, the girl he knew in the concentration camp, just to
hear the end of her vampire story. Are we supposed to believe he
just happened to escape punishment in Germany, then just hap-
pened to end up settling near her in the vast United States, and
that it wasnt massive Machiavellian manipulation that led him to
her granddaughter Sage in that support group? The novel offers
both: Josef does not know about my grandmother; however,
I am the closest thing to a Jew he can find in this town (100),
and, later, he knew who my grandmother was. Maybe he had
hoped Id lead him to her (445). Well, why not go straight to
Grandma then? She was still alive when Josef first accidentally
encountered Sage. And why would he move so close to Minka
then wait years before approaching not her but her granddaughter?
Asking Minka to forgive him would make much more sense; his
actions at Auschwitz affected her directly. Supplying this informa-
tion lets us know what kind of person we should perceive him to
be. Leaving it out is aggravating.
While were at it, how is Josef both cuddly and cruel? If read-
ers are going to trust the narrative in a realistic novel, characters
should behave in reasonably consistent ways. Here, too, Picoult
slips up. In trying to demonstrate that good people do bad things
and bad people do good things, she introduces characters like Leo
and Mary, who are too perfect, and Sage who goes from guilt-
ridden, petty, mousey, and adulterous to empowered, avenging,
twitterpated, and murderous without much transitionand Josef
whose motivations are never consistent or apprehensible. Fully
developed characters command our attention and engage our
108 THE ULYSSES DELUSION

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

approach might be more fruitful. But here The Storyteller fails us


even more profoundly. Ill let the readers take this one. Loralee
on Goodreads, who identifies as half Jewish, writes: I think its
wildly disrespectful for an author of any genre or religious bent to
re-appropriate the Holocaust for their own creative ends. I think
its reductive and dismissive to the memory of the people who
lived through it (February 8, 2014). Bob on Goodreads also
disapproves: I think it is slightly unsavory to use one of the most
devastating horrors in recent memory as a backdrop to a silly love
story. It starts with Sage and ends with Sage, so Auschwitz is a bit
part? (October 29, 2013). And Brenda found that the silliness
of the modern day portion was an affront to the holocaust story
(April 3, 2013).
It is serious business were dealing with for anyone with a sense
of history, but particularly for Jews, whose traditions have spe-
cific prohibitions against representation, and whose artistic con-
structions have been circumspect with any approach to Holocaust
fiction. Writing about it is always an attempt to express the inex-
pressible, weighing the need to witness and remember against the
resistance to replication and the impossibility of reinterpretation.13
Clearly, it is not to be used to access easy emotions or even to
tell a good story. As Elie Wiesel writes in Day, A novel about
Auschwitz is not a novelor else it is not about Auschwitz.
Picoult has described her work as ethical or moral fiction; in it,
she makes a habit of taking on multiple perspectives in the face of
nagging questions, exploring issues like school shootings, contro-
versial medical practices, autism, or gay rights. Four of her novels
have been made into Lifetime TV movies. She often poses power-
ful moral questions, as she does in The Storyteller. But if shes brave
enough to pose the questions, she should be unflinching enough
to follow through on them, to follow the moral ambiguity where
it leads. Instead, she closes her novels down with pat conclusions
arrived at by way of surprise plot twists. These implausible turns
strike me as a cowardly slight of hand, a purposeful misdirection
so readers will look away from what is difficult, then turn, satisfied
and comfortable, toward a pretty conclusion.
110 THE ULYSSES DELUSION

And, in the end, Im left with this assessment, from Alice Short
of the L.A. Times :

Jodi Picoult is a familiar name to those of us who race through the


Hudson News stores at LAX just before we board a plane. We are
smug in our certaintywe know what were getting when we pluck
one of her novels from the pile. Her prose goes down easy, and she
fills her stories with characters confronted by moral quandaries and
life-changing decisions.

Predictable, comfortable, formulaic. Picoults The Storyteller goes


down easy. But down it goes, one traditional literary quality
after the other left in broken pieces around it, cultural sensitivity
another casualty.
In short, Jodi Picoults mastery of popular appeal and her domi-
nance of bestseller lists arent enough to make The Storyteller a
good novel. Discussability is not enough. Absorption is not
enough. The revised standards of literary merit I have been devel-
oping here require conversation with traditional literary judgments;
they demand renegotiation with aesthetics. Just as we had to push
further than traditional literary judgments to appreciate Lolita
fully, novel-readers who aim to be discerning in their choices, who
demand excellence and craft, and who seek the very best and most
satisfying books available, need to go beyond popular standards,
redefining good and best also in light of some of the useful
standards of literary merit we learn in literature class.
CH A P T ER 8

Rereading Rand

When a meandering romance novel tops the Modern Librarys


alternate list of Reader Favorites, can we conduct a thoughtful
analysis of its literary merit while giving its politics their due?

Once, when I was a young reporter in the Monongahela Valley, I


caught sight of a Who is John Galt? bumper sticker on the back
of a beat up pick-up on the drive from Uniontown to Brownsville.
When the truck pulled over at a gas station, I pulled my rusty
Celica over, too, and excitedly approached the driver, hoping to
find a kindred spirit in this strange part of Pennsylvania, two
hours south of where I had spent most of my life. I had read Atlas
Shrugged a few years earlier, after finishing The Fountainhead and
Anthem. In my late teens, I was captivated by Ayn Rands percep-
tion of what it felt like to be exceptional, moved by her demands
that others get out of the way and let people like me succeed.
Now, having just relocated, away from my family for the first time,
I wanted something to feel like home. Oh that, the man said.
It was on there when I bought it.
Take that deflated feeling and stir in a healthy helping of bore-
dom and a dash of feminist outrage. That is what it felt like to
revisit this novel trying to recapture the magic I felt the first time
I read it. The thrill was most definitely gone.
But I cant ignore the way this book commands consideration
in my inquiry into how Americans judge novels. Atlas Shrugged
dominates reader-generated lists of best novelsincluding the
Modern Librarys alternate Readers List of the top 100 novels
112 THE ULYSSES DELUSION

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:

Rands particular intellectual contribution, the thing that makes


her so popular and so American, is the way she managed to mass
market elitismto convince so many people, especially young peo-
ple, that they could be geniuses without being in any concrete way
distinguished. Or, rather, that they could distinguish themselves
by the ardor of their commitment to Rands teaching. The very
form of her novels makes the same point: they are as cartoonish
and sexed-up as any bestseller, yet they are constantly suggesting
that the reader who appreciates them is one of the elect.

That is a fine example of damning with faint praise. Note how


this rejection rests on a dismissal of the popular, the mass market,
and the bestseller, and that it calls on our mutual recognition that
most people (especially young people) are not distinguished.
People who are actually the elect would see that.
And yet, here I sit nodding approvingly. That is, Professor
Konchar Farr, PhD, circa 2014, gets what Cindy Konchar, college
REREADING RAND 113

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

Again, the general literary assessment of Atlas Shrugged is that,


like The Storyteller, it just isnt good. And its true that, using tra-
ditional standards of literary merit, it is difficult to explain why
readers love it. Atlas Shrugged has a basic romance plot, with the
heroine, Dagny Taggart, spending most of the novel longing for
the man who will be her equal, who will fully understand her
and make her life choices meaningful. The narrative voice, though
third person and sometimes omniscient, is generally located with
Dagny, and it enmeshes us in her perspective. We dont know who
John Galt is until she does (until page 643). And through the novels
twists and turns, when she diverts her path of true love through
two lesser men (her Mr. Wickham and Mr. Collins), we are sure
she will find her John Galt/Darcy (who, of course, has been there
all along). The novel signals the centrality of this heterosexual love
story by beginning and ending with it (as do Pride and Prejudice
and The Storyteller and Meg Ryan movies). It kicks off with the
question Who is John Galt? then segues to Dagny on the train,
her head thrown back, one leg stretched across to the empty seat
before her (20), yearning, and it ends with Galt and Dagny on
the highest accessible ledge of a mountain, their hair blowing
in the wind, her hand resting on his shoulder, as he traced in
space the sign of the dollar (1069). As far as the central structure
of the story, there is no innovation or experimentation in Atlas
Shrugged, no attempt to address the modernist dictum to make
it new. In fact, in the realm of romance novels, this one is pretty
typical plot-wise, but it lives on the slightly seedier side of content,
including as it does some fairly explicit love scenes. More on that
(with feminist outrage) in a moment.
As the romance plot unfolds, the heroines longing for a dream
man is described in both philosophical and sexual terms, as the
desire to find a consciousness like her own, who would be the
meaning of her world, as she would be of his. Dagny imagines:

A man who existed only in her knowledge of her capacity for


an emotion she had never felt, but would have given her life to
experience . . . She twisted herself in a slow, faint movement, her
REREADING RAND 115

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

will be anathema to me (it brings out my parenthetical snarkiness).


Even after living with the same person for thirty years, I cant
interpret his emotions accurately from a twitch or a smile. And
when I try to, Im usually wrong. So Im going to go out on a limb
and suggest that this happens only in novels.
In Atlas Shrugged, characters are also revealed unerringly
through a protruding stomach or a flabby face, a steely gaze or
an upright posture. But Rand mines a different tradition as she
delineates Galts appearance. At their first encounter, the novel
goes on for a whole page, reading each of his features, studying
his clothes, and gauging his character from these indicators. Then
comes this description of his body; its classic Harlequin fare (and
its one sentence):

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)

He often glints after that, and he is always hard and angular.


Picture him on the cover of a paperback in the supermarket rack,
his shirt unbuttoned as he clutches the (thin, angular) Dagny to
his metallic manliness.
The central romantic question of the novel, Who is John Galt?
culminates in this description, but Atlas Shrugged uses the same
question to set up a mystery plot, allowing for some suspense to
build as we, with Dagny, try to discover who this enigmatic man
is. It also draws us into the second storyline of three college friends
who decide to change the world by calling for a general strike of
all gifted meninventors, industrialists, business magnates, even
an artist and an intellectual or two. (And, in the end, in the vast
REREADING RAND 117

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

sternness, there was a note of humor, so faint that it vanished if


one tried to discern it (305). A few pages later she reads on his
face precisely the look of a father who watches his sons bleed-
ing on a battlefield (309). Compare this to the description of
the pure (feminine, Orientalized) evil of Ivy Starnes, who tried to
run her familys factory on communist principles of from each
according to his ability, to each according to his need:

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)

The oversimplification of the other guys (including almost


everyone in the novel) as whining rotters, takers, second-raters,
sanctioned victims, looters, servants, and moochers is ungenerous
and distorted.
In one particularly disturbing interlude, a host of train passen-
gers about to be incinerated are described contemptuously, as if
the world will be better without them. One by one, a journalist,
a teacher, a newspaper publisher, a humanitarian, an heir, a business-
man, a financier, a housewife, a lawyer, an attentive mother with
her two children, a sniveling neurotic, and three professorsof
sociology, economics, and philosophyare indicted for believ-
ing incorrect things, making money with the governments help,
insulting industrialists, or claiming nonexistent rights (to a job
or to vote for elected officials). The omniscient narrator moves
from compartment to compartment, car to car, demonstrating that
those who would have said that the passengers of the Comet were
not guilty or responsible for the thing that happened to them are
wrong. And then they all die (558560).6
In sum, by traditional literary standards, Atlas Shrugged is a
clichd and overwrought romance novel with seldom a hint of
Humberts singing violin. As a mystery, it outlasts its build-up;
REREADING RAND 119

even enthusiastic readers trudge exhausted through the final two


hundred pages, from the sixty-page lecture, through the conclud-
ing shoot-em-up scene over the naked body of Galt, and high into
that Rocky Mountain village for a little denoument at page 1,069.
As a modern literary novel, it is oversimplified, repetitive,7 racist,8
self-satisfied, and ungenerous, even cruel. And all this is to say
nothing of its politics. Yet Im certain it was the novels politics
that were supposed to be most abhorrent to me in college.9
It strikes me now that the same appeal that had me poring over
the letters of John and Abigail Adams and reading my American
Literature anthology cover to cover was part of my attraction to
Rands novels. Atlas Shrugged has big ideas about the United
States. And, like many of our iconic texts, it locates these ideas
in The American West, where Ellis Wyant, the Colorado oil man
with an outlaw streak, strides across the landscape of what he calls
The Second Renaissancenot of oil paintings and cathedrals
but of oil derricks, power plants, and motors (234). Long before
we get to the famous John Galt speech, we are prepared for it by
Francisco DAnconias five-page greed is good lecture on the
morality of moneyAmerica the lucrative10:

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

Obviously, this is a fantasy America, easily debunked by a history


class or two (or my familys experience with Andy). And while
the rhetoric is appealing, calling on core US valuesof reason,
justice, freedom, production, achievementthe truth is that
it insults every citizen whose families were in fact conquered or
enslaved (and thats a good percentage of our population), every
worker exploited by an industrialist (and the percentage rises), and
every person so disadvantaged that they dont have bootstraps to
pull themselves up byall in actual America. Yet its a glorious
vision if you can imagine yourself one of the moneymakers.
We have to hand it to Rand. She sure knew how to talk to
American readers.
But sweet talk was not the order of the day when she depicted
sexuality in this novel (hashtag: feminism). Other women who
shared my early affection for Atlas Shrugged confirmed that they,
too, recognized some alarming messages about women and sex
in it, but we let them go, the way we let a lot of things go in
those Mad Men days (which, I might add, lasted longer in the
Mormon culture I occupied at the time than it did in the general
population). Today, these scenes in Atlas Shrugged strike a deeply
disturbing note because our culture generally no longer accepts
rape as sex or brutality as love. We have words now for things like
domestic violence and spousal abuse, and, increasingly, we have
law enforcement trained to recognize them as crimes. Thats not
to say women dont still experience violence at the hands of people
they love. As I write this, its football season in the United States,
and the aggressiveness of that culture regularly bleeds off the field
and onto the evening news. But I no longer accept the casual,
unquestioned place of misogyny in my novels.
That is one of the main reasons my re-examination of Atlas
Shrugged was less than pleasant. The first love scene in the
novel, between Hank Reardon and Dagny, is characterized as
being like an act of hatred, like the cutting blow of a lash encir-
cling her body. When she laughs (with triumph)11 at his desire
for her, He was not smiling, his face was tight, it was the face
of an enemy, he jerked her head and caught her mouth again, as
REREADING RAND 121

if he were inflicting a wound (236). Thats just the beginning


of a pretty explicit sex scene that follows in that fashion, culmi-
nating in a powerful simultaneous (of course) orgasm. Afterward,
he informs her that they are both depraved, loathsome, and ani-
malistic, that he wanted her as one wants a whore (251). Later
encounters have him approaching her with contempt, twisting her
arms as pain rip[s] through her shoulders, realizing that this
was the way she wanted to be taken (252). Midway through the
novel, Hank threatens to beat his wife (because she deserves it),
and then, in a fit of jealousyand homoerotic competitionhe
terrorizes Dagny:

He seized her shoulders and she felt prepared to accept that he


would now kill her or beat her into unconsciousness, and in the
moment when she felt certain that he had thought of it, she felt
her body thrown against him and his mouth falling on hers, more
brutally than the act of a beating would have permitted. (591)

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

relatability, information. This novel works because its engrossing;


it feels like learning wrapped in an engaging, fictional package.
Even the aesthetic things it does wrongthe exaggerated dichoto-
mies, the repetitive prose, the painstaking character descriptions
strike a comfortable note, harmonizing with the conventions avid
readers recognize from popular genre novels. Rands careful use of
the novels forms and practices makes some pretty disconcerting
political ideas come across as homespun truth.
And thats the problem. The result of my rereading of Atlas
Shrugged is that it makes me wish its fans would take the inter-
minable John Galt speech, take Rands objectivist philosophy and
all its related digressions, and exit stage right. They require the
novel form to make them palatable. This novel abuses our practices
of relatability and absorption; it plays on our patriotism. While
I dont generally find fiction with an overt ideology objectionable
(some of my favorite novels are fierce in their advocacy, as these
chapters have, I hope, demonstrated), I do find that when a novel
tips the balance of artistry and ideology in service of the latter, it is
a limited novel. In the end, Ayn Rands Atlas Shrugged affronts its
form. In its eagerness to prove its politics, it is disrespectful of the
generous, democratic, and bighearted American novel.
CH A P T ER 9

Writing Wizardry

Where parenting, playfulness, and pedagogy encounter a wizard


boy and his army and lead a professor to challenge the rampant
dismissal of YA novels in literate American culture.

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 freeway and had to pull off. Embarrassed and frustrated, my


dad, the long-haul trucker, operator of heavy construction equip-
ment, unflappable driving teacher to eight children, surrendered
the wheel to my mom, who drove most of the way to my brother
Pies house in Denver as I squeezed into the back of my Suzuki
Sidekick with Daley and Tanner.
As we took turns reading Harry Potter, I was attuned not just
to our story, but also to every subtle shift in behavior that marked
the impending loss of the father I had known. When he grabbed
Tanners wrist too firmly in a McDonalds restaurant and Tanner
cried, I cried, too, furtively. I had to protect my six-year-old
son from my fatherthe man who taught me to play chess and
rummy, to ride ponies and mini-bikes, to fish, swim, and skate.
One winter he attached an old car hood to the back of his tractor
like a sled and drove us around and around for hours in our snowy
field. Soon the whole neighborhood was grabbing on and flying
off, rolling through the snow choking with laughter alongside my
brothers and sisters and me. That was the dad I remember, full of
fun and playfulness, the kind of parent I wanted to be.
If that trip marked an end to his playful parenting, it was a
beginning for mine. The Harry Potter books punctuate my mem-
ories of the years Daley and Tanner lived with me. Harry often got
them out of bed an hour early so we could read over hot chocolate
at neighborhood coffee shops before school. He got them back and
forth through many more road trips to visit both sets of grandpar-
ents in Pittsburgh. I remember Daley carrying Harry to Girl Scout
camp in her pillowcase and Tanner lounging intently with Harry
on the front porch. When I get out the hammock each spring I
remember cuddling together reading Harry on sticky Minnesota
nights until it got too dark for us to see the pages.
And that time in the desert, when a fierce thunderstorm had
us huddled together reading the book we just couldnt put down,
is one of my most cherished memories. Amazing smells, sounds,
and flashes of lightning (Lumos!) amplified the magical world
that engulfed us inside that little tent. By the time we got to Salt
Lake City, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets had just been
WRITING WIZARDRY 127

released, so we rushed to a bookstore and took it home with us,


reading all the way.
We are all avid readers now; Daley and I delight in our regular
discussions of novels over coffee or on rollerblades, and Tanners
collection of fantasy novels and manga threatens to annex his
room. Because I havent driven a tractor since I left Butler, Harry
served as well as a sled in the field for my kids and me.
He worked for my students, too. A few years ago we called an
English Department meeting to discuss curriculum and invited
students to participate, prompting them: If you could take an
English course on anything, what would it be? They answered
with a resounding Harry Potter. It didnt take much to con-
vince me to teach that course. By then, I had spent nearly ten years
loving these books (almost) as much as they do, and I had just
completed my work on Oprahs Book Club, another extremely
popular (and equally maligned) phenomenon of American liter-
ary culture.
But I didnt anticipate how much these books and the students
who love them would teach me, how the thinking I was doing
about novels and how they live among us in the United States
would be energized by this multi-volume fantasy of a British
schoolboy and his young American readers. Like that summer
road trip, the Harry Potter course marks a turning point for me,
in my career as a professor and in my work as a teacher. I like to
think of it, in honor of my dad, as a return to playfulness.
Two of the students at that department meeting were tradi-
tional-age first years (about my daughters age) enrolled that
semester in my introduction to the English major classRachel
Armstrong and Evan Gaydos. After the meeting, they were per-
sistent (one might even say relentless) in keeping me focused on
developing the course (because they wanted to take it), so they
became my collaborators. We spent hours in my office working on
the syllabus and assignments, trying to make the course demand-
ing and full of challenges, yet woven through with whimsy, like
the books. Less than a year later, there it wasSix Degrees of
Harry Potter, a topics course that would count toward the liberal
128 THE ULYSSES DELUSION

arts core requirement in literature.3 Rachel, Evan, and I knew


Harry Potter and what the books meant to their generation, so
we knew the course would fill to capacity. In fact, after we got the
maximum 28 signups at St. Kates (on the first day of registration),
we added more students from other schools in our consortium
(Macalester College and Hamline and St. Thomas Universities).
We even let in an audit or twoand we still had to turn many
students away. Rachel and Evan, though enrolled in the course,
also served as undergraduate teaching assistants (that was unusual
for sophomores; those positions are generally reserved for seniors
at St. Kates). With all of these factors in place, I fully expected the
course to be successful. And still, I underestimated it. Six Degrees
of Harry Potter became a study in the power of these novels to
affect deeply my American, mainly Midwestern students, quite
a distance physically and culturally from author J. K. Rowlings
Anglo-British wizarding world. It lit up my students in ways I had
never seen. It opened up my studies of the novel to new questions.
And it changed my teaching.
I should point out that I had long been a professor whose work
was, in todays popular academic-speak, student centered. I think
of an essay I often teach, the address Helen Vendler, Harvard
Professor and literary scholar, delivered when she was inaugurated
as the first woman president of the Modern Language Association
in 1980. Entitled What We Have Loved, Others will Love, it
referenced lines from William Wordsworths autobiographical
poem, The Prelude: What we have loved/Others will love, and
we will teach them how. She concluded, in a passage often cited
by literature teachers, that We owe it to ourselves to show our
students, when they meet us, what we are; we owe their dormant
appetites, thwarted for so long in their previous schooling, that
deep sustenance that will make them realize that they too, hav-
ing been taught, love what we love (40). What we love, in her
essay, includes Keats, Yeats, and Dickinson, Milton, Dostoevsky,
and Shakespeare, in addition to Wordsworth. Its a given in the
text that these writers will meet with resistance from our college
and university students. Our job, she suggests, is to educate them,
WRITING WIZARDRY 129

to draw them in with our passion, to demonstrate irresistibly our


love for this canonical literature.
And that is what I had been doing (though a little less canoni-
cally). As is the case with many professors in smaller, liberal arts
oriented programs, more than half of my job is teaching students
who arent English majors, so my work has always been inspir-
ing them to love what I loveGatsby and Janie, Wharton and
Cather. Sometimes it works. Often, despite my obdurate enthu-
siasm, it doesnt. I had one English major, Lennon Sundance
creative, sharp, valedictorian of her classwho could not see what
people found so charming about Jane Austen. All that privileged
aimlessness, the wandering from drawing room to drawing room,
the pointless, dishonest politeness. But, seriously, I thought, what
intelligent woman doesnt love Jane Austen, with her obvious pref-
erence for intelligent women? I knew Jane Austen would work for
Lennon if she just read more of her. I was wrong; Lennon never
took to Jane. To this day.4 It took a few more smart, perceptive,
and resisting readers like Lennon to get me moving in a different
direction with my teaching. Then came Harry Potter.
Paulo Friere writes about a teacher who is no longer merely
the-one-who-teaches, but one who is [her]self taught in dialogue
with the students, who in turn while being taught also teach (74).
It takes about ten minutes of sharing a classroom space with read-
ers who grew up with Harry Potter to see the balance of power
tip, to realize where knowledge resides. My traditional-age col-
lege students know Harry Potter all seven volumesthe way my
children do, the way I know The Great Gatsby, chapter by chapter,
character by character, intimately and thoroughlythe knowledge
of avid book lovers. They know these novels from years of read-
ing and rereading them as they awaited the next book or movie
release. They dont need my enthusiasm; they have their own.
It soon became apparent to me that, though I subscribed to
radical ideas about teachingpedagogies like Frieres that would
have us see students as fully formed human beings in conversation
with us rather than as empty vessels waiting to be filled with our
wisdommy practices had not caught up. If I was going to be
130 THE ULYSSES DELUSION

truly committed to listening to readers, as I set out to be in this


book project, I needed to include these Harry Potter readers.
Far from Vendlers thwarted students with dormant appe-
tites, the Harry Potter students were engaged, eager, and astute.
When I offered them critical tools (six approaches to textual analy-
sis, the six degrees), they knew exactly how to use them to deepen
and expand their understanding of Rowlings stories. One group
read Joseph Campbells Hero with a Thousand Faces, for example,
and with each novel traced Harrys hero journey. Another group
was charged with examining the texts as childrens literature, and
demonstrated to us (carefully and textually) not only how the
characters mature, but also how the issues deepen, the morality
becomes more nuanced and the language more complex as the
series progresses.5 We took the issue of Harry being anti-Christian
head on, as a third group, using Francis Bridgers A Charmed Life:
The Spirituality of Potterworld, led us through a serious moral and
theological examination of the novels and their place in contempo-
rary culture. Groups also studied the texts as fantasy, as (capital L)
Literature, and as speculative science.
The classroom came alive with their projects, presentations,
and papersand their playfulness. Over the three years that
Rachel, Evan, and I taught the course together, we ate choco-
late frogs and drank butterbeer, held a Quidditch tournament,
and followed clues to the Chamber of Secrets in the basement of
our Whitby Hall; we watched a hilarious 20-minute puppet show
of all seven novels, enjoyed a harmonious adaptation of Queens
Bohemian Rhapsody by an impromptu choir of Macalester
Potterphiles, attempted to read tea leaves in a heavily scented
simulated Divination classroom, competed at Harry Potter
trivia, Scene-It and Jeopardy!, and MacGyvered our Muggley way
through the challenges of the wizarding world with only a cell
phone. Though few of the students were English majors, they all
knew what it meant to love novels and to draw deep sustenance
from them.
And the papers they wrote were the kind of writing I had been
trying to inspire for yearsresearch as an expression of curiosity,
WRITING WIZARDRY 131

as deeper engagement in a question that draws the writer, rather


than the empty, grade-grubbing endeavor it so often becomes.
There was a complex argument about Dumbledores trustwor-
thiness and his form of benign authoritarianism, an interroga-
tion of the gendered politics of the golden trio of Harry, Ron,
and Hermione (using Eve Kosofsky Sedgwicks homosocial love
triangle), an exploration of the texts postcolonial positioning, a
thorough study of what made the novelsevery one of them
bestsellers (and how they redefined that category), and a challenge
to Christian condemnations entitled WWHPD: What Would
Harry Potter Do? Their essays surprised and delighted me. Many
of the students wrote well beyond the required 15 pages, and they
continued to revise their papers, with our feedback, even after they
had received their grades. This wasnt writing for class. This was
writing that mattered.
And for you skeptics out there, the novels were up to this level
of analysis. They gave back at every encounter, answering the stu-
dents careful readings with even more careful construction and
craft, taking on moral and philosophical questions without a
patronizing note, delighting in language roots and multiple mean-
ings, referencing the history of our myths and stories, offering up
imaginative worlds that are consistent and believable, and trusting
their readers. Rowling almost never drops the ball, and her novels
never subordinate their medium to the message.
Going through the final papers with Rachel and Evan that May,
I tried to explain how different they were from any set of essays
I had collected in an English class. There was knowledge here, deep
understanding of texts, and passionate writers voices. At some
point, one of us remarked on the difference between these essays
and the ones we had been reading in class, by literature, education,
and popular culture professors. No one in our class, no one who
grew up with Harry, would confuse Voldemort and Snape the way
one scholar had. None of our students would put the marauders at
Hogwarts with Tom Riddle. Rookie mistakes! The scholarship we
read couldnt match the textual knowledge and the long-sustained
familiarity that informed the students papers.
132 THE ULYSSES DELUSION

We decided somehow, audaciously, that we should publish our


own book of essays, including the best ones from the class, then
culling from other papers by college students across the country
there had to be others writing about Harry. We chose an editorial
board of seven. (Actually, I chose six, and then the six added one.
I loved the impertinence of that move. The student editors imme-
diately owned this projectand they recognized the ability in
Kalie Caetano, who is now a digital media specialist for Stanford
University Press.) We put out a call for papers, set some standards
for our review process, then met a lot, argued and laughed a lot,
and ended up with 15 essays that became A Wizard of Their Age:
Critical Essays from the Harry Potter Generation a collaborative
research project in the humanities where the undergraduate stu-
dents did the work of literature scholars.6 And they were serious
scholars and fastidious editors, putting every essay through several
rounds of revisions for content, accuracy, and style. Trust me: you
dont want to get in argument with these women over the Oxford
comma. You will lose (as I did).
You see how teaching Harry Potter led one step beyond what
I had been practicing for years as a teacher and further down
the path of engaging in respectful conversations with readers as
I aimed to do as a scholar? Now place this insight in the context
of the jeremiads against the infantilizing and dumbing down of
American culture many writers have seen in the rise in popularity
of Young Adult (YA) literature since Harry Potter. Popular jour-
nalism repeatedly remarks on the laziness, the prolonged youth of
the Millennial Generationand often blames Harry Potter. Ruth
Grahams condemnation on Slate, Adults should be embarrassed
about reading literature for children, echoes Joel Steins earlier
comments in the New York Times :

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

It shouldnt surprise anyone by now that most condemnations of


YA books quickly elide to a dismissal of its women writers and
readers. Stein characterizes YA as for tween girls and their own
little world of vampires and child wizards and games you play when
hungry. Or the criticism devolves to a disdain for anything popu-
lar, as Ron Charless review of the novels in the Washington Post
does. Perhaps submerging the world in an orgy of marketing hys-
teria doesnt encourage the kind of contemplation, independence
and solitude that real engagement with books demandsand
rewards, he writes. People are reading less, he goes on, because
mass consumption undermines that increasingly rare opportu-
nity to step out of sync with the world, to experience something
intimate and private, the sense that you and an author are conspir-
ing for a few hours to experience a place by yourselves without a
movie version or a set of action figures. Harry Potter trains chil-
dren and adults to expect the roar of the coliseum, a mass-media
experience that no other novel can possibly provide.
Harry Potter books are bad because women and young people
read them. They are bad because a lot of people buy them. At the
same time. At big parties. I dont need to point out whats wrong
with this picture. These are not informed arguments about liter-
ary quality, nor are they evaluations based on clear standards of
literary merit. I promise that most Harry Potter readers are more
responsible than this, and could easily tell you why these novels are
better than Twilight or The Hunger Games even when they enjoy
Twilight and The Hunger Games.
What Harry Potter readers cherish about these novels, what my
student scholars and editors, my children and I cherish, is the way
these novels speak to our imaginations as well as our intellects, to
our passions and our minds. Its the way they draw us in and dont
disappoint us on the second, third, or seventh reading. In this, the
Harry Potter books fit comfortably in the democratic tradition of
enthusiastic novel reading in the United States. Literary historians
have remarked on the similarities between the spirited midnight
Harry Potter book release parties and the stories of throngs of
impatient nineteenth-century Americans waiting dockside for the
134 THE ULYSSES DELUSION

next installment of a Charles Dickens novel. Again, Americans


have, for more than two centuries now, learned from novels,
been entertained by them, and used them for social and cultural
connection. We dive in and get lost together in alternate worlds,
returning better readers and sometimes better scholars and citi-
zens. Most English professors want our students to experience this
charmed interchange for the rest of their lives. As a parent, I cer-
tainly want that for my (now grownup) children.
Harry Potter reminds me that young people in this genera-
tion, like many generations before them, love what pre-Internet
children like me loved, and they can easily recognize excellence.
Despite their more flexible thumbs and frequent sojourns in digi-
tal universes, they are enthusiastic American readers; todays col-
lege students read long absorbing novels thoroughly, insightfully,
and with pleasure. And they continue to do so, years after they
graduate, with their cherished Harry Potter novels stashed next
to Game of Thrones, V for Vendetta, Morrison, or Dostoyevsky on
their bookshelves.
Today when I teach Harry Potter, I more easily bring what I
know as a parent with me than I do in my other teaching. I arrive
ready to find joy in our reading together, ready to respect my stu-
dents preferences, ready to play. But I also bring what I know as a
professor. I suggest reading practices and paradigms, theories and
critical approaches; I provide good questions and a careful plan for
our study. In this situation, with the Harry Potter novels, I have
found that Vendlers model of teaching students to love what we
love misses the mark just as surely as a purely aesthetic evaluation
fails to account for all the ways we read Lolita. While I offer ways to
examine more thoroughly and, thus, appreciate more deeply these
novels my students (already) love, from there, the transaction gets
messy. I honor (and cannot match) the depth and breadth of their
knowledge of the Potterverse, their informed and impassioned dis-
cussion of its details. Harry Potter readers are eager to examine
these novels they grew up with. The real magic for me came in
letting them teach me howhow these novels speak to them, how
they inspire their creativity and spur their critical thinking, how
WRITING WIZARDRY 135

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

We cannot afford to ignore the activity of reading, for it is


here that literature is realized as praxis. Literature acts on the
world by acting on its readers.
Patrocinio P. Schweickart

Heres to books!
Oprah Winfrey

First I took on the role of Columbo, probing, questioning, find-


ing that one more thing that would illuminate the American novel
and reveal the values of its readers and critics. Then it was Hal
Slocumb, running into the gap trying to save the novel from what
weve done with it. In this final section, I imagine bringing every-
one into a room, British detective style, to review our discover-
ies then let you know what I think. And, since now Im Hercule
Poirot, what I think turns out to be brilliantly, dazzlingly true.
Just so you know where were going.
CH A P T ER 10

Redef ining Excellence

If it hasnt already become apparent, I want to profess that I have


loved books all of my life. One of my earliest memories is of want-
ing so much to know how to read, as my mom conducted her daily
story time for my brothers and sisters and me. There we are, the
older four of us on the rag rug in front of Mums green naugahyde
rocker, the younger one or two or three (eventually four) on her
knees or cuddled up to her (Mitchell wedged in by her side, twirl-
ing her hair). D. Boone killed a bar on this tree, she intoned
as we listened, entranced and (counter-productively) wide-awake.
I ached to know how to read so I could keep going when she
stopped. I was blindly jealous of my older brother, Danny, for
starting school before I could.
I told you earlier about the first time I encountered that forest
fire book, of my love-at-first-read. Well, the captivation I felt in
my second-grade classroom, the longing on that rag rug, the sense
of discovery when I first set eyes on Northanger Abbey are all now
a consuming passion. I chose this life, I wrote this book, because
I am committed to novels. You should remember that about me
before I start telling you what to read.
Because I have to do it. Thats the way this book ends.
But first (says Poirot), lets review what we know. One of the
key arguments I have been making is that critics have a role in a
democracy, but its a very different one from the one we have been
performing. As practiced, it is a role founded in the Enlightenment
and played by the privileged. We havent sufficiently adapted our
aesthetic practices to accommodate the diverse interactions and
140 THE ULYSSES DELUSION

the multiple points of engagement that make up our US culture.


In fact, in some senses, the very nature of our standards of liter-
ary merit aims to beat back democracys incursions, elevating, as
those standards continue to do, the lone genius burdened with
his insight and his gift. In reality, our writers are human and fal-
lible; they live in cacophonous communities, surround themselves
with all kinds of people, hang out in busy cafs and bars, often
marry and even have children. The lucky ones learn from talking
to other writers and thinkers, as the Concord transcendentalists,
the modernist expatriates in Paris, and the Harlem Renaissance
writers did. The best of them interact with their readers.
Sociologist Herbert Gans argues that high cultures harsh cri-
tique of popular or mass culture is a plea for the restoration of an
elitist order by the creators of high culture, [and] the literary crit-
ics and essayists who support them . . . who are unhappy with the
tendencies toward cultural democracy that exist in every modern
society (65). And hes right that literary professionals have too
often joined such a resistance to lowbrow and muddled middle-
brow preferences, though sometimes unwittingly, as we continue
to uphold outdated standards of aesthetic merit and too easily dis-
miss the books that most people love. But tossing those standards
is also not the best course of action, as we have seen in the chapters
that precede this. Again, high cultural standards of literary merit
have served a purpose, drawing out some exceptional work and
offering terms for judging the less praiseworthy.
To underline this point, I want to return to that Newsweek
list I started with, along with the three Modern Library top 100
lists I have cited throughout. Looking for three books, my test
novels, (1) Ulysses, (2) Atlas Shrugged, and (spoiler alert) (3) Toni
Morrisons Beloved, I want to highlight (1) critics standards of
excellence, (2) popular preferences, and (3) my own (dazzlingly
true) amalgamated standards of literary merit.
The Newsweek list, you may recall from the Preface, claims to be
more representative and democratic; it includes translations (with
War and Peace at number one), and it covers all time and all nov-
els, not just the twentieth century, not just American literature.
REDEFINING EXCELLENCE 141

Again, it has Ulysses at number three. Beloved comes in at number


20, and theres no sign of Atlas Shrugged.
The Modern Library list, generated by its editorial board mem-
bers who ostensibly employ the more educated standards of the
Academy, puts Ulysses at number one. Neither Beloved nor Atlas
Shrugged appears in this Top 100 Twentieth-Century Novels in
English. While there are four Joseph Conrad novels, there isnt
space for even one novel by a Black women writer. This is not acci-
dental; this list represents how traditional standards of merit, as we
teach them, as we exercise them, skew our ideas of what is good,
favoring writers who look like the ones we have already recognized
as great. Asserting these standards results in the findings of the
annual VIDA count, with an unlikely (and likely unmerited) high
percentage of white male novelists being published, reviewed, and
awarded, as I described in chapter 1.
Because the Modern Library editors constructed their best one
hundred-novel list in 1998, after nearly thirty years of challenges to
academic aesthetic standards, they recognized that there might be
some objection to the very white and masculine results (only eight
women writers total?!). So they invited the Radcliffe Publishing
Course to compile a rival list of the centurys top 100 novels
and published it the next day. Im guessing this list aimed to rep-
resent the voices that challenge the traditional canon, to purpose-
fully include writers of color and white womenbut from inside
the Academy, still guided by trained scholars and critics.
Radcliffes list included all three of my test novels, with Ulysses
at number six, Beloved at number seven and Atlas Shrugged at
92. The top five slots include The Catcher in the Rye, The Grapes
of Wrath, To Kill a Mockingbird, and The Color Purple, all good
books, certainly, and all more obviously popular choices than the
original Modern Library list. There are also many more childrens
and young adult books on the rival list. But I want to know what
standards of literary merit you need to employ to place Catcher
in the Rye before Beloved, or The Color Purple and Gone with the
Wind before To the Lighthouse. Because Im not seeing it. Was any-
one using Nancy Pearls tiny language door? Did anyone value
142 THE ULYSSES DELUSION

complexity or innovation? Its not enough to be inclusive, as


years of feminist canon-busting have demonstrated. We need to
enlarge our project from representation to re-creation, to carefully
revise our standards of judgment and be clear about how were
using themor VIDAs annual list will continue to turn up more
Franzens than Adichies.
Still confronting backlash after the release of the rival Radcliffe
list, the Modern Library realized that readers needed a place in
the conversation. So the editorial board polled popular prefer-
ences and posted the results in a third list revealed several months
later. This list presumably privileges the qualities readers look for
in booksan absorbing story, characters to relate to, something
to talk about, and something to think about.1 And here, again,
we find all three of my test novels, with Atlas Shrugged at number
one, Ulysses at eleven, and Beloved at 31. A lot more genre fiction
mixes in with the classics on this list, particularly science fiction
(lots of L. Ron Hubbard), detective, dystopia, and horror nov-
els. Stephen King has a place. And though there are more women
writers here, there are even fewer writers of color than on the edi-
torial boards original list.
These four lists are in no way scientific or scholarly; they are just
lists.2 I use them here to signify values and attitudes about novels
in our culture. This final Modern Library Readers List, like best-
seller lists, represents preferences, sometimes for entertainment,
affirmation, comfort, or familiarity. It doesnt foreground artistry;
it doesnt aim to highlight the best, only the most popular. And
while the best and the best loved often overlap, selecting them
requires different evaluative processes.3 Again, it is one of the cen-
tral arguments of this book that readers deserve more respectful
engagement with literary professionals and with our conceptions
of excellence, our modes of evaluation. They deserve discussion.
They certainly deserve better than a sneer and a shudder over their
Ayn Rand. Truthfully, I dont want to leave college-student me
(or anyone else) out there alone choosing L. Ron Hubbard.
So, I circle the room, hands behind my back. If I had a pocket
watch, I would fiddle with it.
REDEFINING EXCELLENCE 143

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.

Three Pairs of Shoes


When I teach a survey course of twentieth-century American
literature, I almost always include The Great Gatsby, Their Eyes
Were Watching God, Invisible Man, and Angels in America (Tony
Kushners novel-like seven-hour drama). I add plenty of stories and
poetry, and several other novels in and out of the rotationThe
Awakening, House of Mirth, My ntonia, Passing, The Street, The
Sun Also Rises, Giovannis Room, The Joy Luck Club, and Beloved.
I like defining American together before we try to define lit-
erature and what makes it good. And all of these novels make
it easy to talk about American themescapitalism and getting
ahead, the American Dream of success and its failures, the legacies
144 THE ULYSSES DELUSION

of slavery and the influence of immigrants, our relationships and


identities, language, loss, and laughter. I could recommend any of
these novels as good books, as representing my standards of liter-
ary merit well. But here, in this conclusion, I choose just one to
make a case forToni Morrisons Beloved.
I recommend Beloved as a good book for many reasons, and a lot
of them include the standards I was trained as a scholar and critic
to appreciate. Its beautiful, first of all. The language is unlike any
I have encountered in another novelallusive but plain, poetic but
conversational, laced with pain but elevated and hopeful. I admire
the skill behind that pen, the craft in those sentences. It is struc-
tured precisely, building momentum, knowing when to withhold
and when to deliver. It is polished and complete, ambitious and
challenging. It represents the work of an experienced artist at the
top of her game.
It also does social and cultural work, American work, demo-
cratic work. It demonstrates why slavery in the United States can
never be something to look back on with nostalgia or tolerance.
It was brutal even when it was kindsometimes, as in this novel,
more brutal for having been kind. Morrison brings readers side-
ways into its horrors, until were standing in front of them with
both eyes open, unable to look away. And she does this without
sentiment or shortcuts, without reducing the weight of the realiza-
tions that lie ahead. She never pretends to inhabit the worst places,
to reproduce the most unendurable moments; we go there with
her characters only in dreams and in memories. This novel poses
complicated historical, philosophical, theological, and political
questions, and is courageous enough to leave many of them unan-
swered. It prepares readers to talk with frankness and generosity
about this nation we live in. It humbles and informs.
For all of its artistic and social power, Beloved is also attentive
to its readers desires. It tells a story, rich with historical infor-
mation and meticulous detail, peopled with relatable characters.
For me, relatable in this context means that the characters are
richly drawn, unique (not horoscopes), and, thus, believable,
whether human or ghost, so readers are drawn to them. Again,
REDEFINING EXCELLENCE 145

relatability is not identification. Who would want to endure what


Sethe endures? Who could bear what Paul D tries to shoulder? We
relate to these characters, but we dont reduce, mediate, or usurp
their experience. We walk with them. Thats how relatability is
done when its done well. And Morrison does it masterfully.
And Im not going to sugarcoat how difficult this novel is, not
just tough in its subject matter, but challenging to read. It doesnt
follow the patterns were used to. The chapters arent even named
or numbered, chronologies are confusing, and there is no clear
line drawn between what is real and what isnt. But contesting
our usual patterns, disrupting our realities is part of the work of
this novel, and Morrison does it without condescension, expecting
readers to follow the plentiful cues she offers. Like Jane Austen,
she anticipates having intelligent readers. Beloved demonstrates
how to read it as you read it, if you read attentively. And the com-
pelling plot keeps you turning pages.4
Aesthetically pleasing, profoundly thoughtful, socially and
politically engaged, skilled, challenging, responsive to readersI
cant believe this novel is not number one on every list. This is
what I think an American novel should be; it does what I think
novels should do in a diverse and demanding democracy.
I have a lot more to say, because this is what I do for a living,
and because I have listened for years to smart readers talking about
this novel, even well-informed and discerning readers who dont
like it very much (that would be you, Lauren Olson). Anyway, its
what they pay me for.
What makes professing in a small liberal arts program like mine
an adventure is this next part, though, the part where you talk
back and tell me what you think. And let me just start you off
with a technique I learned when my best friend sold shoes. If the
customer asks for one pair in her size, you go to the back room
and bring out three pairsthe one she wants, another like it, and
one thats completely different, maybe one that you really like and
think would look good on her.
I offer, then, two contemporary American novels about belong-
ing to a place and to a family. Based on all of the standards of
146 THE ULYSSES DELUSION

literary merit I developed in these pages, they are novels I feel


confident I can stand behind, whether you end up loving them or
not. It helps that theyre too new to show up on many lists, though
you may have encountered them in a book club. Youll have to
decide for yourselves what you think of Claire of the Sea Light
by Edwidge Danticat (a little bit like Beloved), and Fun Home by
Alison Bechdel (a graphic novel and very differentand, bonus,
now a successful Broadway musical).
I challenge you, when youre done reading, to consider why you
think what you do, why you like or dislike, admire or reject this
novel. What would you say are your standards of literary merit?
Did the novel I recommended meet them?
Then, please, talk over your ideas, your assessments, with some-
one else who loves novels. There are a lot of us out there.
After that, just one more thing: tell me what you look for in a
novel more generally. What do you mean by good?
Oh, and by the way, what are you reading now? Where are my
three pairs of shoes?
Lets talk about novels.
No tes

Preface: R ansoming a Reading Nation

First, a note on notes: this space is where I indulge my working literature


professor and sometimes take on the language and lineage of my profes-
sion in ways that I work hard to avoid in the body of this book. The Ulysses
Delusion aims to address simultaneously intelligent and perceptive novel-
lovers, like my sisters and friends, and the literary professionals I work
with. Because I am a teacher, I suspect the questions I address here in
the notes will most often draw English teachers and librarians with com-
parable concerns. If you are not similarly nerdy (nerdy, yes, my biologist
friends, but not similarly nerdy), you may want to skip these; or you may
want to join me here as well. Your choice. Be warned, though: I am a
literary theorist (I confess!). Here you are in danger of deconstructions
and discourses, hegemonies, heterocentrisms, and intersectionalities.
Here I sometimes get personal, filling in my intellectual antecedents, my
foundational texts and ideas, with a bit more precision and care than the
broader brushstrokes of my textual arguments allow. I also get snarky,
maybe even silly, if editors dont read endnotes.

1. Since I wrote this Preface, I have had to add my daughter, Daley


Konchar Farr, to my list of people I know who have read Ulysses
cover to cover. She read it, first for an English class at Augsburg
College and again as she spent her junior year abroad at Oxford
(and likely again since), with such joy and engagement that she
almost convinces me to rethink my opinion of Joyces novel.
Indeed, I should confess that my resistance to Joyce may be quite
specific and situationalmore about what he represents than
about how his novel works. I submit as evidence that I regu-
larly approach Gertrude Steins The Making of Americans and
Virginia Woolfs The Waves, both equally puzzling modernist
challenges to the traditional novel, with the enthusiasm Daley
brings to Joyce.
148 NOTES

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

7. I will also discuss standards of literary value in more depth later,


but for now please note that the characteristics I list here are per-
sonal preferences, not professorial pronouncements.
8. My modernist self would add a caveat here, and it requires me
to revive Roland Barthess conceptual dead author. While aspir-
ing to be remembered and significant, Joyce also hoped that his
novel would be literarily and figuratively a novel of the Dublin
streets. The critics report that he wanted everyday Dubliners to
read it. So even Joyce would likely not approve of twenty-first
century Joyce.
Finally, I should note that the following first epigraph is
drawn from Annette Kolodnys 1980 essay Dancing Through
the Minefield: Some Observations on the Theory, Practice and
Politics of a Feminist Literary Criticism which includes a chal-
lenge (a serious throw down, really) to feminist critics to rethink
aesthetic merit, including (I still love this) that dog-eared myth
of intellectual neutrality (163). That challenge, its fascination
for me in the early stages of my career (as one of the first English
PhDs to train formally as a feminist literary scholar), and my
now long-held conviction that it is foundational to the feminist
re-visioning of our profession, has been, through many twists and
turns, the source of inspiration for this book.

1 Come and Get It

1. And speaking of interruptions, I want to note at the outset that


this book has been six years in the making (and counting). Just
in case some of you are unfamiliar with the way the life of a pro-
fessor in a teaching-centered university plays out, let me explain
that during those six years I have been creating and teaching
courses (at least seven a year), advising and mentoring students,
presenting papers at conferences, working on scholarly and insti-
tutional projects, and living a personal life in between. For me,
that has meant that parts of this book had to be worked out in
bursts of earlier, shorter projects along the way. Throughout this
book, then, I plagiarize myself, borrowing liberally from previ-
ous publications that honed my thinking for The Ulysses Delusion
and helped sort out some of my ideas, often in the context of my
150 NOTES

classroom work. Though I make a point of noting where these


borrowings occur, I want to make clear from the beginning that
they are a direct result of writing in the whirlwind that is the life
of a teacher/scholar. Thus, this book, though original, is in some
ways a compilation.
2. My indebtedness to Janice A. Radway for her theorizing about
popular reading dates back to the late 1980s in my graduate school
days at her (and my) alma mater, Michigan State University. This
book, in particular, is deeply influenced by her A Feeling for Books
in ways I can never completely tease out because it has been such a
foundational text for me. Her ideas, about the ways reading func-
tions in our everyday lives, and her methods, of respectful atten-
tion to passionate readers, are now my own in the great tradition
of intellectual genetics.
3. Absorption is not completely absent from critical discourse,
however. It is one of the reader responses that Radway develops in
A Feeling for Books, and Rita Felski, in Uses of Literature, cites a
similar exchange, calling it enchantment. Felski also explores a
version of what Im calling information, which she analyzes as
knowledge, and our studies of relatability and recognition
overlap somewhat.
4. These terms surfaced in the research conducted by my Womens
Book Club class at College of St. Catherine (now St. Catherine
University), Fall 2008, in their individual and group projects and
in our class discussions. I appreciate all these women taught me
through their intellectual energy, their insights, and research and
would like to acknowledge all of them here: Shannon Backlund,
Alex Barnard, Ashley Boatman, Jenna Bowman, Marie-Alix Cave,
Debbi Epperson, Angelique Harbin, Rachael Harit, Kelley Holmes,
Caitlin Hurley, Jennifer Jaroscak, Riely Jesme, Kelsey Krause,
Susan Maldonado, Katie McDonald, Miraf Melaku, Brittany
Pearson, Jeannie Pumper, Mandy Rohde, Laura Schenkelberg,
Carrie Thurnau, Laura Vitzthum, and Jennie Wolvert.
5. This is a brief summary of Nancy Pearls presentation at the
College of Saint Catherine in St. Paul on March 30, 2008. It is also
the occasional subject of blogs and commentary on nancypearl.
com. My several encounters with Pearl in 2008, including a lively
lunch conversation during a Minneapolis library convention,
redirected my thinking about the relationship between capitalism
NOTES 151

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

Chick Lit All Along: The Gendering of a Genre in Youve Come


a Long Way Baby: Women, Politics, and Popular Culture, edited by
my colleague Lilly Goren (University of Kentucky 2009), where
I began to weigh these ideas by writing about them.
10. Both Jan Radways and Joan Shelley Rubins work on the Book of
the Month Club pay careful attention to everyday readers and their
love for books, including the motivation toward self-improvement
noted here (throughout). Cathy N. Davidsons work on the novel
(and her work since) has this same distinctive tone of deference for
what readers love and have loved.
11. Baym notes that the success of the novel comes from its union
of popularity and artistry (44), and asserts the explanation for
the success of the novel lies in the inherent power of the form to
generate reader excitement (43).
12. Davidson points out in her introduction to the Columbia History
of the American Novel that some early critics found the novel
precisely what was required to bring together a nation recently
fragmented by a Revolutionary War and further divided by the
influx of immigrants who did not speak the same language, prac-
tice the same religion, or share the same values as those earlier
arrived (34).
13. I owe this insight to Trza Rosado, who writes in her essay The
Generation(s) of Harry Potter: The Boy Wizard and His Young
Readers in A Wizard of Their Age: Critical Essays from the Harry
Potter Generation (SUNY 2014) of how the increasing darkness
of J. K. Rowlings imagined world across the seven-book series
aligns with the post-911 sensibilities of its maturing readers.
14. The quest for a national literature became increasingly urgent
early in the nineteenth century, when the United States began
confidently exerting its nationhood at the end of the War of
1812. As noted in the introduction to the canon shaping Norton
Anthology of American Literature: During the 1820s . . . a heroic
national myth grew up around him [the American] that asserted
the strength and optimism of the American character and sug-
gested a hopeful trajectory for national literature that concen-
trated on ordinary people. Because the most popular writers of
the day continued to be British, and most American readers saw
themselves as part of a larger Anglo literary tradition, nation-
alists were determined to intervene. The US authors followed.
NOTES 153

According to the Norton: By and large, though, authors in the


1820s shared a sense of the distinctiveness of the American land-
scape, its colonial history, and the legitimacy of its traditions, and
worked to represent the ways that ordinary Americans were com-
ing to grips with their countrys contradictions.
15. Philip F. Guras outstanding study of the first century of American
novels, Truths Ragged Edge (Farrar Straus 2013), also cites indi-
vidual free will, as well as religiosity, as parts of the distinctly
American cast of the nineteenth-century novel.
16. Today Cooper also represents the morally bankrupt strain of
American nostalgia that relegates Native Americans to a heroic
past, making invisible their continuing presence.
17. Lawrence Buells absorbing study The Dream of the Great
American Novel (Harvard 2014) traces the nationalist roots of
the GAN, as he calls it. Using Ralph Ellisons statement The
novel has always been bound up with the idea of nationhood as
an epigraph for the introduction, Buell asserts, the rise of the
novel in the early modern West was roughly concurrent and often
interlocked with the rise of nationalism (10). After laying out the
GANs uniquely American characteristics, Buell finally sidesteps
the question of whether theres enough cultural glue conjoining
the disparate parts of the US nation-state to make for nationally
coherent fictional traditions and soldiers on in his study of 16
proof-texts, eleven by white men (Moby Dick, The Scarlet Letter,
quelle surprise!) and two by Americans of color.
18. In a recent re-reading of Joanna Russs early feminist How to
Suppress Womens Writing (1983), I was delighted to rediscover
in her Epilogue an audacious critique of Moby Dick as full of
discontinuities, jerks, sudden wrenches, gear-changes (125). In
her Aesthetics chapter, a critique similar to Kolodnys of the
idea of objectivity and absolute standards is followed by a few
of my favorite questions: This is a good novel. Good for what?
Good for whom? (118). She concludes that there ought not to
be a single center of value and hence no absolute standards.
Instead, we should recognize a multitude of styles and many
kinds of English (120). And that playful pluralism, that multi-
plicity, characterized the feminist literary criticism that followed.
19. I frequently use Tomkinss Masterpiece Theater: The Politics of
Hawthornes Literary Reputation, an excerpt from Sensational
154 NOTES

Designs, in my introduction to the English major class. Included


in David Richters Falling Into Theory, this essay has become the
foundation of arguments for the study of womens writing of the
nineteenth century. I heard it cited more than once at the 2012
meetings of the Society for the Study of American Women Writers,
for example. Tompkins points out that Hawthorne was appre-
ciated in his time for being similar to the very popular women
writers, Susan Warner and Harriet Beecher Stowe, who domi-
nated the literary scene midcentury and were considered excel-
lent writers. Later dismissed as sentimental and moralistic, these
writers and others like them were the subject of Ann Douglass
condemnation in The Feminization of American Culture and of
Lauren Berlants probing exploration in The Female Complaint:
The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture.
They have been generally dismissed as sentimental and just plain
bad. My integration of Berlants negotiation of the value of the
work of such women writers reappears in chapter 5.
20. I believe that feminist critics Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar still
have the authoritative word on the battle of the sexes in the
development of our modern literary studies in their three-volume
No Mans Land, with its focus on modernism.
21. Among all of the studies and anthologies of the twentieth-century
novel, I find Dorothy J. Hales The Novel: An Anthology of
Criticism and Theory, 19002000, which I cite here, exceptional.
She gathers excerpts from the key theorists of the genre, organizes
them thoughtfully into schools and trends, and then provides an
astute introduction based on her years of teaching novel theory at
Berkeley.
22. Another of my intellectual forbearers is Jane Tompkins, whom
I met at the School of Criticism and Theory at Dartmouth in
1989 but had already been reading for several years before that.
(Remember how teenage girls responded to the Beatles in that
footage from the sixties? Subdue that just a little bitI was 30
by thenand thats what I felt like when I met Jane Tompkins.)
Her book Sensational Designs used Susan Warners Wide, Wide
World as an exemplar for an argument about the important cul-
tural work novels did for nineteenth-century America. I didnt
love Warners book, but I did love, and was thereafter influenced
by, Tompkinss argument. As you will see in the chapters that
NOTES 155

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

26. In a 1996 essay for Harpers magazine, Perchance to Dream: In


the Age of Images, a Reason to Write Novels, Franzen laid out
his understanding of and ambitions for the novel in the United
States.
27. Re: looks like a novelistLast summer, when my (bicycling)
friends and I met at our local Birchwood Caf, where, during the
Tour de France, bikers and foodies comingle, we observed a guy
in a tweed coat (withI promise Im not exaggeratingelbow
patches), which seemed unusual for summer wear in Minneapolis.
He also had dark hair that looked like hed been running his
hands through it in a frenzy of inspiration. We all stopped to
look. I think I know that guy, one woman said. I think hes a
famous writer. But none of us had any idea who he was.
It is also significant that in Michael Schmidts huge com-
pendium of The Novel: A Biography (Harvard 2014), divided
thematically, the section on Portraits and Caricatures of the
Artist features only novelists in this (duck-like) traditionJoyce,
Wyndham Lewis, G. K. Chesterton, Anthony Burgess, Donald
Barthelme. It also begins, delightfully, with an anecdote about
Gertrude Steins rejection of Joyce as the prototypical modernist.
28. Kants aesthetic theory, developed in the Critique of Judgment
(1923), significantly influenced (and was influenced by) modern-
ist thinking about art. Here I call on his definitions of taste: Taste
is the faculty of judging an object or a method of representing it by
an entirely disinterested satisfaction or dissatisfaction. The object of
such satisfaction is called beautiful (286). And genius: For judg-
ing of beautiful objects as such, taste is requisite; but for beautiful
art, i.e. for the production of such objects, genius is requisite (315).
Genius, he writes, is an innate and natural ability that gives the
rule to art (314). Kants arguments develop in that lovely, logical
philosophical tradition, carefully lead from one moment to the
next like a perfect geometry proof, never resting on an unfounded
assertion. Examining how the aesthetic experience differs from
other intellectual, emotional, or spiritual responses, his argument
explores the ways the human response to beauty is unique. But in
order to sort out the idea of the aesthetic, he uses his own particu-
larity (what we might now call invisible privilege) and defines it as
disinterested and universal (I will return to this idea in my analysis
NOTES 157

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

30. In a course on aesthetics I took in graduate school, I responded


to Edouard Manets Djeuner sur lherbe by noting the naked
women and fully clothed men, when I should have been not-
ing the color, balance and light, and the references to previous
paintings (classical nudes via Ingres). I felt the professor actually
pitying me for the feminism that kept me from appreciating the
beauty of this painting. For many observers, to be disinterested
requires us to ignore powerful cultural forces that interest us.
A purely aesthetic response in this tradition, then, requires power
and privilegeor self-erasure.
31. In Hales compendium of novel theory, nearly the entire second
half considers the novel as social discourse, including excerpts
from Frederic Jameson, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Eve Kosofsky
Sedgwick, Gayatri Chakrovorty Spivak, and Edward W. Said.
32. Rhetorical approaches to literature are some of the oldest we
have, more familiar to critics of earlier eras than our Kantian
modernist aesthetic would be. I found fertile ground for my
understanding of the novel in the many (Aristotelian) works
of Wayne Booth which have been punctuation marks in my
education, from my first encounter with Modern Dogma and
the Rhetoric of Assent in a seminar with Greg Clark and Grant
Boswell in 1986. Booths insistence on examining the novel
primarily as rhetorical rather than aesthetic opens the reader-
author-text dynamic in productive ways. I also practice a more
contemporary form of the rhetorical or reader-response approach
in what we now call reception theorywhich is concerned with
the variety of exchanges among reader and text. I still revisit
Booths The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction as an old
friend every few years.
33. To be fair to the classical tradition, affect always concerned the
Greek and Roman thinkers. How an audience reacted to a story
was generally more important than the story itself.
34. In the Investigations section and in the conclusion I revisit
the idea of relatability, but suffice it to say, for now, that relat-
able characters dont have to be lovable or even similar to their
readers. Thats why readers talk about relatability rather than the
less nuanced identification.
35. Again, I would reference the generally accepted truth of the book
industry that mostly women read mostly novels. Estimates I have
NOTES 159

seen fall between 65 and 90 percent of novels bought (and pre-


sumably read) by women, though no one has accurately tracked
book consumption by gender and genre yet, as far as I can dis-
cover. Considering womens interests as special interests in litera-
ture is, thus, logically ridiculous, as well as fiscally irresponsible.
For further discussion, see chapter 5 in Investigations. Bayms
contention bears repeating as well: novels designed to give plea-
sure to the smallest number of people are touted as the present
ages masterpieces (2425).
36. Just in case you have been led to believe that the traditional romance
plot is dead or only to be found in mass-market paperback racks,
note that its the foundation for the success of Fifty Shades of Grey,
which is really just a Meg Ryan movie plot (awkward girl, confi-
dent man, misunderstandings ensue; love triumphs) with a few
sadomasochistic shadows; it is also the underlying structure, with
a few adjustments, of Chimande Ngozi Aidiches 2013 National
Book Award-winning Americanah. And finally, it at least partially
explains the cult of Jane Austen, as I discuss in chapter 5.
37. Mikhail Mikhailovich Bahktins conception of heteroglossia,
anchored in the variety of voices available in the discourses of a
novel, underlines this multiplicity that I find so engaging in nov-
els. In fact, for him, it characterizes the novel, as he explains in
The Dialogic Imagination.
38. The Pittsburgher in me still wants to insist that the standards
need reworked rather than reworking, and I havent lived
there since 1984. Behold, the power of language.

2 Bring Money

1. I want to affirm that these are actual (and repeated) recommenda-


tions from enthusiastic (ardent, avid) readers at book discussions
and lectures.
2. The maxim, Theres no accounting for taste (from the Latin
No de gustibus non est disputandum) has two possible meanings
relevant to my discussion here. The first is that taste is so subjec-
tive that preferences will always be wildly different and idiosyn-
cratic, and, thus, cant be explained or examined. I encounter this
version often in introductory literature classes. Also represented,
with a shrug of the shoulders, as to each her own. The second
160 NOTES

is that disputes involving taste cant be resolved objectively, nor


can they be predicted. The why bother trying is implied. I will
challenge both of these perspectives throughout this book. (The
her own and the trying are the Big Questions for me and the
subject of my incessant inquiry.)
3. Since the 2008 recession, the very real lack of class mobility in the
United States has gotten a lot of press. Joseph Stiglitz, for exam-
ple, reported in the New York Times (February 17, 2013) that,
According to research from the Brookings Institution, only
58 percent of Americans born into the bottom fifth of income
earners move out of that category, and just 6 percent born into
the bottom fifth move into the top. Economic mobility in the
United States is lower than in most of Europe and lower than in
all of Scandinavia. This, to me, is shocking, going to the roots of
American mythmaking, challenging our foundational beliefs (and
my own most cherished values).
4. I feel compelled to add a note here about being the intellec-
tual product of these founding documents. A graduate of The
Bicentennial Class of 76, I won my first writing award for a
newspaper column entitled Tom Paine, PA Patriot. So I have to
confess how much I adore those founding documents for being
more than what they appeared, much more even than what they
aimed to be. I admire them for reaching beyond the moment
and inspiring a democratic progression that the founders (except
maybe John Adams) could never have predicted and probably
wouldnt have wanted. These documents (the Declaration of
Independence, the Constitution, the Federalist Papers, the letters
of John and Abigail Adams) inspired me to be an Americanist.
They continue to encourage my often hard to justify optimism,
though, as I was beginning this project, we shared a moment
of national optimism after electing our first African-American
president (whose campaign posters featured hope). That was
also, however, in the middle of our Great Recession, when many
Americans lost their homes and their jobs.
I would also note that I generally use America and US
interchangeably here, though I wish we had a better word, espe-
cially in the adjectival form, that didnt require me to claim two
whole continents when I aim only for the small part of North
American that is the United States. The French, I understand, are
NOTES 161

experimenting with a version of USian (tats-unien) that would


be great, if it werent so awkward.
5. Joan Shelley Rubins middlebrow challenge to Levines highbrow/
lowbrow categories, her expansion and examination of that genial
middle in The Making of Middlebrow Culture, is foundational to
my understanding of how these brows operate in US culture.
6. This division between morality and consumerism, between spirit
and capital, was also the foundation of Brookss argument. He
blamed the Puritans for encouraging Americas duality, our per-
sistent split affinities.
7. The Culture Wars rhetoric has never gone away, though it is more
often heard today in politics than in the Academy. For an account-
ing of those early academic battles, see Cary Nelson and Michael
Brubs Higher Education Under Fire: Politics, Economics, and
the Crisis of the Humanities (Routledge 1995).
I should also note that The best which has been thought and
said in the world, though often repeated without attribution, is
Matthew Arnolds from his 1869 treatise Culture and Anarchy
(6). Though its foundations and methods were certainly elitist, it
was a call for opening up the best of culture to all Victorians, to
make all men live in an atmosphere of sweetness and light.
8. While high culture condemns popular culture as vulgar and
pathological, Gans explains, popular culture attacks high
culture for being overly intellectual, snobbish, and effeminate,
inventing pejorative terms like highbrow and egghead for this
purpose (55). When the protectors of high culture play at this
game, the accusation of anti-intellectualism is the trump card.
Play it, and watch the panic ensue. Every couple of years there is
a new version of the hell-in-a-hand-basket tirade about American
anti-intellectualism published by another leading intellectual.
Susan Jacobys Age of American Unreason updates a line of similar
laments including, perhaps most famously, Richard Hofstadters
1963 treatise, Anti-intellectualism in American Life.
9. Oprah actually lost money on the Book Club shows, as I noted in
Reading Oprah (77).
10. The next chapter of this story might have Fox Books going under
because of the surprising success of e-booksan ironic twist,
given that their love began with the defunct AOL. I imagine a
Youve Got Mail 20 years later where he is unemployed (but, like
162 NOTES

most disgraced bank executives and business moguls, still really


rich) and she is a popular, albeit whiny, childrens book blogger.
11. As Levine points out, highbrow literature found a well-appointed
home in twentieth-century America, in college and university
buildings and public libraries, especially Carnegie libraries, which,
as I have observed on many a road trip, are often the most impres-
sive buildings in small US towns. The other books got supermar-
ket racks, amazon.com, and chain bookstores.
12. Since I began writing this book, Middlebrow Studies as a
scholarly field in the United States has grown steadilywell
beyond the foundational writers I cite hereBrooks, Greenberg,
and MacDonaldand the texts I cut my academic teeth onJan
Radways A Feeling for Books, Cathy N. Davidsons Revolution
and the Word, Joan Shelley Rubins The Making of Middlebrow
Culture, Elizabeth A. Flynn and Patrocinio P. Schweickarts
Gender and Reading, and Jane Tompkins Sensational Designs.
These earlier works posed questions that prepared the way for
many more studies where what people read for pleasure, enter-
tainment, education, and uplift became the subject of serious
scholarly attention in the burgeoning fields of reception the-
ory and the middlebrow in Anglo-American cultures (see, for
example, Elizabeth Longs Book Clubs: Women and the Uses
of Reading in Everyday Life, Elizabeth McHenrys Forgotten
Readers: Recovering the Lost History of African American
Literary Societies, Nicola Humbles The Feminine Middlebrow
Novel, 1820s to 1950s, Faye Hammills Women, Celebrity, and
Literary Culture Between the Wars , Jaime Harkers America
the Middlebrow, Amy L. Blairs Reading Up, Lisa Botshon and
Meridith Goldsmiths Middlebrow Moderns: Popular American
Women Writers of the 1920s, Nancy Glazeners Reading for
Realism, Erica Brown and Mary Grovers Middlebrow Literary
Cultures: The Battle of the Brows 1920 to 1960 , and Tom Perrins
Remake it New: US Middlebrow Fiction and Modernism in the
Early Cold War). These scholars and others (Yung-Hsing Wu,
Erin Smith, Julie R. Enszer, James Machor, Philip Goldstein)
examine diverse middlebrow texts and reading practices with
depth and insight; I owe much of my understanding of this field
to the vital intellectual community I have found among them.
The ongoing conversation, through their writing and, with
NOTES 163

some, at conferences, has challenged and improved my thinking


over the past five years (but, of course, not eliminated shortcom-
ings I likely hold onto despite their influence). Consider this an
academic shout-out to our Band of Merry Middlebrows.
13. This assertion goes to the nature of hegemony, whether the clas-
sic Marxist conception via Antonio Gramsci allows for the perme-
ability and challenges (short of revolution) of a more postmodern
view advanced by Michel Foucault, as well as Ernesto Laclau and
Chantal Mouffe. Books have been written. Philosophers and social
scientists debate. Literary theorists contribute what we can.
14. Bestseller lists also represent buyers not readers, numbers of
books sold rather than read. Some analysts suggest that book lov-
ers on a budget may pass their copies around more, resulting in
more readers per book. This became a convincing argument for
me here in the Twin Cities when the noticeable proliferation of
front yard Little Free Library book exchanges coincided with the
economic recession.
15. Critics who write about bestsellers often bemoan how unpredict-
able these categories are: who can know why this or that book
shows up on the list? This is just not the case. Korda, for example,
notes: The only thing you can say for sure is that, yes, the ability
to tell a story matters a lot, in fiction and in nonfiction, and hav-
ing something new and interesting to say about familiar subjects
is maybe at the heart of it all (xxvi). Thats a start. But I contend
that the factors that predict success can be assessed and evalu-
ated more carefully and respectfully than this. When professionals
figure out how to converse with readers about the qualities that
make books good, we will more easily recognize potentially suc-
cessful books.
16. These statistics are gathered from reports in the Library and Book
Trade Almanac 2013 (formerly the Bowker Annual ) and from
regular reporting of those numbers in the New York Times.
17. For a fuller discussion of Kant, see chapters 1 and 3.
18. While there is condemnation to be leveled about the snobbery in
the way standards of literary merit have been deployed, there really
was something distinctively different about Northanger Abbey,
something more serious and sharp that I recognized immediately
and knew I had never seen the like of in a romance novel. It had
to do with some of the qualities that traditional literary analysis
164 NOTES

trains us to recognizecomplexity, depth, restraint, structure,


and craft. More on this, also, in the Investigations section.
19. In his discussion of Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary
Canon Formation, John Guillory uses the phrase the inevitabil-
ity of the social practice of judgment (xiv) as a way into his argu-
ment that access to cultural capital guides our literate choices in
the United States. I have held onto this phrase as a way of remem-
bering that all readers exercise forms of judgment that make sense
in their cultural contexts.
20. The ever-increasing number of unvaccinated children of privi-
leged, educated parents in the US speaks to the danger of this
distrust.
21. Adam Savage and Jaime Hyneman are special effects experts and
science geeks who have hosted Mythbusters for the Discovery
Channel since 2003.
22. The language of this sentence references (and is an homage to)
Martha Gellhorn, one of the most famous war correspondents
of the twentieth century and a fierce advocate for peace. In her
introduction to The Face of War (first published in 1959), she
writes, I will not be herded any farther along this imbecile road
to nothingness without raising my voice in protest. My NO will
be as effective as one cricket chirp. My NO is this book (4).

3 Reading L OL I TA at St. K ates

1. Nafisis collusion with neo-conservatism and Western interests


(specifically the CIA and Paul Wolfowitz) was widely discussed
in the press (from 20032007), most notably for academics in
a cover story in Chronicle of Higher Education (October 13,
2006) and in the Boston Globe (October 29, 2006). Both focused
on an article published in the English-language paper Al-Ahram
out of Cairo, an attack on Nafisis work by Hamid Dabashi,
Professor of Iranian studies at Columbia University. Dabashi
argued that Reading Lolita in Tehran was partially responsi-
ble for cultivating the US (and by extension the global) public
opinion against Iran. (http://www.boston.com/news/globe
/ideas/articles/2006/10/29/book_clubbed Retrieved July 28,
2014.) At our book discussion at St. Kates, several students (most
NOTES 165

notably Jordan Arndt, a 2011 graduate, outstanding Honors stu-


dent, international studies major, and later a Fulbright Scholar)
arrived with pages of proof of Nafisis hidden agenda and insisted
that book group consider Reading Lolita with that context
(See what I mean about women and justice?).
2. I want to believe that these critics mean its a love story about the
novel, that the author loves art and loves novels. Yet, this nuance
never suggests itself on the back cover.
3. Nabokov famously stated, I am probably responsible for the
odd fact that people dont seem to name their daughters Lolita
any more. I have heard of young female poodles being given that
name since 1956, but of no human beings. (Jane Howard, The
master of versatility: Vladimir Nabokov: Lolita, languages, lepi-
doptery, Life, November 20, 1964, 61-.
4. Quoted by Norman Page, editor of Routledges Vladimir
Nabokov: The Critical Heritage, Psychology P, 1997 (9394).
Trilling engaged repeatedly with this novel, particularly when it
first came out in 1958. He interviewed Nabokov on television,
on the program Close Up for the CBC (available on YouTube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ldpj_5JNFoA) and wrote
an enthusiastic review in Encounter, both in October 1958.
5. Calling on the common knowledge that World Book Encyclopedia
used to represent, I will cite Wikipedias claim that the novel
gained classic status almost immediately after its publication
in the United States in 1958. Again, the Modern Librarys 1998
list of the 100 Best Novels in the English language (the one that
celebrates Ulysses as number one) places Lolita at number fouras
does the Newsweek list I began this study with.
6. Howard (See f3).
7. Note to feminist readers: if you have been resisting reading Lolita,
I hereby give you leave to accept this discussion as permission to
put it off a bit longer and read more books on your list of women
writers. Youre welcome.
8. A formalist approach is also political, of course, as feminist and
Marxist critics have argued for decades; it is generally invested in
conservative readings that identify and preserve high culture and
uphold structures as they are. To see a formalist reading as apoliti-
cal is to miss the underlying (invisible) privilege.
166 NOTES

4 Oprahs Book Club and the


Summer of Faulkner

1. An earlier version of this essay, Faulkner Novels of Our OWN:


Oprahs Middlebrow Book Club Meets the Classics appears in
Mississippi Quarterly 66.1 (a special issue on Oprahs Summer of
Faulkner).
2. Although Oprah is one of those cultural icons known by a single
name, my practice is to use Oprah to refer to her television per-
sona, Winfrey when referencing the thinking, choosing person,
and Oprah! for the TV show.
3. For further discussion of Franzenfreude see chapter 1 in this
volume and Chapter 4 of Reading Oprah.
4. I still cant get over the sheer vastness of the numbers behind
Oprahs Book Club success. Nothing we know in the book indus-
try compares with it. Truly millions of people watched the shows,
and presumably many of the millions who bought the books also
read them. I discuss the extent of this success, with actual num-
bers, in the context of the Franzen critique and of the publishing
industry, in the beginning of Chapter 4 of Reading Oprah.
But here let me insert an anecdote. I interviewed Cheryl Strayed
in St. Paul a few months after Wild was chosen for Oprahs Book
Club 2.0. As we talked across a table in a local caf, I asked her
how that choice had affected her book sales. She asked me to pass
her my notebook and said, Here, Ill show you. She turned
the notebook sideways and started at the bottom of the page.
The book, she said, did well as soon as it was released. It made
it the New York Times Bestseller List for nonfiction, and was sell-
ing consistently. The pencil mark started flat across the bottom
of the page. I would have been overjoyed to stay there. I would
have been as successful as Id dreamed of being. Pause. Then
Oprah picked it. The pencil line leapt to the top of the page and
continued across. May, June, July, August, it just continued.
Phenomenally more successful than I ever could have imagined.
No one else can do that, she told me. No one but Oprah.
This huge influence, I should remind you, was when Oprahs
Book Club was no longer on network TV, when her viewership on
OWN was minuscule by comparison.
5. Massive Open Online Courses. Though there were precursors
as soon as there was an Internet, most sources place the first
NOTES 167

MOOC in 2007. Online, 2012 was often dubbed The Year of


the MOOC.
6. Middlebrow, again, is linked to middle-class, as I outlined in
chapter 2, but it also has distinct characteristics, delineated metic-
ulously by the scholars of the middlebrow I cited earlier (2.f12).
In the context of the methods and aims of Oprahs Book Club,
the following often-cited qualities are relevant: aspirational, ref-
erencing the American bootstraps philosophy and the unrelent-
ing desire of those in the middle for self-improvement (thus, also
educative or information-filled); consumerist, again that sound of
clinking coins that clashes with aesthetic sensibilities; sentimen-
tal, including unashamed appeals to emotion and an implication
of less rigorous habits of mind; and, of course, feminine (generally
in a bad way).
7. For a more in-depth discussion of the Book Clubs history, see
Reading Oprah, Chapter 1, parts of which I have referenced
here.
8. Franzen, shortly after he was chosen to appear on Oprahs Book
Club, in an interview posted on powells.com (October 10,
2006).
9. It wasnt just Franzen. The US has a history of its high culture
being intolerant of popular culture, artists disdaining audiences,
as I outlined earlier, but Herbert has a fine, concise explanation
for this, one that works to describe what happened on Oprah!
He proposes that Higher culture is creator-oriented and its aes-
thetics and its principles of criticism are based on this orienta-
tion, thus making the readers values almost irrelevant and
protecting creators from even the idea of an audience. On the
other hand, he argues, The popular arts [viz. Oprah!] are, on
the whole, user-oriented and exist to satisfy audience values and
wishes. Thats why, in his estimation, high culture needs to
attack popular culture and particularly to condemn its brazen
borrowings from high culturebecause borrowing transforms
that content into a user-oriented form. So high culture draws
clear aesthetic lines, calling the popular low quality, its creators
hacks, and its audience culturally oppressed people without
aesthetic standards. He concludes:
If high culture is to maintain its creator orientation, it
must be able to show that only it is guided by aesthetic
168 NOTES

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

aunt, or sister in a book club. Some excellent scholarly work has


been done on these groups and their influence on American
culture, including most notably Elizabeth Longs Book Clubs:
Women and the Uses of Reading in Everyday Life (Chicago
2003) and Elizabeth McHenrys Forgotten Readers: Recovering
the Lost History of African American Literary Societies (Duke
2002). Lauren Berlants The Female Complaint is also helpful in
analyzing the work that womens texts in the sentimental tradi-
tion performed for the women who loved them. While appear-
ing and functioning as conventional, these texts, she argues,
were a site of negotiation for the women who read them. And
loving these forms, women worked them so that individuals
and populations [could] breathe and thrive in them (3), as
I quote her in the epigraph to this section. Again, like Radway,
Berlant respectfully interrogates the marginalized traditions
that are her subject and finds in them practices that (re)define
American culture.
14. I discuss Morrisons visits to Oprah! more extensively in Reading
Oprah, Chapter 2, and The Bluest Eye segment in particular in
Chapter 3, The Elegant Balance.
15. Oprah did pack up the talk show and take it to a classroom at
Princeton for the Book Club segment on Paradise, which she kept
calling a class. While the group of gathered readers (class-sized,
not book-club sized, including Oprah pal Gayle King) pushed
Professor Morrison for final answers, she kept deflecting, insist-
ing that, I didnt want to write an essay. I wanted you to partici-
pate in the journey. As I write in Reading Oprah:
And in that spirit, she never offers an explication of the
novel, a final reading that would allow the twenty-two Book
Club participants or the millions in the TV audience to say,
I get it. Now lets put the book away. Instead, she insists
that she wouldnt want to end up having written a book
in which there was a formula and a perfect conclusion and
that was the meaning and the only meaning. There should
be several. If its worth writing, its worth going back to
later. She also concedes that she rarely teaches her own
work because she doesnt want to impose on students
who want a fundamental and final readingas though I
had it. (48)
170 NOTES

In short, there were no lectures, no definitive answers in the


Paradise class. This might have turned out quite differently with
another writer or literature professor.
16. For publishing statistics I rely on the Publishers Weeklys year-end
wrap-ups, printed in the library reference resource, Library and
Book Trade Almanac 2013 (formerly the Bowker Annual ).
17. There are, of course, many prominent Americans who have rec-
ommended books, the latest being Comedy Centrals Stephen
Colbert (now on CBS), who really can deliver the Colbert
bump to a novel, as he demonstrated for Hachette (not Amazon)
authors Edan Lepucki (California) and Stephan Eirick Clark
(Sweetness #9) in the summer of 2014. Colbert and Jon Stewart
are notable for being two talk show hosts who, like Oprah, took
books and their ideas seriously, often devoting nearly half their
time to interviews with authorseven though both appeared on
cables Comedy Central rather than on serious network TV.
Though I hope for the best, there is little chance that Colbert
can take his book-centered approach to the Late Show, where the
monologue-celebrity chat-musical guest format is steeped in tra-
dition. See Alter.
18. From her book Reading Up: Middle-class Readers and the Culture
of Success in the Early Twentieth-Century United States (Temple
2012).

5 Lost in a Chick Lit A UST EN L A N D

1. If you havent yet encountered the Lizzie Bennet Diaries (LBD)


and you are any kind of Jane Austen fan, run, dont walk, to the
nearest computer and begin watching this 100-part YouTube series
of vlogs: www.pemberlydigital.com. Hank Green and Bernie
Sus insightful adaptation of Pride and Prejudice in real time ran
from April 2012 through March 2013, and was the hands-down
favorite of Parrins and my text selections. It was also the first
YouTube series to win a Primetime Emmyfor outstanding cre-
ative achievement in interactive media. Its refiguring of Lydia and
her relationship with Elizabeth is especially insightful; Lydia has
her own spinoff vlogs.
2. Exercising my aesthetic discernment, I would teach Jo Bakers
Longbourn (2013) or P. D. Jamess Death Comes to Pemberly
NOTES 171

(2011), if I had to do it again, rather than the zombies, Lost in


Austen (the book), or Austenland though the zombies were a
great inroad to discussions of deconstruction.
3. Ferris and Young introduce the delightful phrase urtext of chick
lit, but for Bridget Joness Diary. The endurance and insistence
of this love plot is examined engagingly in Lauren Berlants The
Female Complaint, where she argues that a womens culture in
the United States survives in part because of this story, one that
helps to construct an intimate public space, of gestures, epi-
sodes, and other forms of fantasy improvisation, where feminin-
ity is refigured and reasserted in a vast market in such moments
of felt simplicity (7). See particularly Chapter 5, examining
Now, Voyager.
4. Portions of this chapter are extracted, reworked, or quoted directly
from a study I did of chick lit for my colleague Lilly Gorens col-
lection Youve Come a Long Way Baby (Kentucky 2009) (see f1,
chapter 1).
5. Referencing Jane Tompkinss early work in feminist literary criti-
cism, particularly Sensational Designs see f21, chapter 1.
6. Sex and the City fans wouldnt settle for that in the TV series or
the films, where Big and Carrie had to end up together. And a
wedding had to happen, not matter how painfully prolonged the
prelude.
7. I first accessed this Wikipedia explanation in 2008 as a way of
understanding how our culture generally defined chick lit.
I accessed it again on September 22, 2014. Six years later, the
quote now reads: Publishers continue to push the subgenre
because sales continue to be high. Like its a surprise or some-
thing. Women buy novels directed at them. Alert the media.
8. In addition to the argument of chapter 2, my thinking about the
contrast between commercially successful and critically respected
novels first showed up in Reading Oprah (SUNY 2004) and in
the introduction to The Oprah Affect: Critical Essays on Oprahs
Book Club (SUNY 2008), which I co-wrote with Jaime Harker.
It continues with a study of consciousness-raising novels and
feminist print culture (This Book is An Action, UI Press 2015),
also co-edited with Jaime. My analysis owes much to Jaimes
thought-provoking questions and her depth of understand-
ing about the tradition of the middlebrow novel in the United
172 NOTES

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.

6 What I Learned from T HE (Book) G ROU P

1. They were 1, 2, and 3 in summer 2012, and have, as of September


21, 2014, clocked 124 weeks on the New York Times Bestseller
List. Note: they climbed up the list again in early 2015 after the
release of the first of an impending series of Fifty Shades films.
2. They did ride to success on the coattails of the popular novels of
the Twilight series, beginning, as they did, as Twilight fan fic-
tion. This may also explain why the Fifty Shades characters are
underdeveloped: James began her project with already existing
characters.
3. Elizabeth Day in her essay in The Guardian, November 28,
2009.
NOTES 173

4. See Anna Creadicks fascinating study of the pursuit of nor-


mal in postwar American lifePerfectly Average (University of
Massachusetts 2010).
5. See chapter 1 and Nina Bayms description of how novels affected
early readers, p. 34.
6. The VIDA count from 2010 at vidaweb.org.
7. As feminist critics (Baym, Davidson, Tompkins, Gilbert and
Gubar, Armstrong) have argued for years, including recently
(and quite forcefully) my colleague Jaime Harker in America the
Middlebrow.
8. Again, referencing Jane Tompkinss idea of cultural work and
the respectful studies of everyday readers by Cathy N. Davidson
and Jan Radway (see f19, chapter 1).
9. This quote comes from the introduction to This Book is an Action:
Feminist Print Culture and Activist Aesthetics, edited by Jaime
Harker and me (UI 2015).
10. Kathryn Thoms Flannery writes powerfully about the centrality
of literacy and its systems and structures to the feminist move-
ment in Feminist Literacies, 19681975 (UI 2005). In it, she
revisits Adrienne Richs idea of a university-without-walls
where women would have unfettered access to education. It
could be said, Rich adds, that [such a] university exists already
in America, in the shape of women reading and writing with a
new purposefulness, and [in] the growth of feminist bookstores,
presses, bibliographic services, womens centers, medical clinics,
libraries, art galleries, and workshops, all with a truly educational
mission. Quoted in Flannery (6) from Richs Toward a Woman-
Centered University, 1975.
11. You may also recall that a key aim of Friedans work was to name
the problem that has no name.
12. Flannery argues from Jamesons Reification and Media in Mass
Culture (1979) that some texts have utopian potential to
intervene in contemporary culture if seized by individuals and
marginalized groups. But he also suggests that this potential is
possible only to the extent to which these forms . . . have not yet
been fully penetrated by the market and the commodity system
(32). See hegemony in f13, chapter 2.
13. Hogeland, too, sets aside aesthetic questions, focusing instead
on the cultural work these novels perform: This study does not
174 NOTES

attend to questions of literary quality; whether novels like Fear of


Flying or The Womens Room are good novels is far less interest-
ing to me than the ways these novels shaped and were shaped by
feminist ideas and discourses (x).

7 Storytelling with Jodi Picoult

1. Debuting at number one means that readers have already bought


the book on the strength of Picoults name and reputation, with-
out respect to the qualities of the novel itself.
2. Goodreads is a social networking site focused on books, where
users can catalogue the books they have read, review the ones
they have finished, and create groups for book suggestions and
discussion. Created in 2006, it was bought by Amazon in 2013.
Just before that purchase, Goodreads announced that it had
20 million members; its membership had doubled in the previ-
ous 11 months. Today, that number was up to 30 million (goo-
dreads.com/accessed September 27, 2014). Its stated mission is
to help people find and share books they love. Its founder,
Otis Chandler, writing in the About Us section of the website,
introduces his idea of book recommendation: One afternoon
while I was scanning a friends bookshelf for ideas, it struck me:
Id rather turn to a friend than any random person or bestseller
list. As you enter the app, you are greeted with a blank page with
only this line: Meet your next favorite book.
3. Again, relatability is not the same as identification for the
readers I have interviewed. As with the Nazi character in this
novel, avid readers appreciate when they are required to stretch to
access a character they wouldnt readily identify with. In this way,
I find that relatability allows for difference and engages empathy
more than identification might. See the discussion of Beloved in
the conclusion.
4. I encountered this phrase repeatedly in reference to Picoults
novelson Goodreads, on library recommendation lists, in inter-
views, and in her own marketing material.
5. I couldnt find sales statistics that go to this level of specificity
the age of the buyerbut, in my experience, the audiences that
turn out for her readings skew younger than most, and the given
wisdom about her novels among librarians and booklovers seems
NOTES 175

to be that they border on YA or that they are easy transitions


from YA to Adult fiction for many young women. More on that
in chapter 9.
6. I attended this reading on March 12, 2010 with students in my
senior seminar on The American Bestseller, who I compelled
to attend (a few of them were seriously and volubly disgruntled
at the prospectnot to name names, but: Kate Glassman, Trza
Rosado, and Maddie Edwards). It was scheduled to take place at
the Barnes and Noble Bookstore in the Galleria Shopping Center,
but it had to be moved to the South View Middle School audito-
rium in Edina to accommodate the huge turnout, including many
apparently high-school-aged fans.
7. My novel-reading, botanical artist, biologist friend (and Renais-
sance woman) Lynne Gildensoph, who read this manuscript for
me more than once, understatedly points out that even when she
used My Sisters Keeper for ethics discussions in her Biology classes,
the students noticed that the ending is not very realistic.
8. Perhaps in grudging recognition of her popularity, some of these
publications have included interviews with Picoult or news sto-
ries (or condescending notes) about her success, but no reviews
of her books. See, for example, Andrew Goldmans brief Picoult
interview (Febraury 8, 2013) for the New York Times Magazine
on mobile.nytimes.com or Carole Burnss in the Washington Post
(February 26, 2013) at washingtonpost.com. But despite several
web searches with increasingly creative combinations of terms,
I could find regular reviews of her work only in Entertainment
Weekly.
9. I should probably confess that in breaks from my final revision of
this manuscript, I was catching up on an iconic feminist pop cul-
ture phenomenon that I had missed in a haze of child rearing in
the late ninetiesBuffy the Vampire Slayer. References may have
crept unnoticed into this text. But not here. There was no scream-
ing from Buffy.
10. How refreshing was it to get to the end of Americanah and real-
ize that its story arc had come back around to romance, to happily
ever after, after the complexities of the plot had gone off in many
different directions? The narrative was so fascinating that I actu-
ally forgot it began as a love story. That wait, I know this story
feeling at the end was priceless.
176 NOTES

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

novel, its generally acceptable to be an up-from-nowhere Irish


immigrant but not a foreigner.
5. It also brings to mind the fascist fascination for machines. At one
point Dagny wonders why she had always felt that joyous sense
of confidence when looking at machines?
In these giant shapes, two aspects pertaining to the inhu-
man were radiantly absent: the causeless and the purpose-
less. Every part of the motors was an embodied answer to
Why? and What for?like the steps of a life-course
chosen by the sort of mind she worshipped. The motors
were a moral code cast in steel. (230)
6. For me, this stoops to a level of heartlessness that betrays the
novels better nature, its empathy, its democracy. While Atlas
Shrugged engages us with Dagny and the good guys (note to
self: good name for a metal band), it also invites us to share their
disdain for most of the world (all of Europe and most of South
America) because it is against them.
7. Like her brothers always pale, fleshy face, Dagnys blouse is con-
tinually thin and white, and Roark and Galt inevitably hard
(wink, wink).
8. It is racist in its subtle assertion of Aryan superiority, in its eugenic
undercurrents, in the almost complete absence of people of color,
and, most of all, in the absolute whiteness of its heroes.
9. Jennifer Burnss intellectual history of Rands novel, Goddess of
the Market (Oxford 2009), is the best, most balanced study of its
politics that I found.
10. Rand also reminds us that the dollar sign represents the initials of
the United States. I forgot that tidbit. But if the Oxford English
Dictionary and Wikipedia are correct, the historical evidence sug-
gests that the symbol has Spanish origins, and Rands story is only
a plausible alternative.
11. Her triumph being that Reardons desire can reduce her to her
body, and that you want it to serve you is the greatest reward I
can have (236).
12. I also found the novel disturbingly anti-intellectual. Not only
does it constantly misrepresent or ridiculously reduce opposing
ideas, but it also despises all things academic: Wesley Mouch
came from a family that had known neither poverty nor wealth
nor distinction for many generations; it had clung, however, to
NOTES 179

a tradition of its own: that of being college-bred and, therefore,


of despising men who were in business (496). Reardon laments
the soft, safe assassins of college classrooms who, incompetent to
answer the queries of a quest for reason, took pleasure in crippling
the young minds entrusted to their care (910).
13. Both of these last accessed on October 25, 2014. By comparison,
recall that Picoults bestselling The Storyteller totaled 66,000 rat-
ings on Goodreadsabout a third of Atlas Shruggedsbut eight
times more than the most successful of Rands nonfiction.
14. I use the term superhero here in homage to my colleague and
friend Dana Nelson, who examines the deeply unAmerican desire
to rely on a powerful politician to save us, to rescue us from the
messy work of democracy, in her 2008 book, Bad for Democracy.
As she explains, putting the president at the center of democracy
and asking him to be its superhero works to deskill us for the work
of democracy. And, it argues that the presidency itself has actually
come to work against democracy. Rands similar move, arguing
that the nation should be dominated by a few superior industrial-
ists, is, to my mind, equally unAmericanand dangerous.

9 Writing Wizardry

1. A nod to Evan Gaydos, who will appreciate that I chose chapter 9


(three threes) for Harry.
2. Again, because I have been writing this book for six years,
I have been working it through in all of my writing as I taught,
researched, mentoredand parented (see f1, Chapter 1). A ver-
sion of this chapter appeared first as part of the introduction,
written with my daughter, to A Wizard of Their Age: Critical
Essays from the Harry Potter Generation (SUNY 2015).
I also feel compelled to underline here the interplay of parent-
ing and professing that, in this situation, made me better at both.
This doesnt sound like much of a revelation, but in my profes-
sion, still dominated by gender- and class-based assumptions of
success, having a child can be an embarrassing indulgence, one
we keep quiet and work hard not to let affect our dedicated,
scholarly lives (and having two is a dangerous high wire act).
Part of the point of this chapter is, as Ursula Le Guin famously
argued, that the hand the rocks the cradle writes the books
180 NOTES

(NYTimes Book Review, January 22, 1989). My students often


point out that Rowling, too, enjoyed this benefit, living with a
daughter Harry Potters age as she wrote, and addressing the
novels so effectively to maturing readers. She got it right, at least
in part, they argue (with evidence from her writings), because she
was living it as a parent.
3. Yes, this means that for some nurses and teachers and social work-
ers, biology, art history, and philosophy majors, the only exposure
to a literature class they would get in college was Harry Potter.
That, I promise, is some peoples worst nightmare. This inves-
tigation is about demonstrating how wrong that assumption is.
For further evidence, see A Wizard of Their Age especially the
two essays written by nursesHarry Potter and the Wizards
Gene: A Genetic Analysis of Potterworld by Courtney Agar and
Julia Terk and A Nursing Care Plan for Tom Riddle by Kari
Newell.
4. Lennon got an MFA in creative writing and is now a working poet
who adjuncts at St. Kates. Still intensely intelligent, tattooed, and
unconventional, she is even better as a colleague than she was as a
student. And thats saying something.
5. One of the students in that childrens literature group, Jameson
Ivey, is now a middle school teacher, and she just emailed me to
say that she had started an after school group for her students
focused on Harry Potter.
6. SUNY 2015. The student editors included Rachel and Evan,
Kalie, Kate Glassman, Jenny McDougal, Sarah Wente, [Oxford
comma] and Trza Rosado.

10 Redefining Excellence

1. ARDI, again, is my shorthand for readers standards of literary


merit, as delineated in Chapter 1. Also, see f66, chapter 8 on Ayn
Rands place at the top of this Readers List, and some additional
insight on a few other booklists generated on the Internet.
2. A comparative version of the Newsweek list is available at www
.alistofbooks.com/lists/10-top-100-books-by-newsweek or at
the Newsweek website. The three (and more) Modern Library
lists, in a very accessible, side-by-side format, can be found at
modernlibrary.com/top-100.
NOTES 181

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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Inde x

absorption, as a quality readers authors


admire. See also ARDI gender and, 22, 234, 71, 956,
Freedom (Franzen), 22 1412 (see also men; women)
Jodi Picoult and, 1001, 110 race and, 71, 1412
aesthetic merit
commercial success, compared, Baym, Nina, 1415
18, 801, 83, 869, 88 Beloved (Morrison), 140, 141,
early American literary critics 142, 1445
and, 1618 bestseller lists, 8, 38, 42, 445,
Kants aesthetic theories and, 73, 85, 99, 104
201 Book Lust (Pearl), 7
standards and gender, 23, 24, 25 book reviews
Aldrich, Beth Streeter, 3, 11 bestseller lists compared with, 8
Americas Coming of Age male and female authors, 224,
(Brooks), 34 912
Anna Karenina (Tolstoy), 6 Bridget Joness Diary (Fielding)
ARDI (absorption, relatability, Pride and Prejudice and, 77, 79
discussability, information), Tom Jones and, 86
as qualities readers admire, Bront, Emily, 1314
67, 18, 85, 923, 1014, Brooks, Van Wyk, 34, 39
1223, 142
art, 12, 20, 256, 3745, 489, Cather, Willa, 14, 21, 49
5960 character, as doorway to reading
Atlas Shrugged (Rand), 11123 experience, 7, 92, 1012
as allegory, 117 Chase, Richard, 16
critical response to, 112, 114 chick lit
parodies of, 112 Bridget Joness Diary, 79
politics of, 113, 119, 1212, 123 commercial success, 82, 83, 86
sex scenes in, 1201 consumerism and, 823
Atonement (McEwen), 8 cultural analysis of, 803, 84
Austen, Jane, 11, 7787 feminism and, 7981, 87
196 INDEX

chick litContinued Lolita, 567, 62


The Group, 91 novels role in circulating ideas
history of the novel and, 848 of, 95
humor in, 81 Feminism and its Fictions
marginalization of, 24, 83, 84, 88 (Hogeland), 95
Pride and Prejudice, 78 Fielding, Helen, 79
scholarly analysis of, 803, 87, 88 Fifty Shades of Grey series, 8990,
Waiting to Exhale, 79 121
classics Franzen, Jonathan
Oprahs Book Club and, 667, on critical standards and
689, 73, 745 gender, 23
sermons, essays, ethical criticism of Oprahs Book Club,
treatises, 14, 15 66, 69
split from popular novels, 18 Freedom, 1920, 212
commercial success, aesthetic as Great American Novelist,
merit compared with, 18, 1920
801, 83, 869, 88 Franzenfreude, 22
Cooper, James Fenimore, 16 Freedom (Franzen), 1920, 212
Cowen, Tyler, 41, 43 French, Marilyn, 94
The Critique of Judgment Friedan, Betty, 90
(Kant), 20
Gans, Herbert J., 313, 37, 48, 140
Davidson, Cathy N., 1213, 15 gender. See also men; women
The DaVinci Code (Brown), 7, 9 authors and, 22, 234, 71,
discussability, as a quality readers 956, 1412
admire. See also ARDI novels and, 17, 18, 69, 87, 89, 97
Freedom (Franzen), 22 Gilbert, Elizabeth, 4
The Group, 934 The Great Gatsby (Fitzgerald), 30,
Jodi Picoult and, 103, 110 129
Greenberg, Clement, 3940
Eat, Pray, Love (Gilbert), 4 The Group (McCarthy), 904,
96, 97
Faulkner, William, 66, 71, 735 feminism and, 90, 92, 934, 97
The Feminine Mystique (Friedan), 90 Norman Mailer review of, 91
feminism
Atlas Shrugged, 1201 Harry Potter series (Rowling)
chick lit and, 7981, 87 bestseller list and, 8
consciousness-raising novels, 95 impact on authors approach to
The Group, 90, 92, 934, 97 teaching, 12731, 1345
INDEX 197

as subject of literature course, feminist analysis of, 567, 62


1278, 1301, 134 forward to, 589
terrorism and, 15 highbrow vs middlebrow
Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 16, 17 response, 57, 58, 623
highbrow (taste/culture), 12, Kants aesthetic experience
312, 345, 3840, 423, and, 60
57, 63, 66 resisting reading of, 612
Highbrow/Lowbrow: The lowbrow (taste/culture), 12, 312,
Emergence of Cultural 345, 389, 43, 49, 69, 140
Hierarchies in America
(Levine), 358 MacDonald, Dwight, 401
horoscope characters, 102, 144 mass-market (popular) books,
described, 89
information, as a quality readers McCarthy, Mary, 903, 94
admire. See also ARDI McEwen, Ian, 8
Atlas Shrugged, 1223 McMillan, Terry, 79
chick lit and, 85 Melville, Herman, 16, 17
The Group, 93, 96 men. See also gender; women
Jodi Picoult and, 1034 as authors of novels, 224, 70,
87, 141
Kant, Immanuel, 201, 5960 as readers of novels, 83, 88
Kershner, R. B., 18, 26, 82 middlebrow (taste/culture), 25,
To Kill a Mockingbird (Lee), 4 312, 3942, 45, 49, 57, 58,
Kolodny, Annette, 25, 64, 81, 97 63, 656, 74, 934, 140
Modern Library list of top 100
language twentieth-century novels,
chick lit and, 78, 81 141, 142
as doorway to reading Modern Library Readers List, 142
experience, 7, 10, 141 Morrison, Toni
Freedom, 19 Beloved, 140, 141, 142, 1445
Harry Potter series and, 130, 131 Oprahs Book Club and, 72
Lolita, 59 My Antonia (Cather), 14
Levine, Lawrence, 358, 41, 43, My Sisters Keeper (Picoult), 104
49, 50
literary novels vs popular novels, Nafisi, Azar, 55
8, 9, 1517, 18, 247, 38, National Book Awards, 19
4950, 6575, 82 New York Times Bestseller List, 85
Lolita (Nabokov), 5564 New York Times Book Review, 8,
as art, 59 23, 89, 92
198 INDEX

Newsweek Magazine, xiiiiv, xixxx, discussions about books, 68,


105, 140 69, 72, 74
Northanger Abbey (Austen), highbrow vs middlebrow,
1112, 77 667, 74
novels influence on book sales, 734
accessibility of, 1415 Jonathan Franzen criticism of,
aesthetic value versus 66, 69
commercial success, 801, A Million Little Pieces, 66
82, 87 Summer of Faulkner, 6575
as art, 12, 18, 25 Toni Morrison and, 72
chick lit, relationship to, 848 website, 6670
class-based responses to, 12, women, marketing to, 69, 86
1418
as communication, 21, 25 paperbacks. See mass-market
community-building function, (popular) books; trade
15, 21 (literary) books
democratic nature of, 16, 17 Pearl, Nancy, 7, 30, 148
early American, 16, 17 Picoult, Jodi, 22, 99106, 10810
history of, 1218, 848 poetry, 95
literacy and, 14, 15, 17 Pollitt, Katha, 223
literary vs popular, 8, 9, Popular Culture and High
1517, 18, 247, 38, Culture (Gans), 31
4950, 6575, 82 popular novels vs literary novels,
men as authors of, 224, 70, 8, 9, 1517, 18, 247, 38,
87, 141 4950, 6575, 82
men as readers of, 83, 88 In Praise of Commercial Culture
morality and, 1214 (Cowen), 143
Oprahs Book Club and, Pride and Prejudice (Austen), 778
6575 Bridget Joness Diary and, 77, 79
social change and, 15, 92, 94, chick lit and, 78, 80
95, 97 as literature, 78, 80, 83
women as authors of, 17, 224, men as readers of, 83, 88
84, 87, 88, 97, 1412 as romance novel, 78, 84
women as readers of, 12, 15, Proust, Marcel, 4
1617, 24, 84, 88, 97
race, 71, 1412
Oprahs Book Club, 5, 19 Radcliffe Publishing, list of top
classics and, 667, 689, 73, 100 twentieth-century novels,
745 1412
INDEX 199

Rand, Ayn trade (literary) books, described,


Atlas Shrugged, 11123 89
critical response to, 112 Trilling, Lionel, 567
philosophy of, 122
reading experience, doorways to, 7 Uncle Toms Cabin (Stowe), 15
Reading Lolita in Tehran Ulysses (Joyce), xiv, xvixx, 18, 38,
(Nafisi), 55 105
relatability, as a quality readers
admire. See also ARDI Vendler, Helen, 12830
Atlas Shrugged, 123 VIDA count, 23, 912
Beloved, 1445
Freedom, 22 Waiting to Exhale (McMillan), 79
Lolita, 58 Weiner, Jennifer, 22, 84
The Storyteller: A Novel, 1013 A White Bird Flying (Aldrich), 3,
Remembrance of Things Past 6, 11
(Proust), 4 Winfrey, Oprah, 5, 6570, 714.
Rowling, J. K., 15, 128, 130, 131 See also Oprahs Book Club
Rubin, Joan Shelley, 35 A Wizard of Their Age: Critical
Essays from the Harry Potter
The Scarlet Letter (Hawthorne), 13 Generation (Konchar Farr),
setting, as doorway to reading 132
experience, 7, 82 women. See also gender; men
Sex and the City (Bushnell), 79, as authors of novels, 17, 224,
80, 92, 93 84, 87, 88, 1412
The Shopaholic trilogy, 823, 87 Oprahs Book Club marketing
Six Degrees of Harry Potter to, 69, 86
(literature course), 1278, as readers of novels, 12, 15,
1301, 134 1617, 82, 84, 88
social cement, novels as, 15 as writers and readers of Young
story, as doorway to reading Adult (YA) literature, 133
experience, 7 The Womens Room (French),
chick lit and, 85, 88 945
The Storyteller: A Novel, 100 Wuthering Heights (Bront),
The Storyteller: A Novel (Picoult), 1314
99102, 10510
Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 15, 18 Young Adult (YA) literature
critical response to, 1323
taste. See highbrow; lowbrow; women as writers and readers
middlebrow of, 133

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