jus gladii

This weekend, I purchased and read The Master of Go by Kawabata Yasunari. It’s an odd book. Coming to it as I do from the position of an avid Go player, there are areas where it succeeds admirably and areas where it fails abjectly. Before any analysis, though, let’s make one thing clear. The Master of Go (or Meijin) is semi-fictional. It’s “based on a true story,” if you will. Kawabata’s subject is the final match of Honinbo Shusai Meijin (1874 - 1940), played in 1938 against Kitani Minoru “of the Seventh Grade,” but Kuwabata’s Master of Go is not the historical Shusai. He is portrayed as an honorable bastion of art and culture, the last vestige of the traditional art of Go holding on into the Twentieth Century. He is weightiness, solemnity, and gravity; his opponent is a bureaucratic upstart. Kitani doesn’t even retain his name: Kuwabata calls him Otake.

Indeed, from a standpoint of “the history of the game,” The Master of Go is utterly a failure. Kitani Minoru was one of the great masters of the Twentieth Century, and Shusai is remembered more for his politicking and gamesmanship than for his deep insight. Kitani’s rivalry with Go Seigen (who makes a cameo appearance in the book) was one of the defining elements of the shin fuseki era. Kawabata isn’t a particularly good analyst, either: his impressions of moves are vague and unformed, probably due to his strength.

As a piece of literature, though, The Master of Go is a success. It catches the postwar melancholia and traditionalism of some parts of Japanese culture, the feeling that an era had passed forever. This isn’t wholly positive, of course; even looking past the bizarre characterization of Shusai as a hero and Kitani as a (colorless) villain, there are some odd and reactionary anti-Western views here. The Master’s sitting in a chair drinking “orange pekoe,” for example, seems to be the climax of a scene which is meant to be depressing. There is a reference to one of the “modern sorts of girls” in the garden of an inn, which seems “anachronistic.” There is a go-playing Westerner on a train who Kawabata says “lacks fighting spirit,” speculating that Go is a uniquely Japanese pastime.

It’s a bit funny, really. The Master of Go succeeds as a portrait of its author’s psyche; it succeeds as a tribute to the game a few of us love; and it succeeds, finally, as a piece of literary art. It’s just that whenever it touches on any of the technical aspects of the game it chronicles, it fails. Some of the comments on the moves don’t even make sense, and I’m not sure it’s a fault of the translation; the players are characterized bizarrely; and the expected death of Go has not occurred.

Of course, Japan is no longer the greatest Go-playing country. Lee Changho, Lee Sedol, Park Yeonghun, Gu Li, Chang Hao, and Cho Hunhyeon are all probably better than any current Japanese master. Go Seigen was Chinese, and was the greatest mind the Go world produced in the Twentieth Century. Rin Kaiho, a Taiwanese expatriate and student of Go Seigen, won 34 titles from 1965 through 1998; Cho Chikun, a Korean expatriate, has won 71 from 1973’s Shin-Ei until (most recently) 2007’s Judan; and Cho U, another Taiwanese, has been one of the strongest “Japanese” pros in the last decade.

Perhaps I’m being unfair, but from a realistic standpoint the death of Japan’s stultifying aristocratic culture of titular inheritance was only good for the game, and history has not treated Kawabata’s views particularly well.

The book’s still good, though.

I’ve been reading a lot lately, and I have a great deal to say about some of the things I’ve read–in particular, The Book of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe–but want to get some words down about the Booker-shortlisted novel by Lloyd Jones.

It’s not very good.

I mean, I’ve seen one bad review which argues that the book is written too simply. It may be; it certainly lacks the sophisticated wordplay and language of the aforementioned Mr Wolfe. That’s not my complaint, however. My complaint is that the book seems weirdly racist.

It’s narrated (supposedly) by a black college graduate who was directed toward her career by a white man reading Dickens to her and her fellow island natives. It feels like nothing so much as a retooling of the white man’s burden. Matilda is rising above the sad violence and poverty of her home by learning to Use Her Imagination, which neither she nor anyone else has a conception of before Mr. Watts introduces her to the concept. He then reads Great Expectations to his pupils, which propels Matilda from the unimaginative darkness of childhood into… what? Civilization, as exemplified by a Nineteenth Century Briton?

I’m going to give Lloyd Jones a bit of a pass. He’s from New Zealand, which hasn’t exactly been plagued by race and the questions of race as my own home has. Maybe he’s just got a wooden ear. The people who should know better, though–the British and American reviewers who praised this novel to high heaven before it was “snubbed” for the Booker–I have no excuse for them. If this book had won the same prize as Salman Rushdie’s classic Midnight’s Children, I would have lost a lot of respect for the Booker Prize.

I’ve now read three books by Murakami Haruki: After Dark, his latest in English; Kafka on the Shore, which has had mixed receptions both here and in Japan; and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, which is generally regarded as his masterpiece. In addition, I’ve read the criticism I could find, which unfortunately spoiled me for some of the previous books (particularly Hard-Boiled Wonderland). Before I discuss Murakami in particular, though, I’d like to make a couple of detours and consider postmodernism for a few paragraphs. As inadequate as that length must be, both are deeply relevant to Murakami’s work.

First, a basic question: can anyone offer a definition of “postmodernism” that isn’t full of either gushing praise or sneering, worthless sarcasm? I’ve certainly never heard one, at least officially. Years of reading and study, and it’s still not clear to me. It seems to me that many literary critics define “postmodernism” in relation to the text they’re reading at the time. Pynchon is postmodernist because his text is dreamlike and unstructured–reading it is disjointed and difficult. McCarthy is postmodernist because he uses American ideals in strange and perverse ways. Roth is postmodernist because he’s a popular writer who has published books after 1980.

(That last is unfair, I know.)

In the case of Murakami Haruki, my researches led me immediately to another Murakami–Murakami Fuminobu. He writes, in “Murakami Haruki’s Postmodern World,” published in Japan Forum in 2002–

Murakami Haruki’s work seems to avoid such critical problems as those of self and others or love and hate. Instead of the deep introspection and strong passions that characterize modernist literature, the writer’s stories are full of the hero’s favourite things: foods, places, and consumer products which are easily consumed and just as easily forgotten. The hero in Murakami’s stories is quite happy to live the alienated lifestyle characteristic of cosmopolitan city people.

Besides the bizarre reading of Murakami H.’s work here, there is a similarly bizarre definition of postmodernity. Postmodernity lacks “deep introspection?”–but the plot of both Kafka on the Shore and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle are based around deep introspection… and what about other postmodern works, like McCarthy’s Blood Meridian? That’s certainly not devoid of “self and others” or “love and hate.” I think Murakami F.’s problem here is that he is reading any occurrence or mention of a modern piece of pop-culture or technology as necessarily endorsing the lifestyle generally associated with it; I’d hate to see him read John Updike’s Rabbit books.

So much for Murakami Fuminobu.

A review of Murakami H.’s earlier A Wild Sheep Chase, entitled “A voice from postmodern Japan: Haruki Murakami,” by Iwamoto Yoshi (World Literature Today, Spring 1993), offers a quote from one Ihab Hassan defining the “qualities of postmodernism:”

…”a diffuse self, fugitive forms, a culture open to syntagma and parataxis instead of hierarchic or generatire models of organization.”

Essentially, this means nothing. For the layman who is unacquainted with literary theory, you can generally identify bullshit (excuse my French) by counting the number of nonsense jargon-words he strings together. In this case, syntagma and parataxis are misused linguistic terms which don’t mean what Mr. Hassan thinks they mean. I can only pray that “generatire” is a typo for “generative,” because at least “generative” is a word.

So much for literary criticism.

Anyway, I’ll provide my definition. It doesn’t come from a Richly Credentialed Scholar of Literature, but I’ll try anyway.

Postmodernism is the natural evolution of art and literature during the period of the development of mass communication and media. It is influenced by and takes technology into account; in many works, technology occupies a central place in the narrative. Even when a postmodern work is set in a historic or fantastic world, however, it often reflects the philosophies and attitudes conferred upon the author or artist by virtue of his having developed as an artist in the age of telecommunications.

There! It’s neat, nice, and clean. Questions such as “Well, what are the philosophies and attitudes conferred upon the author or artist by virtue of having developed as an artist in the age of telecommunications” are better directed to your T.A. in your recitation section.

Okay, more seriously, they’re to be answered by analysis of works in light of this definition. Sometimes I think most literary critics have forgotten that you can’t write good criticism if you don’t have a question to answer, even if it’s as simple as “Aesthetically, is this book any good?” In light of these good intentions, set out so straightforwardly here, let’s move on to a discussion of the actual, you know, books.

I have probably mentioned After Dark to most of my regular readers at some point. I found it an interesting book. It’s almost plotless–it feels more like an exercise in weirdness than a real narrative–but it’s well-written (and well-translated) and feels satisfying and self-contained despite the disjointedness of the plot and obviousness of the symbolism. It was satisfying enough, at any rate, to convince me to move on to Kafka on the Shore, which is where Murakami throws his weight around, and then on to The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, which most people consider his masterpiece. (I disagree, but more on that later.)

First, note that Murakami has a deep understanding of and fascination with Western culture. He lived in the West for years, and obviously loved much of our culture. His books are more Freudian, I think, than traditionally Japanese; if a movie were made of any of these novels, the soundtrack would be more likely to include Mozart and Rob Zombie (yes, both of them) than any occurrence of a shamisen. In light of that, readers should recognize that references to Western ideas and artists aren’t just trendy name-dropping, particularly, I think, in Kafka on the Shore.

I don’t want to spoil the novel–I think most of you should read it, particularly if you’ve gotten this far in this post–but note first the name “Kafka.” What’s his most famous work? (If you haven’t read The Metamorphosis, please stop reading here and do so. I’ve got time.) Much of Murakami’s work takes place in a debatable dream-world: in After Dark, Eri never wakes. In Kafka on the Shore, Kafka Tamura (our protagonist) participates in several impossible actions within dreams. In The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, it’s not clear how much of the novel is actually made up of dreams; there are at least three distinct dream-scapes in that sprawling novel.

Kafka, I think, offers insight into Murakami’s fiction, even the fiction that isn’t called Kafka on the Shore. I agree with Mr. Murakami Fuminobu in one respect: I think that alienation (or more specifically the difficulty of forming and maintaining relationships) in today’s society is the great problem Murakami H. is trying to deal with. Gregor Samsa’s awakening is at its most fundamental level a feeling of having been cut off from one’s realistic expectations: a cessation of life, as it were, without the finality of death. Many of Murakami’s characters are dealing with the same thing not because they’ve become giant bugs but rather because they’ve grown up in an era when traditional social structures are collapsing.

That does not imply that there is a lack of passion in these stories, as Murakami F. states, merely that those passions are frustrated and suppressed, at least in After Dark and Kafka. In The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, it’s a rare page that doesn’t contain either direct evidence of the protagonist’s devotion to his wife or a metaphor for the same. Indeed, this is one of the sources of Wind-Up Bird’s failure and Kafka’s few weaknesses: Murakami H. isn’t a spectacular writer of passion, at least in translation, and yet it is central to his plots.

So, that’s it, then? Passionate stories of alienation? Not quite: with only those elements, any telenovela would fit the bill. Like Kafka (the writer, not the character), Murakami uses surrealism and fantasy in a pointed and unique way; at times, it’s a profound strength–as in Kafka on the Shore–and at other times it feels as if he’s trying too hard. Eri’s scenes in After Dark and the dream-labyrinth in Wind-Up Bird are particularly dismal failures. In fact, it’s this failure of his surrealism in the latter book which inspires me to differ from the crowd in my opinion. Maybe I’ve played too many video games, but weirdness for weirdness’ sake (”Weirdness-by-the-numbers,” as I said to a friend earlier) doesn’t impress me much.

I’ve played Silent Hill, sir; your phones which ring even though they’re dead are old hat. Yea, and your impossibly-shifting corridors, too.

I’d just think I was a sourpuss if it weren’t for the way the weirdness works in Kafka. It’s deeply intertwined in the plot, but it also feels like it belongs. It helps that one of the characters is “mentally challenged.” In The Sound and the Fury Benji offers an naive narrator, which allows the author to get away with some tricks, and Murakami uses the same technique with Nakata.

All of that’s just window-dressing, though: my own reactions to the work, subjective themselves and subjectively presented. Perhaps a better question than “Why did I (the blogger) find it satisfying (or unsatisfying)” is a more relevant one: “Why should I (the reader) find it interesting?” For the answer to that, I’ll turn back to my definition of postmodernism.

These three books, to varying degrees, offer compelling insights into the “postmodern” world, including the surrealism. Consider our world as it stands today: wouldn’t it have been considered “surreal” just a century ago? I’ve been friends with people from Europe and elsewhere for a decade now, via telecommunications. Before I began writing this post, I watched a video of a British sportscaster discussing Aston Villa’s recent defeat of Chelsea. Before that, I talked to and played games with a few guys from North Dakota and California. Despite all of that–the interconnectedness, to borrow a buzzword, of our modern world–it’s easier than ever to feel lost in the crowd. There are billions of us, now, and telecomm does little to connect us to our family and neighbors.

Murakami has written at least one masterpiece and two interesting novels. In the end, I’ll leave it up to the reader to decide which is which.

Though I don’t pretend to be a literary critic–or even, in fact, to have much affection for the field as it stands–I must confess that sometimes these unholy and unwelcome analyses press themselves on me, like mosquitoes or cats who have recently rolled in poison ivy. In particular, while talking to Mockingbird recently, it struck me that a large number of books that I’ve read and movies I’ve seen recently are influenced by comic books and stage magic, and I began to wonder about why that would happen.

Superhero comics and stage magic are interesting genres. In some ways, they are more subversive as fantasy than the literature we generally view as “fantastic.” Take, for example, Tolkien: though his stories are set in a fantastic world, they are comfortably removed from our own. There is only a thin pretense, mostly ignored, that the story takes place in our own world at some unfathomable remove. Similarly, “science fiction” as written in the Golden Age (1950s-1970s) was extrapolative. It was written with the expectation that eventually it would be true–the key in both cases being that neither genre proposes an alternative reality in which our own world is changed by impossible occurrences.

In literature, I think this changed with Borges. He is one of the first capable writers to take on the challenge of impossible things. His stories are intimately concerned with surreality and impossibility taking place in otherwise “realistic” worlds, though of course these worlds are still abstracted quite a bit. (The labyrinthine settings of Borgean stories are reminiscent of the placeless urbanity of films noirs, and similarly concerned with location and identity as themes. Borges doesn’t undertake to critique sexuality in the same way that a film noir does, though.) He was followed by inferior imitators and some who might be considered successors, such as Marquez, but after a time the Latin American fantastic literature moved toward simple fantasy (”magical realism”) rather than counter-factual realities.

Before Borges, however–before Philip K. Dick, before Gabriel Garcia Marquez, before Gaiman’s Sandman, before Akira, before China Mieville, before the flood of badly written “urban fantasy” and even before the execrable dhalgren–there were superhero comic books, the only fundamentally counter-factual medium. Guys in tights with mystical (or atomic, or cosmic) powers allowing them to turn reality on its head. The superhero genre arose in the Depression era. It embodied the escapist fantasies of millions of boys in a dark time. It also, unfortunately, paralleled the rise of a truly Nietzschean movement in Europe and Asia, the doctrine of the Ubermensch, the Super-man. The genre faded, to some degree, after World War II.

Stage magic, on the other hand, has never been a “dominant” form of entertainment. There was Houdini, of course, and illusion, hypnotism, and related arts have never wholly faded from public consciousness, but they have never defined an era in quite the way the the super-hero did. They do have in common the idea of a specially gifted person subverting reality, however; turning things on their heads. (Or into scarves.) In a sense, a stage magician is our facsimile of a super-hero. We want to believe he has power we can’t understand. Fundamentally, we don’t want to know that he simply squashes the birdcage with the bird inside.

My reading material lately has all dealt with these themes of “counter-factuals.” The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, by Michael Chabon, concerns an illusionist (Kavalier) and his rather less interesting cousin (Clay) helping to create the super-hero genre with a hero called, obviously enough, “the Escapist.” Rant, by Chuck Palahniuk, concerns history, reality, time-travel, and perception. Gunslinger, by Edward Dorn, features a talking horse, a young man with a five-gallon drum of LSD, and several immortals moving through a semi-realistic world. Never Let Me Go, by Kazuo Ishiguro, is similarly set in a nearly-but-not-quite possible world. After Dark, by Haruki Murakami, is a typically Japanese surreality tale, more concerned with its surreality than with its tale. The Dark Tower, by Stephen King, is a grand but horribly uneven parallel-fantasy story interwoven between “our” reality and the reality of its protagonist, Roland Deschain. The Fortress of Solitude is a story featuring both comic books and literal superheroes, though the superheroes are a bit disappointing. This has been a horribly uneven reading list, I’ll admit. I’m currently expanding it by adding a second Murakami, Kafka on the Shore, which to this point has a more interesting plot and characters but a less interesting setting.

What I’m curious about is the origin of this counter-factuality. The easy thing to do is to lay it at the feet of dying optimism. The super-hero and the illusionist, both counter-factual to the core, are creatures of pessimism. They are what we wished to be, when what we were was wretched, and that aesthetic has reasserted itself. I’m not entirely satisfied with this reading, though. Stephen King is not a pessimistic writer, despite his “horror,” and he is a master of the commercial-level parallel-fantasy story. Dorn (who influenced King, I believe) is playful, even humorous. Ishiguro is a writer infatuated with the Japanese ideal of mono no aware, while Murakami is almost silly at times. Lethem’s book reads more like a critique of the 1970s than of its own time.

In short, I’m not satisfied with the idea that pessimism breeds “escapism,” as easy as that assertion might be. Perhaps we could say that complicated geopolitical situations create counter-factualism while a perceived simplicity creates extrapolative optimism and mythic false histories; I think that comes closer to the truth, but it’s hard to say that 1972–Dorn wrote Gunslinger during this period–was more complicated than 1917 or 1957.

Perhaps a widespread public perception of instability influences artists and authors to embrace chaos in the form of counter-factualism, while widespread public perception of stability and progress influences artists and authors to write myths and extrapolative optimism. I think that gets closer to it.

It sure ain’t a nice turn of phrase, though.

Addendum:

dj: Where does vernes fit in?
bh: verne was an extrapolative optimist
bh: it’s just that it looks silly when you look back on this sort of thing from a position where the science behind it seem stupid
dj: but his times wer hardly stable
bh: reading seriously intended “space travel” SF from the fifties today, for example
bh: what do you mean?
bh: verne wrote in france between 1850 and 1900.
bh: that wasn’t a bad time in French history, really.
dj: franco-prussian war?
bh: never threatened the French state in the same way that earlier (and later) wars had.
bh: (and would)
dj: well perhaps
bh: also I think his most famous books were written before it started
dj: I think that brings up a peripheral point that the states
dj: rather conditions
dj: that incubate these public perceptions that influence the literature
bh: honestly the 19th century european wars were positively civilized compared to the American Civil War or the colonial wars
bh: the Civil War was World War Beta 0.5
dj: shush I am trying to forumlate a point
dj: How has increased globalism, particularly communications (although I suppose that is teh definition in most respects)
dj: altered the effect of these public perceptions on the authors
dj: did it grow more intense in the rapidly globalized 50s and 60s and then slack off in the 90s once it reached a kind of saturation?
bh: hmm.
bh: keep in mind, though, that many of today’s writers are actually writing this sort of counter-factual stuff
bh: Chabon certainly
bh: Murakami, Palahniuk in his formulaic machismo way
dj: If they are writing due to an impression of instability though
dj: Is the actual “baseline” stability any lower than it has been int he past
bh: I would say so actually; I mean, look at Darfur
bh: would that have made people in the US unhappy in 1955?
bh: 1965?
dj: Darfur has been happening for centuries
bh: exactly.
dj: But noone knew about it
dj: so have we reached saturation yet?
dj: or will awareness continue to increase as sensitivity grows in popularity
dj: and if that is the case then will we ever get back to a place where extrapolative optimism is again the rule
bh: a local catastrophe would collapse it
bh: but…
bh: then it rebounds, possibly moreso than ever
bh: ie. the post-2001 superhero fanaticism
dj: I would argue that local catastrophies are too short lived to truly influence literature in such an indirect way
dj: now that is very true
bh: by local catastrophe I mean “a depression in the U.S.” This would distract people.
bh: as it abated, it would lead to a period of isolationism, I think.
bh: isolationism leads to extrapolative optimism
dj: the isolationism would efb
dj: so I guess I see where you are coming from
dj: If that is true then unless sensitivity gives way to stoicism then the trend of counter-factualism will continue indefinitely, broken only by spikes of perception of progress
dj: I dare say perceptions of stability will be far more rare
bh: unless worldwide communication broke down
bh: in which case local stability and progress could lead to extrapolation
bh: I think that’s the key
bh: viewing the world in its entirety almost certainly must lead to pessimism
dj: Then we are essentially returning to pre-globalization extrapolative optimism
dj: yes
bh: (isn’t that the age-old problem, since Solomon of Ecclesiastes and his “excessive wisdom?”)
dj: So Global pessimism, local optimism
bh: “comprehension of boundedness”

Be warned: this post is about Go, and is fairly technical.

One of the problems I have in Go and other strategy games (and even in life in general) is that I tend to be a creature of habit. Change bothers me. I’m unhappy when I am forced into a line of a joseki I’m not familiar with, or when I’m in a situation I haven’t experienced before.

Since this post is image-heavy and I actually pay for my bandwidth, I’ll hide it behind the fold.
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I posted a piece back on April 14 which condemned Oprah’s choice of The Road for her book club. That earned some ire, but I stand by it, and on stabler ground now: I devoured it on Sunday, in what turned out to be a particularly fruitful reading-week.

The book is odd. It’s almost plotless, its premise is unbelievable, and its characters are beyond flat–but the book works. It’s gotten a lot of praise, and it’s deserved. I don’t think it reads particularly well as a novel, though: it actually seems like an epic prose-poem. The symbolism is thick, too, though it’s easy to miss if you’ve never read The Bible, Dante’s Inferno, and Paradise Lost. I’m tempted to write a comparison of The Inferno and The Road, actually, but it seems a bit too much like “working in my field without pay,” so I’ll stay away from it for now.

(Expect it in a couple of weeks. I need to find my copy of Dante.)

In short, I recommend it, with reservations: if you haven’t read the great (Judeo-)Christian narratives, don’t come near it. It’ll seem pointless, plotless, and depressing. If you have, though, you will find a wonderful story here. It’ll never be uplifting–I think “uplifting” is something Cormac McCarthy can’t write–but it’s a great book, and will be remembered.

I own The Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit, and The Silmarillion in good hardback editions, the product of a much-appreciated Christmas gift. In light of that, I couldn’t pass up an excellent deal: Amazon offered the hardcover edition of The Children of Húrin (though not the deluxe) for 45% off. It was less than $15. I took them up on the offer, and yesterday began to read.

The story feels different from the previous books. A great deal of Tolkien’s history is tragic and melancholy. Most of his stories aren’t the triumphal “Hobbit stories,” but are rather sweeping myths set in a time of enduring evil and horror. Morgoth is active and frightening in a way that Sauron never was. Consider this quote, which sets the tone for the story:

“You say it,” said Morgoth. “I am the Elder King: Melkor, first and mightiest of all the Valar, who was before the world, and made it. The shadow of my purpose lies upon Arda, and all that is in it bends slowly and surely to my will. But upon all whom you love my thought shall weigh as a cloud of Doom, and it shall bring them down into darkness and despair. Wherever they go, evil shall arise. Whenever they speak, their words shall bring ill counsel. Whatsoever they do shall turn against them. They shall die without hope, cursing both life and death.”

Cheery, isn’t it? The story of Túrin and Niënor is not a children’s bed-time story. You won’t come out of it liking Túrin very much, but it’s still worthwhile; it’s probably the only chance you’ll have to understand those of us who love Tolkien’s mythology if you are unwilling to read epic poetry. Besides that, the story is excellent, the production quality and editing is superb, and the illustrations (yes, illustrations) contribute to the atmosphere of the book admirably.

Hurry up. Amazon’s discount has already fallen to 40%.

The division of books, particularly fiction, into “high” and “low” literature is an unpopular pastime. Charles Dickens was a “pulp” author in his day, people say. What about the science fiction of the fifties and sixties? What about the Victorian novels? My distaste for all three of those particular examples notwithstanding, they are often the rallying cry of the literary levellers. It’s funny that Agatha Christie, Stephen King, Terry Brooks, and Philip K. Dick never seem to be pinpointed as examples of this literary equality; they’ve sold many more copies than the dreck you generally see trotted out as Popular Fiction With Literary Significance. I get the idea that some people latch on to an obscure book and decide that they will stand by it, come Hell or high water, in a way that they would never consider doing for Murder on the Orient Express, The Stand, The Sword of Shannara, or Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? In light of that, I’d like to quantify the difference between an “entertainment” (as Graham Greene would have said) and a “seriously intended” novel. (more…)

Okay, I admit it: I’m probably a bit of a snob. That doesn’t prevent me from dipping into the “lower orders” of books, though, where a writer is more of a tradesman than a struggling, starving artist: I love science fiction, fantasy, maybe a mystery once every year or so. I’ve even read a few novels by Stephen King, who may be the most divisive popular writer in history. He’s just too big to ignore. Critics can easily ignore most “trash” novelists, but Mr. King has transcended that label and that level of popularity. He is a force. He doesn’t publish nearly as often these days as he did in his prime, but a Stephen King still distorts sales figures for months. I’m not immune: I haven’t blogged about it, but I’ve been reading his Dark Tower series recently. I’m about halfway through The Dark Tower, which is the seventh (thick) volume of the series–and I’ve been pleasantly surprised by his plotting and writing. In light of that, and in light of my own pitiable endeavors, I felt justified picking up his non-fiction book On Writing to have something to read at lunch on Monday.

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The last book club selection by Oprah baffles me. I don’t follow Oprah; I don’t even follow her infernal book club. When I see it posted around the Internet that Oprah has picked The Road for her book club, though, I get confused. I’m not a populist, I guess. I have no objection to “common people”–I’m a poor Southerner myself, so I have a bit of claim to the apellation–but your average “common person” seems a lot more likely to watch the WWE than he (or she) is to read Cormac McCarthy. (more…)