Wicked Quotes: Anthony Lane on Best-Sellers 1
Gore Vidal has a high old time ripping through the NY Times’ Best Seller List in an essay he wrote in 1973. He argues that the art of fiction has been infected, perhaps irreparably, by film making practices. Anthony Lane replicates this romp twenty years on in an essay called Best-Sellers 1(found in Nobody’s Perfect) that I have just read. His conclusion is more dire still: novels haven’t just fallen to become surrogate movies, they’re now (in 1994) ’something far more sinister: surrogate non-fiction.’ How-to guides for living. Manuals with little squirts of plot around the edges.
Here are the wicked quotes:
"…editors of the Times Book Review would like to believe that they bring readers together beneath an umbrella of civilized discourse; but outside it is raining Danielle Steel. "
Good pulp novelists "plug into the grid of our speech, into the power surge of ordinary fantasies… "
Like water for Chocolate: "The saving grace of this otherwise callow book
the spring that keeps it tense, is that it becomes both a study in frustration and a compendium of pleasures. Forced underground, physical desire keeps welling up elsewhere, most notably in the kitchen: the novel steams with elaborate foods…""The prose of Anita Brookner, for instance, as sad and tidy as a suitcase on
a single bed, tell you that ideas are there to be missed;"Judith Krantz: " …her ability to celebrate an impossible way of life in prose that never fials to be radiantly, exultantly bad. "
When studying ancient Carthage or medieval falconry, Flaubert "..was furnishing and feathering a world that had already taken shape within his mind; when Allan Flosom (The Day after Tomorrow) looks at bus timetables his book just gets a little longer. "
On Bridges of Madison County : "(No phrase has been admitted to the book which you could not imagine being sung by Karen Carpenter). "
On the mystery genre: "…readers may relish the very lack of originality, like smokers who refuse to switch brands…They speak of chaos let loose, then controlled: the perennial seesaw plot, as pleasant as the rocking of a cradle. "
I interviewed Harlan Coben, one of the world’s most successful mystery genre writers (2.7 million books sold per year), last weekend in Toronto at BookExpo Canada. We spoke about this sameness of plot issue, and the fact that those books which are most popular tend to be the ones read 100 years on. Stay tuned. Should have it posted here within the next week or so.
June 20th, 2008 at 9:51 PM
Praise be to Anthony Lane. I always liked his comment about The English Patient (the book) - that it was so finely written as to be almost unreadable.
June 20th, 2008 at 10:14 PM
Almost?