Guest Post: The Grumpy Bulldog: What is a Great Book?

The Grumpy Bulldog Returns!

My alter-ego Grumpy Bulldog is back today to make a guest post on what makes a great book.  As you should expect, it gets a little grumpier than normal.
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A couple of people linked to this article in The New Yorker by Michael Cunningham (The Hours, A Home at the End of the World--both of which are good books and pretty good movies) who was a juror for the Pulitzer committee that ended up selecting no books worthy of the award in 2012.

Apparently there are four jurors who have to sift through over 300 books and come to a consensus of three or so to pass along to the main committee, who then vote on which novel gets nominated.  Usually they can find one worthy book, or at least one THEY think is worthy.  I've read a number of Pulitzers and there are a few where I think, "REALLY?"  Incidentally I hadn't heard of any of the three books Cunningham and the other jurors picked.

Now we get to the title of the post.  What does greatness mean?  That was what the jurors had to figure out.  Cunningham I guess is really focused on great language.  Someone else wanted to "fall in love" with the story--I hate people who say that--and someone else was more focused on the story.

That's where you get into the problem.  A "great" novel is something different to everyone.  Cunningham posts the first sentence of the David Foster Wallace novel they nominated.  The "sentence" is more like a paragraph.  Look at this thing, it's 89 words long!

Past the flannel plains and the blacktop graphs and skylines of canted rust, and past the tobacco-brown river overhung with weeping trees and coins of sunlight through them on the water downriver, to the place beyond the windbreak, where untilled fields simmer shrilly in the a.m. heat: shattercane, lamb’s-quarter, cutgrass, sawbrier, nutgrass, jimsonweed, wild mint, dandelion, foxtail, muscatine, spinecabbage, goldenrod, creeping charlie, butter-print, nightshade, ragweed, wild oat, vetch, butcher grass, invaginate volunteer beans, all heads gently nodding in a morning breeze like a mother’s soft hand on your cheek.

You need a freaking road map to get through that sentence.  And what is it even saying?  I've read it about 10 times now and all I can figure is there are fields somewhere.  I would have read that one sentence and deleted the book from my Kindle.

Another book was a debut novel by some young woman writing about a family in the south.  My thought would be:  BORING.  There have been like a million books about the south from Huck Finn and Uncle Tom's Cabin to Faulkner and beyond.  He posted a clip of that book too, another sentence loaded down with stuff to convey a relatively simple meaning.  The third one being considered had already been published in a magazine years ago and again the writing was full of stuff trying to add weight to sentences that may not have needed them.

As a reader, sometimes I just want to scream, "Look it's a freaking sunset, all right!?"  Or night or whatever.  Or in the case of that Foster excerpt, there are some goddamned fields out there.  Whoopee.  Like I haven't seen fields before.  (I grew up surrounded pretty much on all sides by fields.)  What's your freaking POINT?!!!

Anyway, what this reminds me of is the voting for baseball's Hall of Fame.  Or any Hall of Fame really.  Inevitably you get columns every year about why so-and-so isn't good enough or so-and-so is being snubbed.  My favorite player growing up, Alan Trammell of the Tigers, falls into the snubbed category.  Why isn't he great enough?  Because he didn't take steroids like Mark McGwire, Barry Bonds, and Alex Rodriguez to hit enough home runs?  Because he didn't do back-flips at shortstop like Ozzie Smith?  Gawd!

The point anyway is the old "different strokes for different folks."  The selection process in choosing awards is invariably flawed because it all depends on the prejudices of the people doing the choosing.  Another example recently is that I finally watched "The Artist" on DVD.  Was that really the best movie of 2011?  According to people who mattered it did.  According to people like me it was meh, a lightweight, heavy-handed story that like books about southern families has been done to death.  But it got the buzz at the right time and let's face it most Academy voters are old folks who probably still fondly remember the silent movie era.

I guess the point of my ranting is that when people say your book isn't good enough or you're not good enough, a lot of the time it's their fault, not yours.  I mean have you seen some of the crap they publish?  Gawd!  I read the upcoming Amanda Hocking novel and it was like, "Really?  This is the person who sold all those self-pubbed books?"  It's not that it was completely terrible but it was oh so mediocre.  I remember too when Ebert posted a link to some Canadian woman who got a movie writing contract because of her Tweets.  I read the linked Tweets and it was like, "Really?"  I mean I know people who make pretty much the exact same witticisms and they don't get movie contracts.  Who decided this one person was "great" and the others not so much?


That's what can be really frustrating, when you get down to trying to figure out why one person or their work is elevated over another.  Looking at the article from the New Yorker, it makes sense why they decided not to give out a Pulitzer to any of those three books.  None of the books they nominated seemed all that great, at least to me.  What do I know?

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If you want to write a rebuttal or anything else, guest posts are still available for Mondays and Fridays (except July 23).  The two guest posts I've had so far are the highest traffic posts on this blog.  I'm just saying.  If you're interested, there are plenty of ways to contact me:  Email, Twitter, and Facebook.

Tuesday is still a Two-Fer...