Please choose your books with dignity!

 

Trawling the internet for reviews of my favourite authors’ works, it has been brought to my attention that most internet reviews are written by tweens who have just learnt to spell “juxtapose” and don’t seem to realise the irony in their regular misuse of “irony”. Indeed, there seems to be an overall lacking of depth in most reviews; people clamour for superficial drama and tragedy without acknowledging that the true skills of an author are delicate, infinitely subtle, and very much hidden.

Inquisitive, informed readers are battling what I can only call the “Picoult Generation”. Here is a group of people who really believe that the factory-churned, breath-takingly banal novels they are reading are honestly well written. I take no issue with people reading the likes of Jodi Picoult or Dan Brown; we all need to ingest our fair share of mindless bile every now and then. My issue arises when these “authors” are compared in any way with people who can actually write.

Reading a book by Jodi Picoult is the literary equivalent of watching porn and eating donuts. Her writing is indulgent, prosaic and predictable. Let us take “My Sister’s Keeper” for example. Unconvincing and mawkish characters aside, the plot is a veritable minefield of laughably obvious heartstring-tugging. I would normally write “spoiler alert”, but to be frank, I don’t really think that’s necessary with a book like this. It spoils itself from the first tragic leukaemia diagnosis, right up to the last chapter, where – oh the unexpected tragedy – little Anna dies. There are spectacular moments throughout Picoult’s books where she really does surprise you; how is it possible, you ask yourself, for the trash that I am reading to get so popular?

This all comes back to my point about subtlety, porn and donuts. Dan Brown, Stephanie Meyer, Paulo Coelho (although I must confess a soft spot for his overly sentimentalised preaching), and the ghastly Jodi Picoult have all won the adulation of the masses by stuffing horror, tragedy and suffering down their throats until they collectively gag their praise.

Sadly, the truth is that people like horror. We have a human taste for voyeurism, especially if it involves being a fly on the wall for the darkest side of human nature. Jodi Picoult writes incessantly about child abuse, and it is atrocious how she panders to this clawing desire for detail. I was confident that she had surely written her last, when “Handle With Care” came out. The title alone is enough to make me well up with hate. Let me make myself clear to anyone who is under the impression that “Jodi Picoult touched on a sensitive subject and wrote it well”, as the very aptly named Fairy-Whispers201 seems to believe: It is not hard to write about wicked people doing wicked things. It is not good writing, nor is it evocative, intelligent, or thought provoking, to play up to people’s desire for that thrill of perversion.

Child abuse, rape, paedophilia, murder, prostitution, suicide; all these are topics surrounded in our contemporary society by a dark glamour. They are “black and white” topics, considered so breathtakingly horrific that an author cannot go wrong by condemning them. It doesn’t take a good author to evoke an emotional response to a 5 year old being molested, that’s just prying out a basic human response. A true author, a real artist, would never be so blunt.

So we come to subtlety, and true tragedy. The tragedy that exists in our every day lives is not so easy to write about because of its immediacy and the fact that it tends to lack the magnitude of the topics aforementioned. It’s not socially acceptable to care that much about these things, or to admit how they affect you. The utter horror of being alone on the first day at a new school, a family member who is just slightly too embarrassing to talk to anyone about, the death of a pet, and the stifling loneliness of growing up, or growing old, these are all real human agonies. The most beautiful and interesting things to read about, the topics that require the most delicacy and skill, are the most insignificant-seeming. An author who uses her words like a surgeon wielding a scalpel to perform such tender examinations on the human psyche should not ever be compared to the likes of Picoult, who charge into the operation room with a pick axe and a timer.

I could not think of a finer example of this gentle writing ability than that of Patrick Süskind’s in “The Story of Mr Sommer”. I admire Süskind’s writing at any time, but there is an effortless beauty to “The Story of Mr Sommer”. There is an almost fable-esque quality to his writing in this book, one which is not present in “Perfume: the Story of a Murderer”, and only slightly in “The Pigeon”, and yet he never descends into patronisation or assuming that his readers are idiots (something which I must say Coelho has a tendency to do).

My plea is this: I know it’s a hard book to find a copy of (to my knowledge only one edition was ever printed, in hard and paper back), but this is a must-read for any lover of true literature, and the illustrations are just stunning, so go bribe your local second hand bookstore staff with cake and bookplates and forged signatures of eccentric Finnish poets and get yourself a copy. I promise you won’t regret it, and if you do, you can always go binge on some Dan Brown, I hear they’re selling it by the kilo now.