The Problem with Good Books: What It Means to Be a Writer Today, Part 6

The Problem with Good Books

By Don Wallace

When we asked whether Bad Books ruin us for Good Writing, it was a bit of a softball question, as Bad Books are part of the same cultural arc that acclaims White Castle sliders and “Dancing with the Stars” and Kill Bill, Vol 1—part of our All-American self-abasement sweepstakes. Nobody can be against Bad Books in America, for the same reason that characters who eat at McDonald’s in movies (or in politics) are morally superior to those portrayed dining on sous-vide squash soup and roasted beef-marrow-bones sauced with duck liver foam. We are a low-rent democracy. For an author, citing a Bad Book as influential is shorthand for saying, “See? I’m just a regular person like you. Now buy my book so I never have to eat at McDonald’s again.”

Of far greater concern are the bad books I’ve read while under the impression they were good. In my experience, a Bad Book passes through the digestive system like a bad oyster; you may spend a day with a hangover, full of remorse, but no lasting harm is done, usually, and the next day you can actually fit in your jeans again. With a Good Book—or what you think is one or, more probably, have been told is one, over and over again until you believe it—you’re on the receiving end of something that can do sustained and probably irreparable damage to everything: your love life, your opinions on a huge variety of subjects, your choice of a career or lack thereof. Good Books explain your recent enlistment in the Foreign Legion or Teach for America, your love of ethnic cuisine or meat and potatoes, your modest drug habit or boxed set of Mozart. Every time you open your mouth at the dining table to deliver an opinion, Good Books inflict collateral damage upon your friends and family.

All of the above would be perfectly acceptable if Good Books didn’t also mess with your prose. But they do. Because officially recognized Good Books are set out as examples, unlike Bad Books, they instill in us what Harold Bloom called “the anxiety of influence”—which leads to imitation, which in turn can lead to years spent wandering up somebody else’s blind alley.

It would be easy to pussyfoot around here, play it safe: drop hints and act the part of coy ingenue. But what’s the fun in that? I’ll start by mentioning the writers who repaid my love by leading me into The Punitive Error of Jokiness (Pynchon), The Manly Sin of Bruxism (Hemingway), or The Vastly Orotund Pretentiousness of Memory-Palace Builders (Gass, Grass, Gaddis, Gardner…). They wrote stuff I still like and admire, but what rubbed off on me did not improve my writing, unless in the sense that one must go through Purgatory to reach Heaven.

The dangers of these first examples, for a young writer, or for any writer starting out, can be demonstrated by imagining each as a person you’ve been seated next to at a Thanksgiving dinner table. Perhaps he is an uncle or a boyfriend or visiting Puritan. Anyway, the guy telling puns and jokes nonstop until you’re exhausted? Pynchon. Nice writer if he’d just ditch the whimsy. Of course, seriousness can be overdone, as witness Uncle Ernest over there. Geez, what a blowhard! He could use a little more time on the dance floor with Aunt Hadley, doin’ the Lighten Up as rendered stereophonically by Archie Bell and the Drells. Still, Uncle E at least shuts up now and then, and can handle his liquor, unlike The Four G’s, as we think of those second cousins from Hohenzollern-Haut-Savoy who’ve memorized every mini-series and controversy on Masterpiece/History/PBS and keep topping each other with fact upon fact, scene upon scene, debate upon debate.

Easy pickings? Agreed. None of the writers above are exactly sacred cows. (Or steers. We did notice they were all male.) All have taken their lumps, seen their stars tremble in the firmament, even fall. The really dangerous writers are those who still have that aura of untouchability.

A prime example is Raymond Carver, the same “Ray” I collected off my doorstep one morning (the liquor store across the street was the last to close and first to open in Santa Cruz). Poor guy, on the cusp of fame and fortune and he didn’t know it, shaking so hard he could barely sip the cup of instant Folgers I made him. The hand-rolled cig didn’t help much, either. Waylon Jennings on the turntable at 7 a.m.? Good intentions pave the road to hell.

When I got to Iowa and the Writers’ Workshop the following year, imagine my surprise to find Ray Carver and his brand of minimalism enshrined as the default mode of writing among my peers. I didn’t disagree; the proof was there on the page, plus as a Westerner I loved Carver because I’d lived in “his” landscapes and among “his” people. But it felt a little odd to have my own writing taken to task in workshops for its un-Carver-like qualities. I hadn’t realized the purpose of a workshop was to foster imitation.

What the cult of Carver wrought for the next ten to fifteen years, maybe longer, was The Sin of Remorseless Reduction—the elimination of adjectives, modifiers, thoughts, motifs, and anything the least bit fancy from the prose, as well as any deeper emotions and motivations from the characters. As we were allegedly doing this in the service of portraying the “inarticulate,” this made artistic sense. Hemingway did the same for the whores in “The Light of the World” and the shell-shocked in his Nick Adams stories. But as a template for writers trying to find their own way, and their voices and prose styles, it was like a diet of bread and water.

For me, still recovering from an undergrad overdose of Pynchon and Heller and Tom Robbins, this restrictive diet was probably a good thing. But it became a straitjacket—no, a veritable gastric band!—when combined with the cult of Carver’s approved subject matter: a narrow focus on those stunted but certifiably authentic souls who pumped gas, lived in trailer parks, worked as fry cooks and truckers, and even sat next to us in the Hamburg Inn No. 2 nursing hangovers, unaware that we might eavesdrop on them to flesh out our tales of their mating and subsistence rituals.

Carver was a dangerous man to love, no question. His trademark flattened-out affect strangled many a writer’s child in the crib. This wasn’t his fault; it was all our own, for following him where he did not ask us to, through twenty years of K-Mart realism, where some of the best writing minds in my generation and others to follow wandered in a land of no inflection, where the slightest comma could be King.