The Ten Most Harmful Novels

Well, I had to jog some painful memories, but I came up with ten of the most harmful novels of the 20th century, plus a few that are good but dangerous.

The harmful novels are often well-written, but their effects have generally been disastrous: they inspired younger writers to imitate them, they created awful new genres that debased readers’ tastes, or they promoted literary or social values that we could very much do without.

Their harmful effects tended to be immediate, and then to fade out as other bad novels emerged. My list is both entirely subjective (I am a scarred victim of several of them) and in no particular order.

Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand. This at least has the virtue of being so widely read and discussed that we don’t really need to read it ourselves. I tried a couple of times and bogged down badly. Others apparently found Rand’s novel a political blueprint; they are numerous enough to form hazards to navigation on the Internet, not to mention in the Bush administration.

The Catcher in the Rye, by J.D. Salinger. Mark Twain made the American vernacular a literary language; Salinger tried to do the same for the American adolescent whine. We who read Catcher as teenagers in the 1950s and 60s at once considered ourselves free to babble on paper as we did over coffee and cigarettes. It was certainly easier than learning how to write a straightforward sentence expressing something more than teen angst.

For Whom the Bell Tolls, by Ernest Hemingway. As a kid I knew a few veterans of the International Brigades who’d actually fought in Spain instead of reporting on it, as Hemingway had. They called this novel “For Whom the Bull Throws.” But Hemingway’s style was fatally imitable, and I dropped my plagiarism of Salinger to plagiarize Hemingway instead. Politically, Hemingway didn’t know what he was talking about, but it sounded cool to spend your days blowing up fascists and your nights cuddling in a sleeping bag with a Spanish babe.

The Big Sleep, by Raymond Chandler. Hemingway’s greatest influence was on hardboiled detective writers like Dashiell Hammett, who actually did some good work. Then Chandler came along with his poached detective Philip Marlow, who took so many conks on the head that he wrote entirely too well, stacking up bizarre metaphors like so many poker chips in a high-stakes game of roulette in some lost casino of the soul. So to speak. Not until Elmore Leonard would crime fiction finally free itself of the creative-writing workshops.

Love Story, by Erich Segal. This one took me only 45 minutes to read, and half a second to fling across the room. Its sentimentality addled the wits of a whole generation in the early 1970s.

USA, by John Dos Passos. In the 1920s, Dos Passos was an interestingly experimental writer, breaking up his narrative with “newsreels” and sidebars about current events and celebrities. I thought he was tough and gritty, but when I revisited this endless trilogy a few years ago, I found the narrative unreadable no matter how it was broken up. Dos Passos eventually migrated from the Marxist left to the Buckley right, without improving as a writer.

On the Road, by Jack Kerouac. Circa 1957, my friends and I at Santa Monica High were knocked silly by On the Road and the other novels that gushed from Kerouac’s typewriter. Once again, we learned that babble is good, and we ignored Truman Capote’s dismissal: “That’s not writing, that’s typing.” I didn’t really recover until 1965, when I wrote my first novel. I was in the army, and the discipline must have made a difference: the novel was bad, but bad on its own terms and not on Kerouac’s.

Blood Meridian, by Cormac McCarthy. This hand-embroidered depiction of rape and slaughter is all too typical of current “literature.” The more metaphors and similes you can throw in, the more the critics praise you. The effect is like a nice firm dog turd garnished with whipped cream and a cherry on top, and served on a fine porcelain plate with a silver spoon.

Lord of the Flies, by William Golding. Well, we know all British writers hated the boys’ schools their parents consigned them to. Nasty schoolboys are still a dismal metaphor for civilization, even if it’s clangingly obvious to an audience genuinely scared of nuclear war. Sucks to your pretensions, Willy.

Good But Dangerous
The good but dangerous books are a different matter. They have a powerful effect on us, but only gross incompetents will be dumb enough to try to imitate them.

Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre launched countless romance novels and family sagas, but the Brontës were at an extreme of talent; their successors have regressed to the mean, and then some. The same is true of The Lord of the Rings, which has spawned half a century’s worth of tedious fantasy epics.

Some novels are good but dangerous because they leave us dumbfounded. After Ulysses, what more can we say about the mythic echoes in modern life? Even Scott Fitzgerald couldn’t come up with a novel that could match The Great Gatsby, so how could we? I re-read One Hundred Years of Solitude every few years. Every time I find that the Maestro has broken still more of the rules we ordinary mortals must obey if we want to tell a story.

The bad novels give us at least this consolation: If those nincompoops could break into print, and even sell millions of copies, then we nincompoops ought to be able to do at least as well.

Comments

[M@]

Your Good but Dangerous list included all my picks. I'm not sure whether I agree with some of your list but Atlas and Catcher especially caught me as excellent choices.

I think the GbD should also include, as a class, both the "loose, baggy monsters" of Russia and the entire canon (literary and critical) of Henry James. There's a good middle ground between form and theme, and taking either side to the extreme is bad literature.

[alex castro]

do you remember me? Alex, from Liberal Libertário Libertino. You linked me on your other blog. Your list is perfect, but you forgot one book: The Stranger.

Boy, I have lost counts of how many novels I have read (especially when written by beginners) narrated by Mersault.

I think Mersault's voice (although tedious) is the most widely imitated literary voice of the century

[Melanie McBride]

I can't agree more about the ayn rand especially. I despise her work. The only people I've ever met who enjoy her novels are neo-cons and arch invididualist libertarians. Granted she lost all her bourgeois privilege at the hands of fascists but failed to make anything really productive out of the experience other than "the bad people who took our money weren't as special and talented as we were and that's why they hated us." It's the classic position of the privileged to assume that status is somehow meritocratic and that talent and intelligence are the product of a *unique* and (especially, priviliged) sensibility - rather than the collective influences and efforts of others who contributed to ones specialness (i.e., their parents for providing them with their privileged education, their excellent mentors/advisors, their access to knowledge, their level of economic comfort and stability, etc). It's essentially all an argument for Burke's reflections on the revolution in France: that only the rich/privileged/leisure class should ever lead because they are the ones with the time and inclination to really contemplate big ideas, etc (unburdened by the workaday realities of the underclasses).

[Lynn]

Bridges of Madison County isn't on the list, but Love Story is, so I won't quibble. I read them both over lunch. Their brevity was their only redeeming virtue.

[susan]

Uh-oh. I'm still enamored of McCarthy, and am into Suttree right now. I admire the words that drag you deep into a very dismal life that feels like a layer of grime on your skin.

[steve]

I'm actually somewhat confused by the thought behind this top ten list. Is the issue with the writers or with the penchant to be derivative, a habit that is both encouraged by literary markets and that can actually aid in learning how both to do and not to do. If Kerouac spawned imitation, then with whom should we take issue? In addition, should we simply agree with Capote's comment.

[Brian]

I don't agree with all of these, but I see the point behind them with the exception of "The Big Sleep." Having just read it, I found Chandler's prose crisp and witty. I think the problem is with all the films his writing spawned and their overuse of florid voice-over narration that became so easy to misuse and parody.

That, however, can hardly be considered Chandler's fault.

[Ellen]

I just came upon your blog today. In your list of ten most harmful books- or maybe worst books- I was expecting to see Naked Lunch. I had heard people raving about it for years and last summer I finally got a copy. Never made it thru to the end, and I almost lost my own lunch several times while trying to wade thru it. It was like, okay, let's see how many drug-induced grotesque images we can dredge up.
Anyway, great blog! as a middle-aged writer I was glad to find this. Ellen

[Crawford Kilian]

I was listing mostly books that posed a threat to me as a young writer, and Naked Lunch never had much impact. I read some of it and, like Norman Mailer, got bored with it.

Reading something by Jerzy Kosinski, however, I quit when I realized it was quite possible to have my imagination poisoned. The same with John Irving; after reading his early novels with some interest, I got halfway through Garp and then, um, threw Garp across the room. I don't like being manipulated.

A really bad novel usually isn't too harmful; it's the well-written ones with a brilliant concept that can cripple future writers. Hence Chandler and McCarthy, who are wonderful writers...but they make their kind of writing look both easy and worth doing.

[Ray Pence]

I've not read Atlas Shrugged, but over the years I've run into more than a few people who become absolutely sold on Rand and her worldview. These folks go through a phase where they seem to see everything from a Randian perspective and it's very depressing. In terms of influence on writing, I can't speak to that. My guess is that Rand is a rotten fiction writer but that won't stop her from being influential. People want positive reinforcement for being selfish and becoming more selfish and they'll get it with Rand.

Regarding Kerouac and Salinger, and maybe Hemingway, I don't think as much of these books now (at age 41) as I did 20-25 years ago, but I'm not sure I'd call the books dangerous just because I have a more complicated and less celebratory view of them. I believe that all three writers are very important, in some ways more important culturally than artistically or aesthetically. It's important for all books to be read critically, of course, but don't young people have the right, need, whatever, to be carried away and naive about works like On the Road? Capote's pompous sarcasm aside, how influential is he today? Didn't he turn into something not all that different from Kerouac, i.e. a major substance abuser better known for his image than for his art?

People need to know that Kerouac was about a lot more than OTR. He helped me care more about writing than most artists have, because he truly gave his life to it. If these books get young people excited about reading and writing, as they did me, I say that's a positive thing. Those who are serious about it will refine their work and their views over the years, but there needs to be some kind of door opener, and I can think of worse authors to do that than Kerouac, Salinger, and Hemingway.