Non-P* Lit Crit
Mind you, anything that has stood the test of 1,000 years I'm willing to admit belongs in anybody's canon. I'd probably even be willing to reduce that to 500 years. But a mere 100 years? A blink of the eye for some minor deity? I don't think so. The dear, departed century, "the bloody 20th" as it ought to be known, certainly had its failings. Among its overlooked, underestimated virtues was an outpouring of very high-quality (bear with me now) "second-rate" art. That "second-rate" is not my term. It's the judgment of those who educated those who drew up the lists of 100 "great" books. In place of "second-rate" we could say "popular." In every art form, the 20th century saw an extended production of really good popular stuff: movies, music, art, dance, theater. I wouldn't go as far as Myra Breckinridge did with her famous dictum concerning the output of Golden Age Hollywood in the 30s and 40s (she asserted that every movie coming out of Hollywood in that period was culturally important). But I will certainly go a lot farther than the tadpoles currently swimming in the putrescent pond of the academy. Those future toads are currently divided into two schools, the retros and the rads. The retros look back in sadness and around in anger. They long for a return to the simple old days when Patriarchal Lit Crit and the Patriarchal Lit List (from Homer to Tolstoy and then full stop) reigned. The rads look everywhere and everywhere they look they see jigsaw puzzles which they delight in reducing to pieces even (especially!) in cases where the original work is seamless. It's enough to given elitism a bad name. Neither group has the time of day for the fine, vast body of popular art produced in the 20th century. Their loss. Our gain. Because "fine" is the key, accurate terms here. To keep this essay shorter than book-length, just one example, one writer of fine popular work. Donald E. Westlake is what the Tadpole Elites would call a hack. Over four decades, he has turned out a large body of work. Though he often got published in hardback, he was what our friends would dismiss as a pulp writer. Their loss. Our gain. Yes, a lot of Westlake is less than "masterly." Clearly written in a hurry, edited in haste, printed, sold, forgotten. (Note that even the Biggest Tadpoles are coming to see that some of Shakespeare [actually, quite a bit] falls way, way short of great. When you're writing for money, when you're writing to eat, not every line is going to be immortal.) But Westlake (like everybody else, except the real hack writers who write to formula and fill the best-seller lists with pure garbage) grew and matured. Starting in the 70s, the books become consistently tight, wry, funny, tragicomic, even at times endearing, contemplations of and reflections on the old comédie humaine. Westlake turned out funny book after funny book, most of which are holding up very well. Compare your laughter while reading, say, Two Much, or Dancing Aztecs, to your grimaces at the rapidly fading humor in the novels from the same period by Peter De Vries, who at the time was a darling of the New Yorker/lit crit set. Shakespeare found his Falstaff. Westlake eventually found his Dortmunder, a sadsack, well-intentioned thief whose biggest plans are repeatedly thwarted by the truly greedy "straight" world. Westlake skillfully (seamlessly!) puts Dortmunder in the most outrageous scrapes ("capers" they were called when originally published) and lets him scramble to find a way out. From stealing an entire bank (Bank Shot) to retrieving loot from under a hundred feet of water (Drowned Hopes) to exacting elaborate revenge on a billionaire who humiliated Dortmunder over a bauble (Don't Ask), the books are endlessly inventive, rich in character and place, and just plain funny. A good one to start with is What's the Worst That Could Happen. Far more than a "genre writer" (another of those Tadpole Terms), Westlake has ventured into "pure" (sorry) fiction. Kahawa takes you to Idi Amin's Uganda on a trip you won't soon forget (involving a scam to steal an entire train). Imagine Magical Realism meets New York street and you have Humans. Brothers Keepers (the 16 members of a 200-year-old monastery occupying valuable land on Park Ave. fight off rapacious developers) paints a picture of monastic life so affirmingly realistic that it's almost enough to make you take the vows. Masterpieces? I don't know about masterpieces. After 25 years, these are still good books. Maybe they won't be after another 25 years (though I think they will), but for now, they (and many others like them) are still here for us to enjoy, no matter what the Tadpoles say.
*The "P" is short for "pretentious," as in "PMLA" ("Pretensions of the Modern Language Association"). END Afterword: Do everything you can to avoid seeing the recent atrocious movie rendering of What's the Worst That Could Happen which shares little more than the title with this book. Follow-up: For more info, try amazon.com: |
In
art, as in politics, the Greats we shall always have with us. By hook or crook (though
more often by PR and a good line), they (the Greats and their life-challenged supporters)
establish the alleged higher ground, and maintain it at any cost. Thus we get the
"canon," the communally accepted body of "great" work. Even this
rag-tag bunch of pixels called "Magellan's Log" has not been above promulgating
said canon. At the close of the last century, we passed on to our readers