Bad Novels, Agony Literature and Literary Fakes
By Robert Nagle
Normally I don’t link to things on my blog from Teleread (I just copy it over), but a few years ago I wrote a tongue-in-cheek essay about a bad self-published novel, and over the years, the comments I have accumulated from random web surfers have been remarkable. Or you can simply browse the hilarious reader comments on Amazon.
Lars Eighner (Austin author of the legendary memoir Travels with Lisbeth) on why fake memoirs are popping up: 
Literature has several main lines of muddling. One of them is fiction. I will not say much about fiction because essentially fiction is fraud-proof. I will not accept complaints about fiction even if the dust jacket stuff about the supposed author is completely unrelated to events on this planet. Fiction can convey truth or can be vacuous. The problem today is that the market for general fiction is very soft. And indeed, that seems to have played a part in the frauds of the moment, for at least in a couple of cases the authors are said to have tried to present their works at first as fiction but were persuaded that it was unpublishable as such. If only we had a genre for depressing agony fiction. Evidently people will buy agony literature if they are told it is true.
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Required reading in high school tends to be the most bloodless, which is to say lifeless, sort in order to avoid the school board’s receiving complaints from born-again parents, and this situation is going to get worse as theocracy tightens its death grip on America. Required reading in college includes stuff that is no longer quite so spry as it was when it was written and stuff that appeals to scholars whose sense of pertinence is usually at least a generation behind the times. So if someone pronounces a new novel “serious,” the crepe hangers are overjoyed. That does not make lying okay or excuse fraud, but I think it has something to do with why people try to pass off novels as memoirs.
(For more on Eighner, check out his classic essay on Dumpster Diving and his thoughts about writing Travels with Lisbeth. For the record, now that his dog Lisbeth has passed away, he now has a new canine companion Wilma).
Speaking of literary fakes, see M.A. Orthofer’s book review on literary fakes (or check out Jerzy Kosinski’s mp3 audio interview on the subject) .
April 9th, 2008 at 3:58 pm
I had a friend who was unfailingly positive about everything he did. We went to see one of the worst movies ever made (the cartoon version of Lord of the Rings) and I came out stunned. “Well,” he said, “I liked the music.” I could never work out whether he was actually living in a state of bliss or one of total denial.
So I suspect that there are people who, having put in the time to read or start reading an awful book, can bring themselves to sincerely believe it is a good one. Somehow it meets their needs. This is one reason why attempts to come up with ‘objective’ standards for judging fiction are just daft.
April 9th, 2008 at 4:08 pm
Let me go further: I’ve now read some of the Amazon reviews, and this is a wonderful example of how apprently rational people can disagree so completely that you would not recognise they are even talking about the same book. I wouldn’t like to be stuck in a lift with some of the people who enjoyed the book, but their views are legitimate and if they were entertained by it then that’s all an author can legitimately hope for.
The marketing trick, of course, is to find a way to focus on these nutjobs — sorry, differently-inspired people — without handing out thousands of free copies to people like me.