The Truth about Bestsellers
What Contemporary Literature Can Learn from 98 Years and 980 Bestsellers
Or…
Why Jonathan Franzen, Ben Marcus, and Michael Chabon Should Stop Arguing About “Contemporary, Quotidian, Plotless, Moment-of-Truth Revelatory” Fiction And Encourage Great Writing in All Genres
Every weekend, I glance at The New York Times Best Seller List to see what America is buying and to find out what appeals, at this cultural moment, to the mass-market reader. I do this not for items to add to my personal reading list – those titles typically derive from suggestions by friends and teachers – but to be aware of authors who will undoubtedly come up conversations with my parents’ friends, taxi drivers, or with people I meet at the beach, whenever I tell them I’m trying to be a writer.
Let me be clear, right off – I have nothing against best-selling novels, and I have been known to be perfectly happy curling indulgently around one now and again. I would also, I’m not ashamed to admit, be thrilled to find one of my novels on the bestseller list some day, if it meant that I could then settle down into a happy groove of producing fiction for the rest of my days.
But I don’t think I would get too much argument from anyone by suggesting that the bestseller list today doesn’t represent the most worthwhile literature being produced right now. However, when I tell people, for example, that I haven’t read The DaVinci Code or some other familiar title of the moment, the reaction can be anything from surprise to perplexity. “But aren’t you a big reader?” And when I proceed to defend myself by mentioning authors I am reading – Aimee Bender, Haruki Murakami, Joseph Roth, Peter Ho Davies, Raymond Chandler – I often get blank stares.
I suppose this is why I find it interesting and just a little bit quaint that two of the great literary minds of our generation, Jonathan Franzen and Ben Marcus, are engaged in a public debate, mostly conducted through Harper’s magazine, about the value of realistic fiction versus experimental fiction, as if the either-or equation presented by these two stylistic forms could actually solve the question of why people aren’t reading more – and if they are reading, why are they picking up such trash?
Franzen, for his part, worries in a Harper’s piece that was once titled, “Perchance to Dream,” and then reissued in his book, How to Be Alone, as “Why Bother,” that the social novel no longer has a place in literary culture because it can’t possibly expect to deliver to readers what other forms culture — from television news to the Internet or even extreme sports – already provide to mass audiences. Ben Marcus, in a piece in last month’s Harper’s magazine, “Why Experimental Fiction Threatens to Destroy Publishing, Jonathan Franzen, and Life as We Know It,” argues that Franzen shouldn’t do so much hand-wringing over the question of literature’s popularity, or the fame of great contemporary authors as compared to that of movie stars or sports heroes. He, instead, writes that because literature is an art form, it is, like all other art forms, dependent upon experimentation and innovation for its very survival.
There is another group of writers and literary critics (not mentioned by either Franzen or Marcus), who create what you might call third camp. This group presses for neither realistic nor experimental fiction, but what, for lack of a better word, we might refer to as “the well-told tale.” If this camp had a manifesto, it might be Michael Chabon’s “Editor’s Notebook” preface to McSweeney’s Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales. Chabon’s argument goes something like this: since 1950, American literary culture has labored under the burden of a kind of literary snobbery that excludes all but one form of literature. The term fiction, he argues, has in fact been only one mode of fiction, “the contemporary, quotidian, plotless, moment-of-truth revelatory story.”
Chabon and his supporters, who include a range of authors from Sherman Alexie to Stephen King, argue for a revival of all the lost genres of short fiction, ghost stories and westerns, detective stories and horror stories – in short, stories that are both fun and entertaining and serious, but that don’t require a level of readerly seriousness that feels like swallowing a brick.
All three groups, I should point out, cast themselves as marginal figures, defending a lost art against all who would encroach on their literary ideals. But none of them have a right to claim this status. Not a single one – Franzen, Marcus or Chabon — would be denied a spot at Yaddo or MacDowell. None of them need worry that their books will be published, that their articles will appear in print, or that they will ever be barred from writing for The New York Times Book Review. So, why are they so worried that their type of fiction is so embattled?
I thought I might find the answer to this question by doing a little cultural analysis of my own. It seemed to me that each group had two things in common. First, they were arguing that their form of literature was under-appreciated by the masses of readers. Second, they were arguing that their type of writing had a place in the cultural canon – that is, that ultimately they would hope that future generations would validate the form of writing they’re arguing for, by awarding it with praise, and by studying it in academic circles.
I decided to retrieve a list of bestselling novels in the United States for the last century to determine whether there has ever been a correlation between what we consider great works of literature and what is considered popular fiction. I also wanted to find out whether something has changed in the way we view literature – and whether people are really fighting for spots on the cultural charts, or whether they’re actually just seeking esteem from their literary peers.
I used the Lists of Bestselling Novels in the United States, available HERE, based on Publisher’s Weekly’s lists of bestsellers (not the NYT’s list). It includes ten titles for each year from 1900 to 1998, for a total of 980 titles. I then compared this list with a list of Pulitzer Prize winning novels I found on the Pulitzer web site to find out how many novels from the bestseller lists ever won literature’s top honor.
My first job was to scan the ninety-eight years searching for works that we might today deem “great literature” of the sort that, for instance, the English Department of a major American university would approve for an undergraduate’s general education (such as the General Education in Literature course I teach at Iowa). (I do not pretend to have read even a fraction of the books on the bestseller lists since 1900, so my judgments are made primarily based on my literary education and the biases handed down to me by professors and literary criticism I have read.)
Out of the 980 bestsellers dating back to the beginning of the century, I found fifteen that I’d expect to be slam-dunks – i.e. I wouldn’t have to spend a lot of time explaining to the English Department why they were worthy of serious consideration. They were:
1905: The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton (#8, also 1906, #9)
1906: The Jungle by Upton Sinclair (#6)
1921: The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton (#4) (Pulitzer)
1922: Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis (#10, also 1923, #4))
1931: The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck (#1, also 1931, #1) (Pulitzer)
1937: Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck (#8)
1939: The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck (#1; also #8, 1940) (Pulitzer)
1940: For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway (#4, also #5, 1941)
1943: A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith (#4)
1952: The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway (#7) (Pulitzer)
1958: Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov (#3, also #8, 1959)
1961: To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee (#3) (Pulitzer)
Franny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger (#5, also #2, 1962)
1963: Raise High the Roofbeam, Carpenters by J.D. Salinger (#3)
1969: Portnoy’s Complaint by Philip Roth (#1)
After compiling that list, I followed up by making another list of titles that might not be approved for a “greatest-hits-of-literature” class, but that I felt I could convince the English Department would be worthy of academic study. They were:
1919: The Arrow of Gold by Joseph Conrad (#2)
1921: Main Street by Sinclair Lewis (#1)
1924: So Big by Edna Ferber (#1) (Pulitzer)
1925: Arrowsmith by Sinclair Lewis (#7) (Pulitzer)
1927: Elmer Gantry by Sinclair Lewis (#1)
1928: The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder (#1) (Pulitzer)
1929: Scarlet Sister Mary by Julia Peterkin (#9) (Pulitzer)
1930: Cimarron by Edna Ferber (#1)
The Woman of Andros by Thorton Wilder (#3)
1931: Years of Grace by Margaret Ayer Barnes (#5) (Pulitzer)
1934: Lamb in His Bosom by Caroline Miller (Pulitzer)
` 1935: Lost Horizon by James Hilton (#8)
1936: Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell (#1) (Pulitzer)
It Can’t Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis (#5)
Eyeless in Gaza Aldous Huxley (#10)
1937: The Years by Virginia Woolf (#6)
1938: The Yearling by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings (#1) (Pulitzer)
The Citadel by A. J. Cronin (#2)
1943: The Human Comedy by William Saroyan (#5)
1944: A Bell for Adano by John Hersey (#9) (Pulitzer)
1948: The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer (#2)
1950: East of Eden by John Steinbeck (#3)
Across the River and Into the Trees by Ernest Hemingway (#3)
1952: The Cain Mutiny by Herman Wouk (#2) (Pulitzer)
1953: From Here to Eternity by James Jones (#5)
1956: Andersonville by MacKinlay Kantor (#6) (Pulitzer)
The Mandarins by Simone de Beauvoir (#9)
1957: Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand (#10)
1958: Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak (#1, also #2, 1959)
1959: Lady Chatterly’s Lover by D.H. Lawrence (#5)
The Ugly American by Eugene L. Burdick (#6)
1960: Advise and Consent by Allen Drury (#1) (Pulitzer)
1961: The Agony and the Ecstasy (#1)
The Winter of Our Discontent (#10)
1964: The Spy Who Came in From the Cold by John Le Carre (#1)
Herzog by Saul Bellow (#3)
1966: The Fixer by Bernard Malamud (#6) (Pulitzer)
1967: The Confessions of Nat Turner by William Styron (#2) (Pulitzer)
The Chosen by Chaim Potok (#3)
1970: Islands in the Stream by Ernest Hemingway (#3)
Travels with My Aunt by Graham Greene (#9)
1973: Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut (#3)
1976: Humbolt’s Gift by Saul Bellow (#10) (Pulitzer)
1977: Delta of Venus by Anais Nin (#9)
1979: Sophie’s Choice by William Styron (#2)
Jailbird by Kurt Vonnegut (#5)
1981: The Hotel New Hampshire by John Irving (#2)
1983: The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco (#7)
1989: The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie (#6)
1998: A Man in Full by Tom Wolfe (#4)
I hope it goes without saying that my choices are, by necessity, subjective, and that these lists could be reorganized in infinite permutations based on a reader’s, or teacher’s, own prejudices and personal tastes. Herzog may belong on the top list, for example, as could Virginia Woolf, The Years, and one might easily make a case that A Tree Grows in Brooklyn belongs on the secondary list and not the first.
I have also tried to be conservative in my list-making. There may be other works on the bestseller lists that deserve a critical re-examination. Someone could certainly argue that I might’ve added more works by John Le Carre or Sinclair Lewis. The Pit by Frank Norris (1903) could be a contender for the second list, and Sir Conan Doyle’s first Sherlock Holmes mystery, The Hound of the Baskervilles, might fit into a course on historic mystery novels. One could make a case to also add Giant, by Edna Ferber, who won the Pulitzer in 1925 and was a charter member of the Algonquin Round Table.
We could also elevate a few more titles to higher stature, for example, by teaching them in a course the explored the socio-political impact of novels made into films. Our syllabus would include such works as Grand Hotel, by Vicki Baum (#4, 1931) or Rosemary’s Baby by Ira Levin (#7, 1967). Great books? Maybe not. But who can deny the impact they’ve had on our culture?
In total, I came up with 20 bestsellers that were also Pulitzer Prize winners; so in just under 20 percent of the years from 1900 to 1998, a critically acclaimed novel was also popular. And I came up with at least 65 titles – and maybe 70 at best — that would be worthy of teaching to future generations of young people. That’s about a 6.5 to 7 percent success rate, if we are to measure success based on literary value and longevity.
I had a mixture of emotional and intellectual responses after reviewing these lists and attempting to categorize the titles. I have to admit I was surprised. I had always assumed – as most people do these days – that the term “bestseller” was essentially synonymous with “trash.” But many of the great books we recognize today as literary masterpieces were, in their time, popular novels.
I was also struck by how difficult it was to find recognizable titles in both the first two decades and the final two decades of the century. It’s possible that I simply don’t know enough about the great works of American literature from 1900 to 1920, and there might be titles that I overlooked. But since I was born in 1969, and because I’ve been reading the Book Review for about 15 years, I found it a little surprising then to note that during my adult reading years there have been very few serious novels that achieved mass popularity. The only ones I found in the last two decades of the 20th Century were The Name of the Rose, The Satanic Verses, and A Man in Full.
The period we might call the “Golden Age” of bestseller fiction came in mid-century. As I got into the late ‘50s and early ‘60s, I was surprised to find myself highlighting not one or two recognizable titles every couple of years, but three or four sometimes in a single year. In 1961, for example, Americans were reading, or at least buying, The Agony and the Ecstacy (#1), Franny and Zooey (#2), To Kill A Mockingbird (#3), Tropic of Cancer (#6) and Steinbeck’s The Winter of Our Discontent (#10). That’s a pretty high-brow reading list compared to 1994, when three of the top ten bestsellers (#4, #7, and #8) were by Danielle Steele, and others were John Grisham (#1), Tom Clancy (#2), James Redfield (#3), Stephen King (#5) and Michael Crichton (#10).
What also struck me was that the names that hit the charts in 1994 are the same ones whose names appear on just about every list from 1980 to 1998, along with other repeat performers such as James Patterson, Patricia Cornwell, Scott Turow, Robert Ludlam and Mary Higgins Clark. If we were to judge literary value by the most books most Americans were buying, Danielle Steel would be our greatest American author, since her name appears on bestseller lists 29 times from 1983 to 1998, holding 24 percent of slots from 1990 to 1998 alone. She appears on the list three times each year in 1994, 1997, and 1998 and twice per year in 1985, 1987, 1989, 1991, 1992, 1995 and 1996.
Is Danielle Steel a great writer? I have not read any of her books so I am in no position to judge. But I very much doubt that anyone who considers themselves a serious reader of fiction would argue that she is the finest practitioner of the craft. But I do have to disagree with Anthony Lane, who, in a 1994 essay in the New Yorker concluded that the bestseller lists is no trashier now than it ever has been. Looking at my list, it’s clear the bestsellers have gotten far trashier.
The bestseller in fiction took a precipitous turn in the 1980s towards what might be termed the “throwaway read,” a novel with a shelf life of yogurt. Interestingly, that doesn’t seem to be quite as true with nonfiction bestsellers. America’s nonfiction bestseller lists still have some pretty hefty titles. This week, for example, the nonfiction bestseller list included Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking and Thomas Friedman’s The World is Flat, both complicated and voluminous works.
And nonfiction readers seem to be much more consistent in their reading tastes. Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink, “exploring the importance of hunch and instinct to the workings of the mind” has been on the bestseller charts for 42 weeks this week, as Friedman’s book has stayed aloft 30 weeks. Steven D. Leavitt and Stephen J. Dubner’s book Freakonomics continues to be purchased after 29 weeks, and David McCullough’s 1776 keeps ticking at 23 weeks. Meantime, no fiction title on this week’s bestseller list has enjoyed that status for more than five weeks in a row.
What explains the runaway marketplace success of authors like Steel, who has produced more than fifty books with the speed of a Thai Nike sneaker factory, or Patterson, who advertises on television and who claims as a literary innovation his tendency to write very short chapters, so his works “feel addictive?”
Corporate consolidation of the publishing industry and the rise of the mega-chain bookstore are part of the answer, because the combination of the two forces has led to the decline of the number of titles published and a shift towards promotion of nonfiction, celebrity-driven titles, and mass-market fiction. The result is that “good fiction, investigative reporting and other quality books are simply being squeezed out of the market,” as a 1999 Multinational Monitor report asserts. Put another way, the books this industry prefers to produce are pre-packaged products, infinitely reproducible, and as easy digested as McDonald’s Big Macs.
Literacy rates also contribute. Last year, the National Endowment for the Arts issued a report, “Reading at Risk: A Survey of Literary Reading in America,” which found that there had been an overall decline of 10 percentage points in literary readers from 1982 to 2002, representing a loss of 20 million potential readers.
Shortened attention spans may also be to blame. According to Publisher’s Weekly, an average person in 2004 spent a total of 86 hours a year reading, down from 101 hours a year in 1995. It’s possible more people are picking up throwaway novels because they simply want to spend less time reading.
But I fear that after all this analysis I’ve only ended up where Franzen began in 1997. Franzen blames the consumer economy and digital culture competing for peoples’ attention and making formerly serious readers less serious about books. He asserts that new media deluges us with so much information and entertainment that most people don’t feel as if they need to turn to books. “As… the novel’s audience peels away, what’s left is mainly the hard core of resistant readers, who read because they must. That core is a very small prize to be divided among a very large number of working novelists.”
But then I hesitate – aren’t some of the people who read trashy fiction people who also read “because they must?” What about the 11.23 million readers who bought John Grisham’s The Pelican Brief, despite the ever-present lure of the Internet, paint ball and extreme sports to distract them? Irving Bacheller, one of the most popular authors of the first decade of the same century, who made three appearances on the bestseller lists of 1900 and 1901, only sold a million copies of his most famous novel, Eben Holden: A Tale of the North Country (1900), at a time when there was no Internet, no video games, no television and not even a decent pin-ball game to distract them.
If Crichton’s readers don’t care about books, why read at all? Do we forget about these folks because, as Franzen says, because they treat books as “a portable substitute for TV?” Do we focus only on those people who felt culturally required to read good fiction at some point in the past? Franzen writes in “Why Bother?” that he was dismayed to find, after publishing his second book that, “All of a sudden it seemed as if friends of mine who used to read no longer even apologized for having stopped.” Did they stop because there weren’t good books out there for them to read, or because the cultural requirement seems to have been lifted? If the latter is the answer, then were they serious readers in the first place?
There is a very real crisis of American letters that began in the 1980s and seems to have only gotten worse in the last 25 years – and that is, the books that most Americans are buying and reading correspond very little to what we hope we’ll hand down to future generations as works of great literary merit. But instead of addressing the readers who are out there, a handful of literary critics are arguing with each other over what should attract members of this “hard core of resistant readers.” They’re fighting over what gets produced in literary journals and published in the ever-dwindling space offered for fiction in general-interest publications – realistic or experimental fiction.
Leaving behind the question of why people might prefer throwaway books to “serious literature,” let’s explore what we, as people who care about the future of great literature, can do about it.
Do we continue to allow this gulf between the readers of throwaway fiction and readers of “serious literary stuff” to widen? Do we, the “insiders” of the literary profession, turn our backs on those readers and continue to debate each other over which camp deserves the most critical acclaim and academic canonization? Do we demonize one group of writers in order to uplift our own segment of the literary elite? Or do we try and find a way, as authors, as people who believe in the value of “serious books,” to get good reading materials into the hands of the readers who already are reading?
Without, I hope, oversimplifying Franzen’s argument, it seems unfair to target masters of the craft such as William Gaddis, who is the subject of his 2002 New Yorker essay, “Mr. Difficult,” by saying that his work is too hard to read and not entertaining enough. He adds to his list of “difficult reading” authors such as Pynchon, DeLillo, Coover, Barth and Barthelme. Following this thread, I suppose Franzen would basically argue for tossing out most “post-modernist” books in favor of books with naturalistic logic and easy readability such as, say, Age of Innocence, which once attracted a popular readership.
I tend to agree with Marcus when he argues that there’s nothing wrong with a tough read – and in fact, sometimes it can be very enjoyable. And I agree that asking authors to always reproduce formerly-successful modes encourages writers to “behave like cover bands, embellishing the oldies, maybe, while ensuring that buried in the song is an old familiar melody to make us smile with recognition, so that we might read more from memory than by active attention.” Realism is already the reigning paradigm in literature today, or as Marcus puts it, the “incumbent mode.” And it’s still not popular enough for Franzen.
Franzen makes a good argument when he suggests that authors strive to have a “contract” with our readers – that when they take the time away from paint ball to read our serious novels we should provide them with something “fun and entertaining” that they can sink their teeth into. But “fun” and “entertaining” are pretty subjective terms, and I suspect that what’s fun for Franzen might not be fun to me – since he’s a big fan of bird-watching – and what’s entertaining to the guy I meet on the beach who’s happily reading Blink may not be entertaining to me.
I agree with Marcus that it’s unfair to categorize everything that doesn’t have a straightforward naturalistic plot as “experimental,” because that is far too reductive. The experimental label probably turns a lot of people away from great books that are not only worthy of reading but that are also “fun and entertaining.” But I disagree with Marcus when he argues that we basically forget about the reader who picks up throwaway novels because the pursuit of great art shouldn’t be dragged down by the lowest-common denominator.
But there is another way. Literature doesn’t have to be either “difficult and experimental” or “friendly and realistic.” This dichotomy is artificial, anyway. Chabon makes the case that it’s time we throw open the doors of the literary castle to a greater variety of literature, including genre fiction and other “low” forms that critics have deemed, in the past, unworthy of serious literary consideration. People like murder mysteries and horror stories and ghost stories and romances – that’s why they’re taking the time away from paint ball to read Stephen King, Danielle Steel, Patricia Cornwall, etc. Why do we feel required to dismiss this entire body of readers? Is it because we assume they are afraid of material that gives them, as Franzen puts it in his essay, “a sense of having company in this great human enterprise?” I’d wager that even most literary writers have at one time been obsessed with some genre, whether it’s science fiction or self-help or romance, or detective stories – though most likely they’ve kept these feelings closeted. They probably even secretly want to write these types of books.
Chabon argues for more reader-friendly tales, and even those that come from genres that have been long been discredited by the academy. He wants those modes – and new storytelling modes, too – to be practiced by writers who know a thing or two about the craft, so that the works can be character-driven, syntactically complex, ideologically complex, as well as “thrilling.” This is where his argument essentially intersects with both the points made by Franzen and Marcus. Franzen wants literature to be popular. Marcus wants new modalities. Is it so impossible to imagine that popular forms could be harnessed by writers who actually have something to say about the “great human enterprise?” Shouldn’t the best practitioners of our craft be encouraged to write the kinds of stories that people will enjoy, and to do so with all the intelligence, wit, attention to detail, understanding of voice, tone, energy and skill that is now devoted primarily to the realistic, naturalistic, mode?
I would argue that realistic fiction – as defined by Chabon as the “the contemporary, quotidian, plotless, moment-of-truth revelatory story” – is in fact just another genre. Anyone who has been reading literature since the 1960s is familiar with the formula, the style, the arc, and the anticipated weightiness and lyricism of the prose. We know at the end of a realist story that someone will have an epiphanic moment, just as we know that at the end of a detective novel the mystery will be solved in some way we didn’t expect. We can almost set our clocks by the point, about three-quarters through a New Yorker story, when we are supposed to be moved to tears or to have a sudden awakening. If these expectations from realistic fiction prevail, why should we be surprised that readers are bored with “serious literary fiction?”
The detective novel – now a well-worn form that seems to have been born with prehistoric man, was actually only invented 150 years ago by Edgar Allan Poe. The form has hundreds of terrible practitioners, perhaps thousands. But it also gave us some works of art, such as The Maltese Falcon by Dashielle Hammett. Great works can often come out of what we consider to be low-art. Huckleberry Finn is an adventure novel; Gone with the Wind is a romance novel; The Old Man and the Sea was a seafaring tale.
We don’t think of them that way today, because they’ve withstood the test of time. The reason is that they were written well and overcame their genre categorization. My suspicion is that in the future we’ll be less concerned about what mode of writing an author chose and more concerned with whether they approached the subject of truth with some honesty, humanity, and insight. When new and old genres accomplish this, we can throw away the useless labels “genre” and “experimental.”
-This piece was never published but was Nina Siegal’s MFA Thesis paper at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, May 2006