What Makes Good Fiction

An editorial

I recently found the mute function, and I have to tell you it’s a huge weight off of my mind. I mean it makes me not want to kill myself by making the horrible decision and stop to read the probably AI generated slop by a presumed educator trying to do her best nihilism spiral like an even more bleak Oprah Winfrey. On this site there are many writers, many readers, and an unfortunately large number of people who either fancy themselves political commentators or book reviewers. I’m not entirely innocent of this one as I do get on my bully pulpit, including right now, but at least I’m generally advocating for things I actually believe in. I leave it to you the individual to decide if I’m full of it.

The thing is there’s more going on here than just shit takes to top the shit cake of terrible commentators. I would name names, but here we are twenty-four hours later and I can’t even remember the name of the person I muted. That’s how little I think of them.

What is being lost in a more general sense is an idea of what actually makes good fiction. For as long as we’ve had commercial fiction there have been literati who consider themselves they self appointed ministers of what is and is not ‘good’ and will dictate to you what you should read. For the longest time these were collegiate and university ivy league douchebags who disdained you, the reader, for poplit. You can imagine them already as I am describing it: self satisfied, corpulent, sitting behind a big desk and raising an arch brow at your comic books because he reads literature.

Now that particular bogeyman is fading or has at least mutated. More and more poplit is becoming rightly recognized as literature and they have to do mental handstands to say otherwise. As I’ve mentioned before, they love to suggest Lord of the Rings is literature because of its length, its depth, and the aroma it produces on your shelf. Conversely they’ll try to tell you Burroughs, Gemmell, Howard, Lieber, and Moorcock aren’t literature because they’re short, lurid, and crowd pleasing. These are the same people who try to suggest Sir Conan Arthur Doyle wrote big boy books and that its just unfortunate circumstance that Sherlock Holmes is his most popular work being sleazy mystery fiction, like he and Agatha Christie are somehow better - more pure - than Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, or Mickey Spillane.

So you now have a hinterland of poplit that is profound enough to be literature, but nonconforming, and with it a new breed of critical literati who want to curate your reading. They want you to read <selected pet author>, but you shouldn’t read John Steinbeck because he’s “problematic.” Okay, you can read Harper Lee, but only if you admit Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird is a “white savior.” And, as a new permutation of the purity spiral, you shouldn’t read the classics because they’re evil. Ulysses? Moby Dick? Paradise Lost? Oh, that’s too patriarchal, too western, too staid.

Worse, they’ll still trot out some random deep stuff ‘you’ve never read’ so they can hide their bull mess behind the cloth of better works. For instance, they’ll tell you about what they think Don Quixote is about, but they don’t actually understand it because they don’t want to and they don’t want you to either. First they want to tell you what to think, then they want you to regurgitate it because it sounds smart. Actually reading books for yourself could be dangerous.

And, since you’re already doing what you’re told, why not accept their politics while you’re at it?

Because yes, that’s what this is all about.

You should always read original sources.

Read them for yourself, and when you do read the good ones. If it’s some modern author you’ve never heard of re-writing the Illiad to tell you what it means and litter it with zoomerisms you’re reading the wrong one. Get the old one. Get the one they don’t want you to read. That’s the good stuff.

But how can you choose a good book from a shit one?

That’s actually super easy, and that’s what they don’t want you to know.

A good book operates on two levels: the textual and the thematic. You always hear about the thematic. People love to talk about themes because themes are open to interpretation. You can say a book means almost anything, especially if someone has never read it. So, as a for instance, Moby Dick by Melville has themes of obsession, man versus nature, and if we squint real hard someone could argue its about a Christian ideological drive to dominate and destroy nature and pacify it, which is probably an imperialism narrative to someone.

Give me a moment, I might throw up.

Okay, I’m good.

So then there’s the actual story. A young man goes to sea to make his fortune in a profitable industry and discovers not only is it not what he thought as whaling was a horrific industrial process, but that the men who ply the waves do so with an almost religious mania that is encapsulated within the captain and his personal quest for vengeance which almost claims them all.

That’s because in addition to a well told, well structured, fiction Moby Dick has a lot of things going on “under the hood,” and that’s what separates boring from good. You want fiction that first pleases you on a visceral internal level, you enjoy reading it, and then you want fiction that makes you think because there’s stuff going on.

Does that mean every story needs to be a deep narrative?

God no. Popcorn exists. Read some light stuff. Have fun.

Does that mean that every deep book is a good book?

Also no. There are many, many deep books that are absolute trash.

For instance, I don’t enjoy reading Uncle Tom’s Cabin. It’s a brazen naked analysis of slavery and it makes me hate it with every fiber of my being. But, it’s a very important, very well written fiction. I really want to finish it one day. On the other hand, I can’t stand The Great Gatsby, it is the quintessential story about rich assholes who lose it all and die because they’re rich assholes. If you want a much better contemporary American novel from almost the same era read The Postman Always Rings Twice. Assholes have asshole things happen and die or end up in prison, but it doesn’t present it as a sorrowful inescapable and emotionally confused tragedy. They deserve what’s coming to them and they know it, but their greed and arrogance is their undoing.

Using this guideline you can often figure out very quickly if a book is any good or not. Lord of the Flies is pretty good in terms of text, and has some strong themes, but it completely loses its own plot up the authors ass in the last ten pages. The same goes for Upton Sinclair and The Jungle. The only warning I would have is don’t adopt it as a Prichard Scale. The eponymous Prichard Scale appears in the film Dead Poet’s Society and postulates that a poem’s greatness can be determined by the following formula: Greatness = Perfection * Importance. As Robin William’s character opines “I like American Bandstand but I can’t dance to it.”

We’re not looking for greatness. Greatness is innate. A book will be good or bad whether you like it or not. As much as I might hate Tolkein the man, his works have stood the test of time and will outstrip my bones. We are still reading Gilgamesh thousands of years later. No, this is a guideline for finding the works that appeal to you and forming your own opinions of them.

The literati want to break fiction down into a measure of relative greatness.

All you need is good enough.