The holiday movie season brings us The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, David Fincher’s English-language version of Stieg Larsson’s bestseller, which has already been made into a Swedish movie. Ordinarily you might not want to make a new movie when one based on the same book came out just two years ago, even if it was in a different language; but Larsson’s Millenium Trilogy is more than popular enough to carry the load, with over 27 million books sold worldwide.
That popularity really bugs some people. Sales figures notwithstanding, Larsson’s books fall pretty dramatically short on several conventional metrics of literary quality, such as “elegance of writing” and “plausibility of plot.” Early in the first novel, before we really know what’s going on or have been properly introduced to most of the characters, we are treated to a scene that consists of one character telling another about a long series of complicated and shady European business deals, complete with obscure acronyms and names that will never be mentioned again. This keeps up for what seems like pages. And it’s just a hint of the various stylistic crimes Larsson will gleefully commit throughout the series. He loves piling on meaningless details, especially about what his characters are eating and the clothes they are wearing. The prose is clunky and often wearying. The series effectively evokes the brooding coldness of Scandinavian winters, but that’s not always a good thing.
And yet — the books are impossible to put down, as approximately 9 million readers will testify. (I haven’t seen the American movie, although I did see the Swedish one, which wasn’t anywhere near as gripping as the original novel.) So we have a fairly common occurrence in publishing: books that are fantastically popular, but nevertheless are not very “good” by many agreed-upon criteria. In very different ways, think of Dan Brown, JK Rowling, or Stephenie Meyer.
Faced with such a puzzling phenomenon, one can go two ways. One is to go all-out curmudgeon: take Michael Newman’s review of The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest (many spoilers). It’s not so much a review as an extended whine of incomprehension: How can something so terrible be so beloved by so many people?
The other way, much more interesting, is to actually try to answer that question, rather than just repeat it in an increasingly petulant tone. What is it about these books that makes them so irresistible? In our electronically-focused age, when some good old-fashioned printed books reach dizzying heights of popularity, perhaps the thing to do isn’t to complain that they don’t fit into our pre-existing criteria, but to figure out what they are actually doing right. I personally loved Larsson’s books, and am quite fond of the Harry Potter series, but I would ask the same question about The Da Vinci Code or the Twilight books (the first of which I thought was terrible, and the second of which I was never tempted to pick up). It’s a commonplace to bemoan what a “bad writer” Dan Brown is, but that can’t really be true. People read the books with enjoyment and keep coming back for more; he must be doing something right. Not everything, of course — I doubt that it’s necessary to distort history and science so dramatically just to write a compelling thriller. (A special case would be something like Ayn Rand, whose writing is uniformly off-putting; people keep coming back for the politics, not for the prose.)
In the case of Stieg Larsson, Laura Miller gets it right in her own review of Hornet’s Nest. Say what you will about lumbering prose and distracting minutiae; Larsson has created unforgettable characters and put them in compelling situations. This isn’t a cheap skill that anyone can just pull off, or we’d all be living high off our royalty checks. (Or our heirs would be fighting over them.) When books work for people, it makes more sense to appreciate the craftsmanship than to complain that they don’t fit our criteria. I still don’t know how Dan Brown makes people want to compulsively turn the pages, but it’s no mean trick. More power to him.
There’s a recent New Yorker article reviewing the Eragon books (among others), discussing Tolkien’s legacy and the recent fantasy genre. It does a good job addressing just this question of why these books become so popular despite their literary shortcomings. But actually much of what sells is of very little literary value. Perhaps the greater surprise is when great writing becomes wildly popular, like Dickens in the 19th century. It’s hard to think of anything recent that is as enduring _and_ popular as Dickens.
OK I admit I know nothing about this book/movie other than that she has a tattoo which looks like a dragon. But is there physics (or any science) in there?
Couldn’t disagree more. In an age informed more by Simon Cowell than Samuel Clemens, one might resist the temptation to equate quantity with quality.
Novels are entertainment; they have to be enjoyable. Every other literary merit they might possess is optional.
As long as a sizable fraction of the population thinks the book was fun to read (and the publisher and bookstores give it opportunity to find an audience), it will be commercially successful.
Also, remember that everybody’s got a different definition of what makes a book “good” or “bad”. We organic systems can be so variable.
Interestingly, the complaint about minutia and meaningless, boring detail is what drove me away from that (supposedly) great American classic, Moby Dick. I hit a block of description on whales, whale species, hunting techniques and tactics that went on for something like 30 pages, and just gave up. I wonder what Newman would say about that?
IMHO, critics are at times deeply offended that people just want to be entertained, and that entertainment can come from bad implementations of art. I saw a video a while back that dissected the big chase scene from Dark Knight, complaining about perspective shifts and how many rules of filmmaking it broke, and how bad it was. Nobody really cares, though – did it make for intense viewing that drew you in? Heck yeah.
When critics like Newman ask “Why do people like bad art” that’s not the real question… What they’re actually asking is “Why doesn’t anyone care what I think?”
Perhaps you’re ignoring some obvious reasons why many things in life, which by objective criteria are “terrible”, are nevertheless highly popular: marketing and popularity.
Sometimes the reason something is popular is because it is popular, i.e. a sociological feedback effect since humans are social animals. Hollywood executives know this phenomenon well, and it seems the publishing industry has caught on too. People buy books on the NYT best seller list because they’re on the best seller list. The story and content just has to be passable for _anything_ to rise to join the ranks of the highly popular after some marketing/hype. It’s almost like an anthropic principle of popularity operating in a multiverse of stories. You could even model an “inflation” of popularity if the rate of change of popularity is proportional to popularity, heh.
The Da Vinci Code is compelling because Dan brown came up with one of the best story premises in a long time. If it weren’t for that how many people would have read that book? Not many I wager. If the story is good enough people will tend to forgive whatever flaws the book might have.
Yet ANOTHER depressed goth/punk stereotype. It’s odd that almost all of the goths in media are depressed, or criminals, or act the way they do because of abuse. This isn’t true. In my experience, most goth/punk people are far more open minded, well adjusted and less insecure than their ostensibly normal counterparts. Most people who are as depressed as goths are portrayed don’t have the volition to dress themselves up every day.
@7: Since the basic plot of The Da Vinci Code has been around for a while (e.g., it gets covered in about two pages in Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum) I don’t think that’s it. I think Brown’s success comes down to some combination of:
1) He’s good at making his readers feel smart, either implicitly by writing about highbrow stuff in a way that feels accessible, or more explicitly by making mistakes and letting them feel smug about noticing them. This sounds kind of like an insult, but I actually mean it as a compliment. My favorite puzzle games have exactly the same thing going on. (For example, I remember playing through Portal, feeling really clever about figuring everything out, and then going through it again with commentary and hearing the designers talk about exactly how they’d cued me to figure out all those things I thought I was being so clever about.)
2) He’s got the pacing thing down to an art form. A ridiculously suspenseful art form.
I think you’ve got a really good point. I can’t stand Dan Brown myself, but obviously many people like him. A writer’s whole goal is to produce a book that’s fun to read — a book that people like. So if he’s found a formula that sells and that people like, he’s doing his job. Writing a book that millions of people will enjoy is more difficult than the critics imagine. It takes a certain kind of talent to write something like “The Da Vinci Code” — not a kind of talent I admire or aspire to share, but talent nonetheless.
Slow day on the science front?
I recall hearing about how a bunch of naval officers stuck on a South Sea island in WWII were delighted when a crate of books showed up until they looked over the selection: “O shit! It’s literature!”
Reminds me of Ringu. Extremely popular Japanese novel, made into a South Korean movie, which played in Japan as a foreign film, then made (independently) into a Japanese film with a global audience, which then inspired an English-language remake (The Ring) without reference to the original novel at all. There apparently exists a whole series of South Korean sequels, which, AFAIK, have never been released outside South Korea, in addition to the Japanese sequels and the American The Ring 2, all of which are different.
I eagerly await The Girl with More Dragon Tattoos.
In the early days of sound films, before dubbing and subtitles, they used to make the same film over from scratch in different languages. Probably the best known is the Spanish-language Dracula, filmed shot-for-shot on the same sets as Tod Browning’s classic, but with a different cast and a different director.
I honestly have tried exactly what you’re suggesting with Dan Brown: figure out whatever the Hell it is that made him a rich man. I’m stumped. I loathe his work. And I don’t think it’s a guilty poseur’s loathing, either. It’s the real deal. I found the Da Vinci Code repellent. Some of that had to do with the fact that I once studied the Mary Magdalene phenomenon rather in depth, and hence consider Brown to be little better than a plagiarist. But I can dig a skillful thief, and forgive a great deal if I’m entertained. I like a lot of stuff I happily acknowledge is utter crap, from food, to books, to music, to movies. So what the Hell is it about Dan Brown??? I seriously, sincerely Don’t Get It.
Sorry I must disagree with one aspect of your take. Not by any means impossible to put down, but impossible to keep reading. I was bored, not intrigued and yes found the unnecessary details (Mac Powerbook … whatever) off putting. I have one on kindle not read. I tried and spent a good half hour on a train from Frankfurt to Bern reading. Never touched it since that.
My view is by no means, obviously, the consensus.
Most people read to be entertained and to escape their normal routine. They really don’t care about violations of writing style, factual inaccuracies, or unnecessary detail. Creating compelling characters in an interesting scenario is all that matters. I very much enjoyed reading the Millennium series and many of Dan Brown’s books. They were interesting and fun to read.
Sean, the dichotomy between “popular” and “literary” is nebulous and often difficult to define – perhaps that is why the whole discipline of literary criticism exists in the first place. You mention “pre-existing criteria” but you don’t mention which criteria: New Criticism? Post-modernism? Feminism? First you must situate a novel in a particular school before you can evaluate it on that school’s principles. Northrop Frye attempted this in his “Anatomy of Criticism.”
Keep in mind, “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” was widely popular at the time and is also considered to be the paramount of American fiction.
There is a time and a place for everything. I have read things by Saramago, and sometimes it’s just too much, I just want to read something light that I can understand without having to think too much. And Harry Potter, may not be the greatest piece of literature, but the story, the places, the spells, the creatures and that fantastic world she created it’s what makes it irresistible. It’s like music, one day I want to listen to Mozart, maybe tomorrow I will listen to Evanescense and Enrique Iglesias and perhaps later on I will put in one piece by Schoenberg followed by Debussy.
I’ve not read this book, nor have I ever really felt the need. I did see the Swedish film, it was an alright film but I have no desire to see the American remake. I generally find American remakes in general to be dumbed down and over produced with poor screen writing and more special effects than plot or decent acting. I am starting to get off topic though and my disdain for holywood is a rant all it’s own. The fact is that today fewer and fewer people are even bothering to read, so while what has become possible may or may not technically be great literature the fact that it even has people reading and thinking is far more important than the quality of the work. This being said nobody ever said an entertaining book had to be well written; at the same time noone ever said a well written book was going to be entertaining. I am an avid reader and on the whole much prefer the so called classics over what is being published today, yet while I can see why the writings of Tolstoy have become regaurded as classics, I find Tolstoy to be a tedius read. I honestly find some of Mark Twain’s books to be reather tedius as well. Especially Huck Finn, though some of that is the phoenetic spelling of the southern dialogue which gives me a headache. Let’s also not forget that many of the so called classics were not exactly what one would call well written by the standards of the time. Standards change, and novels are not bound to the same rules of grammer and syntax as essays or text books. Rather than sit there complaining about other peoples taste, just shut up accept the fact that your taste differ’s and just be happy people are actually reading something.
Who decides what is great literature? English teachers and English professors, based on what their teachers and professors told them and their own biases. Schools of literary criticism? I can’t think of a more useless way to waste a student’s time than to have to learn about them (I have a degree in English, so I know). Personally I hate much of what has been decided upon as the “must read” list in high school. I can’t stand The Great Gatsby ((a soap opera) and Catcher in the Rye (gack, more teenage angst!) Reading Dickens is like having your teeth pulled…okay, I did like Great Expectations, but Dickens was paid by the word so he stuffed as many words into his novels as he could. The Bronte sisters? Ho-hum.
Today’s popular literature has a way of becoming tomorrow’s classic literature. So will the DaVinci code be read in 100 years as a classic novel? Maybe, but I hope not. We have better to offer from this era.
Ayn Rand’s writing is divine. Personally, I go back for the prose; the politics are more of an extra treat.
I have a feeling that this movie will be too “hollywood” and take away from the actual intent of the original film, which i thought was amazing. As far as who considers what to be “good literature”…it just doesnt matter. Everyone has opinions about everything, so just enjoy it and be glad its not another sparkling vampire flick lol.
jjdebenedictis: there is a vital difference between ‘enjoyment’ and ‘entertainment’ that falls at the heart of this sort of debate. Particularly, I think, in contemporary culture where we’re surrounded by stuff that’s meant to keep us constantly entertained. In that milieu, I’d argue that the purpose of great literature – of any great art – is to remind us that there are other things to feel than pleasure, excitement and stimulation. There is a virtue – in these times, I think, an absolutely vital virtue – in using art to explore non-entertaining things like disgust, confusion, boredom, anxiety and melancholy.
Dan Brown, meanwhile, is in a category of his own for me. I gave it a go for the sake of cultural curiosity and literally couldn’t bear it. I don’t even understand the claims that it ‘slips down easy’. I’m a science fiction fan, and that often means encountering – particularly from Golden Age writers – a fair bit of skilfully styleless writing whose sole purpose is to tell you who people are and what they are doing without any mucking about, and this wasn’t it. Each sentence drew such noisy attention to its own shoddy construction that my brain felt like Sideshow Bob stepping on a series of rake-handles
@Michelle: Nobody “decides.” That presupposes that there is some ultimate authority on the matter. Criteria is based on reason, and we can evaluate different criticism based on reason. You’re right in that “must-read” novels were often the result of the Ivory Tower passing on old white men, however, the 20th century saw a huge influx of post-colonial and other marginalized voices into the canon.
Without some form of criticism we are left with pure relativism – in which everything can be considered “great” – both Danielle Steele and Shakespeare.
The key to the popularity of these books is that it is very easy to follow the characters and the plot. The characters and the plots are simple. The engaging element is the easily identifiable villain, who you learn to hate from the get-go, and the also so easily-identifiable hero who you learn to love also from the get-go. The big classical books are difficult because they require additional thinking, and positioning in time and space whose etiquette and nuances are so different than today’s. The reason the great books were recognized as great books, is because in their times they were popular, because the people who read them easily identified with the characters, their line of thinking aligned with the behavior of the characters easily. For them it was easy to identify the villain and the hero too. I think that the value of the great books and great music for that matter is that they were used as a medium to communicate disagreement or mockery even with the status-quo. No ‘New York Times’ bestseller book has that quality, and it mainly stems from the fact that we live in a country where mockery and disagreement are not taboo. There are plenty of poorly written books who are considered great books for having that one quality alone, for allowing a breathe of fresh air in otherwise stagnant regime (think Eastern Europe)