We mostly read for story, not for style

From The Way We Read Now by Adam Kirsch.

What makes a book popular? What makes a book enduring? What makes a book consequential? Each a million dollar question.

The challenges are enormous. How do you measure popularity? How do you measure consequentiality? How do you measure durability? How do you deal with the recency effect? How do you address the disconnect between commercial success and critical reception? How do you address the age cohort issue? How do you address translations? How do you address the confounding factor when books are turned into movies?

As with any survey, the results depend on the definitions used and the populations being sampled. Pick you definitions and pick your populations and you pretty much have your answers.

None of this stops newspapers, magazines and others from assembling new lists that other can berate, mock, admire, or use.

In this instance they are using Great American Read.

When the novelist Philip Roth died in May, the obituaries and tributes agreed that he was (to quote a few choice descriptions) “towering,” “pre-eminent” and a “giant of the American novel.” In the opinion of those who create the official narrative of American literature—the critics who write about it, the professors who teach it, the publishers who sell it—there was no one bigger than Roth. The one question few stopped to ask—and maybe an obituary was not the place to ask it—is whether the reading public agreed. Is Philip Roth in fact one of America’s favorite novelists? Can such a thing even be measured?

As it turns out, it can—and he isn’t. We know this thanks to “The Great American Read,” a new initiative from PBS, which set out to produce a list of America’s 100 favorite works of fiction. The alphabetical list (the books aren’t ranked) was released this spring, based on a poll of more than 7,000 American readers. The results of the poll were winnowed down by an advisory panel of “literary industry professionals” using a few rules: The books had to be published (though not necessarily written) in English, with a series like “Harry Potter” counted as one title, and there could be no more than one book per author.

There is a lot of discussion of the issues, particularly the obviousness of the recency effect (23% of the nominated books on the list of 100 were published in the past 19 years, an improbable outcome if we are weighting durability as important.)

But then Kirsch goes on to another observation.

Beyond statistics, however, there are also literary insights that can be deduced from the Great American Read list. For one thing, it seems clear that American readers don’t care very much about good prose. “The Da Vinci Code” and “Fifty Shades of Grey” are regularly cited as examples of terrible writing, but both were mega-best sellers, and both find a place among the top 100. This is not simply a matter of readers preferring genre writing to literary writing. Rather, it appears that, in any genre, readers prefer strictly functional prose to stylistic elegance or idiosyncrasy. Isaac Asimov is on the top 100 list, but not Philip K. Dick ; James Patterson’s Alex Cross mysteries and Agatha Christie’s “And Then There Were None,” but not Elmore Leonard or Raymond Chandler.

Another way of putting it is that when Americans read, we mostly read for story, not for style. We want to know what happens next, and not to be slowed down by writing that calls attention to itself. According to one familiar indictment of modern literature, today’s literary writers are unpopular precisely because they have lost interest in telling stories and become obsessed with technique. In the 20th century, this argument goes, literature became esoteric, self-regarding and difficult, losing both the storytelling power and the mass readership that writers like Balzac, Dickens and Twain had enjoyed.

It is an interesting observation.