when is a bad novel good because it's bad

and when is it just....bad?

Having deleted Twitter, which I especially miss on today of all days (RFK, etc), I don’t have a suitable forum for short-form grievances. Here is my short-form grievance, expressed in an imperfect forum.

I feel like there is a certain kind of tic so common in contemporary criticism that it deserves a name. The tic goes like this: a critic can’t entirely extirpate an abiding fondness for a novel she cannot really justify liking, so she attempts to transmute the novel’s vices into virtues by claiming that the book is bad on purpose, e.g., this novel about life online is boring and sterile and cynical on purpose because life online is itself so boring and sterile and cynical. Maybe the novel in question is boring and sterile and cynical on purpose, but who cares? Either way, it’s boring and sterile and cynical—and therefore not very good. I’ve tried to think of a pithy name for this familiar move and come up short. Call it, provisionally, a second sort of intentional fallacy, because it mistakes an intention for a vindication.

I see this sort of fallacy crop up a lot in the never-ending discourse around a writer I very publicly do not care for, the one and only Sally Rooney. To be clear: I have not read any Rooney novels besides the first two, and I will not be reading any more Rooney novels unless I am handsomely paid to do so. I have no idea whether the latest Rooney novel is good or not. But I do obsessively read reviews of Rooney novels (my own vice, not unlike my penchant for watching reality television) and I think many (not all) of the Rooney apologias in circulation take this form. Yeah, Rooney novels are pat and formulaic and trite and sentimental, because they’re about how the genre of the novel is pat and formulaic and trite and sentimental! Yeah, the characters in Rooney novels are two-dimensional, because they’re about the shallowness of personality as an idea! Okay, but the novels are still pat and formulaic and trite and sentimental and filled with two-dimensional characters. So does it really matter that the novels are cloying and annoying to read on purpose, or perhaps more aptly, in order to make a point? (I’m setting aside the question of whether these readings of Rooney are correct, that is, whether Rooney novels are actually pat and formulaic on purpose, although for the record, I doubt that they are. I get the impression from the first two novels that these are earnest attempts at realist and lightly reactionary fiction about the consolations of conventional heterosexual love. Not that it matters what Rooney herself means, in her private life, in her bedroom alone at night, when she writes in her journal etc; what I mean is that I don’t get the sense that the internal logic of these novels compels anyone to ask meaty thematic questions about self and genre. On the contrary, the internal logic of these highly enjoyable and slightly vacant novels compels their readers to sit down and indulge in some unusually well-crafted escapism. The meaty questions are an external imposition, a testament to the intelligence of those asking them and not to the intelligence of the novels themselves.)

This piece is very smart and vivaciously written; it makes many interesting claims about novels in general that I won’t address in this post.* Indeed, I think it’s much more interesting qua obviously brilliant person’s meditation on the status of the novel than it is qua reading of Sally Rooney—but in the latter guise, it’s guilty of the fallacy. Of Normal People, Chu writes,

“I’m not going to let anything like that happen to you again,” Connell tells her. Marianne lets herself become the shivering female victim of domestic abuse, while Connell strides easily into the role of the selectively violent male protector, and together they adopt a virtuous new sexual dynamic: “He understood that it wasn’t necessary to hurt her. He could let her submit willingly, without violence.” But the artificiality of these roles is not lost on Marianne herself, who despite settling into a “normal” sexual relationship with Connell cannot unsee the trappings of genre that contain them. “Was it just a game, or a favour he was doing her? Did he feel it, the way she did?” she asks herself. “Did he love her?””

This reading interests me in part because I think it’s part of a broader tendency to regard the enterprise of fiction with embarassment, to write fiction that apologizes for being fiction (ahem, Rachel Cusk) and to justify reading fiction by claiming that the fiction in question is really just a means of revealing the contrivedness of fiction in general (the above). But that’s an essay for another day. For our purposes, what matters here is that the fallacy is on display. Normal People is a good novel—because it’s a patently artificial and cheesy novel that it somehow exposes the novel as a sham, as a tissue of tired conventions.

For me, it remains an open and genuinely interesting question when, if ever, a novel is good because it is bad. Maybe novels are sometimes good in virtue of failing in certain respects. But it is certainly not obvious to me that Rooney’s novels are good because they are so affected and corny, and if this makes them good in some way, it doesn’t make them good as novels. It makes them good as theorizations of novels, which isn’t the same thing (unless you think that theorizations of novels and novels can be collapsed into one category, in which case we have much broader and perhaps bloodier disagreements).

* Chu writes, “The novel form and the commodity form are dialectically entwined, to the point that a given novel’s literary qualities may be impossible to distinguish from its economic ones.” This is a premise that I, romantic that I am, do not accept, but to which I won’t attempt to do justice in one dashed-off post. It’s also a premise that serves as an entrée into some more robust claims about fiction that I also do not accept but that I find very interesting—way more interesting than Rooney and her tiresome fiction!