The Anti-Anti-Oprah Book Club:
In Defense of Short Attention Spans and Good Writing
(Response to: The 2002 Anti-Oprah Book Club: A Challenge to Mediocrity and Short-Attention Spans)
December 2002
by Stephan Finch

Before I give the "Anti-Oprah Book Club" the roasting it richly deserves, let me express my sympathies. I, too, ache to read books that are not mediocre. And I readily agree that Oprah isn't getting us anywhere. But blaming the dearth of great books on readers' short attention spans is madness. In fact, we're far too patient.

How else to explain the river of nonsense produced by self-appointed saviors of the novel like David Foster Wallace and his friend Jonathan Franzen? I'll begin with Wallace, who you might recall created a deafening buzz in 1996 by publishing a book that was thicker than it was tall. That alone was a record. Wallace's book was aptly titled Infinite Jest. A few puzzled readers said the most remarkable thing about Infinite Jest was that it went on for 1,000 pages without making any point whatsoever.

But the problem wasn't that Infinite Jest lacked a point. Oh no. By page six, it was clear that David Foster Herbert Walker Wallace had a point. DFHWW wanted you to know that modern life, modern media and modern society is confusing, inhumane and unwelcoming to difference. Fine. (Just for the sake of simplicity, let's set aside the matter of this being very little more than what J.D. Salinger told us decades ago.) The problem was that by page 500, DFHWW had hammered that point home so relentlessly that readers began to wonder if maybe there was some other point besides the first point that they should be looking for. And by page 1,100, with DFHWW continuing to clobber the shit out of the the first point and showing no interest in making a second point, readers became so desperately numb, they forgot, or lost interest in, the original point.

But that's not where the problems stopped. The novel's biggest weakness was that it didn't have a plot. It didn't have a conflict. It didn't have a protagonist. It didn't have any of those perfectly useful little gimmicks that writers and storytellers and readers have come to expect. Why? Well, because David Foster Herbert Walker Wallace knew that, first, developing any of these things would have been hard work and, second, because the existence of any of them would have made Infinite Jest easier to understand. And that, my friends, is poison to self-anointed geniuses like DFHWW. Because shucks, it's not supposed to be easy to understand a genius.

So what did we get instead of a plot and a conflict? We got footnotes. Pages and pages of them. Oh, and tennis. We got more damn tennis than a decade of Sports Illustrated could give us. Oh, baby, did we ever get a lot of tennis. Tennis, tennis, tennis. But you know what? Some people were actually thrilled about this. They said it was genius. And get this: They weren't tennis fans. They were college grads.

Yep. Some of those same skinny bastards you used to see strolling across campus with Moliere or Dante or Homer tucked under their arms. Only now it was Infinite Jest. The calculus was simple. Back in college, great literature was usually a little hard to understand. So now, by golly, something that's hard to understand... Well, that must be great literature.

Um... Didn't anybody tell these guys that the overwhelming majority of great books were wildly popular in their day? Henry Fielding is considered difficult to read. But back in the 1700s, people loved to hear his stuff aloud. Jane Austen. Dickens. Hemmingway... all wrote best-sellers. They wanted desperately to be understood by their readers, to draw them in with the music of language and entertain them with a well-plotted story of a hero struggling to overcome a conflict.

Yes, great writers consistently challenge their readers by trying a new idea, even a distasteful one. Nabokov's Lolita comes to mind. Not a mediocre book. Beautifully written. And meant to be understood and enjoyed.

Yet now come Wallace and, more recently, Jonathan Franzen to kick obscurity in our face and tell us it's art. Franzen famously declared in a 1996 essay in Harper's that the novel desperately needed rescue then set about trying to save it by writing The Corrections. In The Corrections, Franzen takes the war on the modern reader's attention span to a new, even more insidious level: The sentence. There isn't a single one in the entire novel that's comprehensible.

The very first one in the novel sets the tone: "The madness of an autumn prairie cold front coming through." What the heck is that? It's a not a complete sentence for one. And it's about the weather, for goodness sake. The most cliched opening sentence of all time is "It was a dark and stormy night." Shortening the cliche by hacking off the subject and verb of that sentence doesn't make it artful. It just makes more obvious that Franzen is a hack. (By the way, I happen to live in Chicago where lots of autumn prairie cold fronts come through and let me tell you: It's no big deal.)

The most delicious irony to accompany the publication of The Corrections: It was chosen as an Oprah book. Need I say more?

Don't let these knuckleheads fool you. If you're bored, it's their fault, not yours. Simply put, great writing is never boring and always surprising. Yes, there's a lot of crap in the bookstore. And yes, some of the most enjoyable books are very little more than crap. I'll admit I've read a Stephen King novel and enjoyed it. Sue me. I've also encountered some books that I think might someday be called great literature. All of them were wildly entertaining and quite accessible. Set down that unfathomably heavy copy of Infinite Jest right now and pick up a tiny little paperback written by Martin Amis called Time's Arrow. Instead of tennis and footnotes, you'll have all the humor and horror and intrigue of a Nazi doctor's life in reverse. You won't be bored. To paraphrase a saying the New Yorker magazine uses in its ads, you'll read, and you'll see.

(Stephan Finch is a volunteer staff writer for 2 Walls Webzine)