Can a popular novel be badly written?

[Fastolfe]

Originally Posted by HarryT

No offence taken. I do think, though, that by deliberately avoiding what is "popular" you're perhaps missing out on some good stuff.

You're correct, and that's a conscious choice I make. I estimate whether I'll like something by the opinion I have of who buys it. It's a shortcut and something of a logical fallacy, but more often than not, it's pretty accurate. However, I agree that it is at the cost of missing out on great stuff that not-so-great people happen to like.

The alternative would be to sample everything myself, and I don't have the time nor the patience to be disappointed too often.

[gmw]

GraceKrispy and I mentioned accessibility some posts back, and now I see HarryT mentioning that Harry Potter was not "great literature" but was a very good read. Given the number of you that disagree with my OP, what I want to know now is why accessibility is not considered to be a very important part of a good writing?

The the term "great literature" seems to be a phrase reserved for those scary books that seem more about showing off how clever an author can be with words rather than actually entertaining the reader (apologies, that is excessively cynical but expresses a common perception I think). To me there seems a certain amount of snob value here, "oh no, that's not Literature so of course it's not well written". Fastolfe equates popularity with mediocrity. Does that mean that my original post was totally wrong, that writing is not about communication but about how much smarter the writer is than the general population? Can someone logically justify to me why a readily accessible series like Harry Potter should not be considered well written if only on the grounds of accessibility to young and old alike? It got people reading who have hardly ever read before. It's not something I've ever heard said of the many books I've heard described as great literature.

[HarryT]

I do think that Harry Potter is well written. It tells a good story and is entertaining. What more is necessary before something can be considered well written I really don't know.

However, I would say that one can make a distinction between a well written book and a book that has literary merit, by which I mean that it shows an artistry with language, rather than just telling its story well.

Eg, consider the opening of two of Charles Dickens books. First, "Bleak House":

London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln's Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes—gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another's umbrellas in a general infection of ill temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if this day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest.

Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little 'prentice boy on deck. Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon and hanging in the misty clouds.

and now, "A Tale of Two Cities":

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way--in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

There were a king with a large jaw and a queen with a plain face, on the throne of England; there were a king with a large jaw and a queen with a fair face, on the throne of France. In both countries it was clearer than crystal to the lords of the State preserves of loaves and fishes, that things in general were settled for ever.

To me, both of those show such wonderful use of language that they elevate the work of Dickens to the status of "great literature". That's not to say that they are not also entertaining - Dickens is probably my favourite author. But, to my mind at least, Dickens is great literature; Harry Potter is not.

[gmw]

Originally Posted by HarryT

... However, I would say that one can make a distinction between a well written book and a book that has literary merit, by which I mean that it shows an artistry with language, rather than just telling its story well. ...

This paragraph would seem to confirm my suspicion that great literature is about showing off with the language. But I do like much of Dickens, although I've not read Bleak House and I found A Tale of Two Cities to be quite hard work. I've also read criticisms of Dickens writing style too - usually starting specifically with that opening sentence/paragraph from A Tale of Two Cities. And while it may have been accessible in it's day it is much less so now. So my question still stands, why is accessibility not important? Isn't it important that a book can gain an audience?

[HarryT]

Accessibility IS important - at least I think it is. Is anyone saying otherwise? There are works of "literature" that I personally find to be completely unreadable. I prefer to make a distinction between authors like, say, Shakespeare or Dickens, who were the popular entertainment of their day, and writers like Virginia Woolf who deliberately set out to write as an "art form", with not the slightest consideration of whether or not their work was entertaining to read.

[gmw]

Originally Posted by HarryT

Accessibility IS important - at least I think it is. Is anyone saying otherwise? ...

Well that depends on how you read this thread. I have already been found wanting in my understanding of people's opinions/statements, so I could be wrong ... but here goes.

There seem to be quite a number of explicit statements/opinions that popularity has nothing to do with a book being well written. What I was attempting to do was gently lead in to the idea that accessibility is at least one important factor in considering whether a book was well written. If we accept that, and you and I seem to, then as the next step I was going to ask was whether popularity was a reasonable measure of accessibility? (And if it is then popularity does have something to do with quality, even if you would not go so far as to allow that very popular books cannot be badly written.)

[TenaciousBadger]

my answer to the OP's question: a definite yes.
there are tons of novels out there that are bestsellers despite the fact that they are badly written. i'm thinking of the romance category (but without malice )

the paradox is that people do enjoy the books even though they roll their eyes at the repetitiveness, the stereotyping and the honest-to-God bad writing of some authors. i am one of those readers... before you throw the tomatoes . so yeah, in my experience, a popular novel can be badly written.

at the same time, i've come across well-written novels that i could not finish. brilliant novels by awarded writers that plumbed humanity to its darkest depths, novels where every I was dotted, every T crossed and all conditionals used correctly.

i guess it's a case of whatever floats your boat.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by gmw

Well that depends on how you read this thread. I have already been found wanting in my understanding of people's opinions/statements, so I could be wrong ... but here goes.

There seem to be quite a number of explicit statements/opinions that popularity has nothing to do with a book being well written. What I was attempting to do was gently lead in to the idea that accessibility is at least one important factor in considering whether a book was well written. If we accept that, and you and I seem to, then as the next step I was going to ask was whether popularity was a reasonable measure of accessibility? (And if it is then popularity does have something to do with quality, even if you would not go so far as to allow that very popular books cannot be badly written.)

No, I can't agree that accessibility can be a measure of the quality of a book's writing. Let's take as an example the original versions of Stieg Larsson's "Millennium Trilogy" books. They are completely inaccessible to me, because I don't read Swedish. Is my lack of knowledge of Swedish really a factor by which one can judge the quality of the writing of the books? I don't personally think that it is. A book can be well written, but yet completely inaccessible to me if I don't speak the language in which it's written.

[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by HarryT

I do think that Harry Potter is well written. It tells a good story and is entertaining. What more is necessary before something can be considered well written I really don't know.

A good editor. I think they fired hers after book 5, because they realized that anything she put on a page would sell. The seventh book, especially, could've been cut down by 1/3 without losing a bit of quality and would've been much improved by shortening the "camping in the woods" to a chapter or two, instead of a third of the book.

The story was good, and the later books built on the momentum of the first ones; if they'd stood alone, they wouldn't be nearly as popular because they weren't as well-written as the early ones.

However, I would say that one can make a distinction between a well written book and a book that has literary merit, by which I mean that it shows an artistry with language, rather than just telling its story well.

I agree with your point, but I fear the term "artistry with language" is too prone to subjective debate. I think it is objectively identifiable, but in order to describe it, you'd have to start using academic terminology that would kill the average book discussion.

[Freeshadow]

Well methinks HP has its moments - especially when politics and powerplay become the driving force in the plot. Bud judged as a fantasy piece it makes me shrug when I think of all the logic holes in the setting as a whole.
There's plainly too much things not properly being taken care of, when assuming "magic possibilities in the power of (as described)" are present in the setting.
The background is wreck.

btw. Harry I'd be interested in your opinion on the Artemis fowl series in case you have taken a look at it.

[Maggie Leung]

Accessibility is important to a degree. Each writer has a different target audience. Children's books are written with kids' limitations in mind, for instance. Children's books are generally widely accessible; that doesn't mean they're necessarily well written. Writers with a more literary style write for that audience.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by Freeshadow

btw. Harry I'd be interested in your opinion on the Artemis fowl series in case you have taken a look at it.

I'm afraid that I haven't read that series, although I've heard good things about it.

[jezebel]

Accessibility has much to do with a specific target audience, as I think someone else has said. That still isn't an indicator of quality, IMO. It's just an indicator that a writer has found a way to reach an audience, and in some cases*cough* Dan Brown *cough* to exploit that.

[Andrew H.]

I think that the OP is actually confusing whether a popular book can be "badly written" with whether a popular book can be a "bad" book.

The answer to the first question seems to be "yes"; the answer to the second question may be "no."

As I mentioned upthread, I hated a lot of the Da Vinci reading experience because of the bad writing, but I kept turning the pages and finished the book because I wanted to see what happened. And it seems that I'm not alone in that. Which suggests that the book overall was not bad - it at least drew people in - even though the writing was bad.

I have also read books that I didn't finish because, despite the occasionally wonderful use of language, the book didn't end up *going* anywhere and none of the characters were interesting. But, at least at the sentence level, the book was well written.

Re: "Great Literature." Sometimes the language in older books is unfamiliar and hard to follow for people who haven't read much of it. As you read more, it becomes more familiar, easier to follow - and eventually you can find modern pedestrian reading somewhat shallow.

[Vivian]

Just because a book is a page-turner doesn't mean it isn't a horrible book. Pillars of the Earth. I rest my case. Thank you.