WRITING ABOUT PHILIP ROTH IN 1984, MARTIN AMIS MADE this aside: “Though they all want it, in a way, writers tend to be distrustful of the ridiculous accident of bestsellerdom.” True, we do all want the ridiculous accident, and for all the reasons anyone wants what money brings. And yes, at the same time we are, or should be, distrustful of the accident, since writers can’t pretend they don’t know what bestsellerdom usually means: populist, puerile—a whoredom of bad prose and tumescent plots. We all want it but we aren’t all going to get it. We aren’t even going to get close.
Who does get close to the ridiculous accident, and just how accidental is the ridiculousness? In The Bestseller Code: Anatomy of the Blockbuster Novel, Jodie Archer and Matthew Jockers don’t believe in accidents. Here’s their thesis, worth quoting at length:
The bold claim of this book is that New York Times bestsellers are not random but predictable. They are predictable not due to the commonly repeated “truth” that it is all about an established name, marketing dollars, or expensive publicity campaigns. . . . Forget worries about covers. Forget obsessional Facebook posts and endless tweeting. . . . What really matters in predicting whether a novel will make it or not is nothing more or less than the author’s manuscript . . . and a computer model that can read, recognize, and sift through thousands of features in thousands of books in order to predict which books are most likely to succeed in the market.
The authors have devised a computer program, an algorithm “fine-tuned on over 20,000 contemporary novels,” and have set it loose inspecting the elements that go into building a novel: theme, plot, character, setting, etc. Bestsellers, they tell us, “have a distinct set of subtle signals, a latent bestseller code.” Their program analyzed twenty-eight hundred features of bestselling novels and can boast of an 80 percent accuracy rate in determining what novel will break big. It has other talents, too, this program. With the counting of only articles or prepositions, it can guess, “with 82 percent accuracy,” whether a writer is a woman or a man. Hunting only the word “the,” their program can say, “with a reasonable degree of certainty,” if the writer is English or American. This is all very curious.
The authors refer to themselves as “literary scholars” and “literary critics,” and that’s giving those two job descriptions quite a workout here. Awed by the market, they are tirelessly upbeat, breathless over bestsellers, their “bestseller-ometer,” “machine learning,” and “text mining.” In this effusive jamboree of facts you’ll learn that “heroines are so often twenty-eight years old,” that love scenes appear “exactly at page 200 if it’s a 400-page novel,” and that bestsellers have “three-part plot shapes.” You’ll learn that “the stylistics” of Jackie Collins and Jane Austen “are much the same”—that hurts. You’ll learn that in The Da Vinci Code—can we agree, for the sake of accuracy and defiance, to call it The Leonardo Code?—“Dan Brown averages seven instances of the word ‘the’ for every hundred words,” and that “the word ‘thing’ occurs six times more often in bestsellers than in non-bestsellers.” You’ll learn also that bestsellers have “wives more than husbands and girls more than boys.”
You’ll learn, in other words, about ritual, about formulas, but you will already know that the preponderance of bestsellers is yawningly formulaic: that’s partly how they became bestsellers. Their readers want formulas, predictability, the familiarity of being on a ride that zips them along without any meaningful crisis of spirit or mind. They want to identify, to relate; they want a novel to resonate. If you’ve ever tried to read a bestseller by, say, Nicholas Sparks or Jodi Picoult, you know that there’s nothing there beneath the page, no connotative complexity, no aesthetical commitment, no turbulence of intellect, and so no reaching for wisdom. “The kind of book that sells by the million,” said Anthony Burgess, “rarely imparts to its readers the sense of epiphany.” No, but it has plenty of feeling to impart, and that fits well in a culture where emotion has achieved a bullying apotheosis. Nicholas Sparks is so chronically saccharine you can feel yourself getting diabetes as you read.
Archer and Jockers ably show that, despite George R. R. Martin’s tomes and whatever other bestselling fantasies you can name, verisimilitude rules the list and always has, since lazy readers like to savor the sentimental preciousness of seeing their own situations dramatized. This rabid realism comes as no surprise because once a writer disposes of it then he becomes obliged to rely on language—on a style that employs the sophisticated and recruits the imagination of his readers—and if there’s one thing the average bestselling writer can’t ever pull off, it’s language. Remember Evelyn Waugh’s relevant admission: “I regard writing not as an investigation of character but as an exercise in the use of language.” For bestsellers atop the list, the dynamism and dimensions of language are rather beside the point. Plot is the thing, and never mind that if the language is crippled no one with half a mind will care about the plot.
You know that popularity is as different from importance as enjoyment is from joy. The marketplace can’t and won’t measure merit, and it’s perfectly okay with that. But are you okay with that? When a nation’s book taste is in the gutter, you can count on other things soon joining it there, such as that nation’s facility for language and thinking, for judgment and morality and spiritual vigor. When did things go so wrong?
Things never were right. There never was a golden age of reading, of pervasive high culture that promoted meritocracy, a culture in which the masses revered the most serious and artistically accomplished work. Flip through Horace and you’ll find him castigating inferior poets and those plebs who celebrate them. In an 1818 lecture, William Hazlitt called literary popularity “the shout of the multitude, the idle buzz of fashion, the venal puff.” In 1899 Henry James lamented the pervasiveness of bad taste, the “millions for whom taste is but an obscure, confused, immediate instinct.” In 1919, G. B. Shaw wrote this: “Everybody knows how to read and nobody knows what to read.” In 1929, British critic John Cowper Powys referred to “the frothy nothings of the hour.” There’s Ezra Pound, in a 1933 letter, railing with characteristic bile against “the enfeebled adolescent Amurkn mind” that allows low culture to thrive. In 1973, Gore Vidal had fun poking at “the sort of exuberant badness which so often achieves perfect popularity.” “No one,” he wrote, “has ever lost a penny underestimating the intelligence of the American public.” Expect that to change no time soon. Still, you can’t help suspecting that the “common reader” of Samuel Johnson and Virginia Woolf was a whole lot less common than the ecstatically gullible reader who helped build Dan Brown’s mansion.
The numbers the authors give us are dizzying: “Fifty to fifty-five thousand new works of fiction are published every year,” and that doesn’t count the self-publishing racket, the vanity printers cashing in on dreamers (those “sad but egotistic suckers,” in the words of Paul Fussell). “The five biggest publishing companies own approximately 80 percent of bestsellers.” In the United States, “two hundred to two hundred twenty novels make the New York Times bestseller lists each year,” or less than one-half of one percent of the total novels published annually. Danielle Steel has sold six hundred million copies of her books—that’s not a typo: six hundred million. Disciples of romance often read, say the authors, several hundred romances per year, which isn’t quite the feat it sounds like when you consider how little is actually there, each one a bonbon tossed lazily onto the tongue.
The reality of what is selling is related to the reality of how people are apprehending and appreciating, how they are thinking. Pound believed that “if a nation’s literature declines, the nation atrophies and decays.” Nobody’s pretending that Tom Clancy is literature, but you see Pound’s point about the link between what we read and how we think, between the books we love and the world we see, between language and apprehension. Pound also noticed that a nation which grows accustomed to shoddy books is in the process of losing itself irrevocably. Accept the middling and false in your books and before long you’ll accept the middling and false in everything else, too—your food, your friends, your presidential nominees.
When Archer and Jockers discuss the style of bestsellers they mean only what’s most obvious, primarily diction and syntax, and when they say “winning prose” they of course mean “selling prose.” In literary art, style is not severed from substance; style permits substance, allows theme or plot or character to be born, which is why the literary artist’s first concern is always language: without that nothing else can happen, nothing else can hold. “Style is matter,” said Nabokov (the italics are his), which was just a restatement of Goethe’s notion that “a writer’s style is a true reflection of his inner life.” In that way, style amounts to an embodiment of morality. The language on the page must indicate much more than what is there. That’s the trick to most commercial fiction: never put more on the page than what the surface can hold. Never ask your reader to delve with you into the wombs of language, to rappel into the inky caves of connotation. Literature means a striving into the accuracy and surprise of language, into the many folds of understanding, while popular fiction perverts language to become common advertisement, a public service message that means less than what it says.
Archer and Jockers are researchers ostensibly without judgment, but their giddy register gives them away. To modify a Wildean barb, you sense that they and their algorithm know the price of everything and the value of nothing. Their simplistic talk of words as commodities—“a bestselling verb”—debases language into a species of propaganda. What’s the leading defect that makes Dan Brown enormously inferior to, say, Shirley Hazzard? The inevitability of his gimped prose, sentences that reveal a mind unable to activate self-knowledge or rejoice in analogues, and a pandering to the reductive, which is precisely how propaganda works. Attention to the multiform complexity and surprise of language seeks value and understands that value can be had.
Recall the opening line of I. A. Richards’s Principles of Literary Criticism: “A book is a machine to think with.” But the handy retort from those readers who gorge on bestsellers is: We don’t want to think. We want to escape. There really are not that many choices of reply there if one doesn’t want to sound like a health-food freak chastising children for their chocolate fete. The term “snob” quickly readies itself on the tongue. About bestsellers, I. A. Richards tried to convince himself that “those who disdain them are not necessarily snobs.” Not necessarily, no, but mostly. We snobs enjoy deriding all those lobotomized bestsellers and feeling superior to the talentless readers who make them possible, but Archer and Jockers are right to give us this deflating reminder: “The top few titles alone are why some retailers are able to stay in business and keep selling books at all.” Let’s remember, too, that if it weren’t for bestsellers, some publishing houses would have a hard time keeping their doors open. They can put out serious books and lose money only because they put out shitty books and made money.
As far as their own writing goes, Archer and Jockers are merely competent, though you’ll have to suffer through sentences such as: “Grisham novels and the number one slot go together like potato salad and the Fourth of July,” and: “[E. L.] James writes emotional truths with such regularity of beat that the reader feels the thrum of her words in their bodies like the effect of club music.” They don’t fear the tautology of “male patriarchy,” nor do they mind the hissing each time they mention those unkind “reviewers” whose standards prevent those same reviewers from warming to bestsellers. They more than once refer to something called “the human condition,” as if there were only one. “The Devil Wears Prada is not Hamlet,” they tell us, and it’s good to have that cleared up. And then there’s this rodeo of wrongheadedness:
The value of those writers on the bestseller lists is that these books make us read. They make us imagine, feel, discuss, think, and empathize. They let us fantasize, spy, escape. The New York Times novelists form the core of literary discussion and debate around the country. . . . We look to them for understanding of our world. We look to them to help develop our tastes and opinions and to practice our expression of them.
The first three sentences can probably pass a polygraph test, though “think” doesn’t quite belong. The second three sentences are uniformly false and we should be glad for that: if bestsellers indeed formed the core of literary discussion, and if we indeed looked to them for an understanding of our world, then both literary discussion and our world would be in much graver shape than they are.
Schopenhauer once made the observation that not reading is as important as reading: one must exercise a fine discrimination, must not buy into the easy entertainments of the hour. Archer and Jockers are “interested in the potential to launch new authors,” and so they have the hammy goal of “widening access . . . to the career of writing.” Has anyone ever stepped into a Barnes & Noble and determined that that’s what our culture needs, more writers? Archer and Jockers want to encourage publishers to spend “more of their Patterson/King/Steel budget on the young writers who may one day replace them,” and that sounds decent enough until you realize that it means another generation of supermarket schlock.
Someone at The Guardian is quoted as saying that the authors’ computer model “may revolutionize the publishing industry,” but true revolutions are rare, and anyway, the publishing industry is already undergoing a different revolution instigated by the Internet. It’s a rotten time to be a writer, and especially to make a living as one. There are simply too many of us, and too many are passably competent, and too many editors can’t tell the difference between competence and excellence. What’s worse, there are no readers to speak of. Our society doesn’t care about serious reading. So we have an enormous supply-and-demand problem upon us: everyone a writer, no one a reader.
Look at the history of the bestseller list and you’ll see that since the turn of the last century, Americans have been dependably excited by the same breed of blockbuster. Bestsellers might share a genome, as the authors’ program demonstrates, but untold commercial flops share much of that genome too. “The bestselling novel,” say the authors, “is a world in which characters know, control, and display their agency. . . . They live their lives; they make things happen,” and you have to wonder how that doesn’t apply to nearly every novel you’ve ever read. The ridiculous accident of bestsellerdom occurs between the time a book hits stores and when it begins selling in the millions, and no academic with an algorithm will ever tell us exactly how that Hogwartian wizardry is done.
—The New Republic, SEPTEMBER 28, 2016