Garth Greenwell's book is unreadable

A friend has been texting me about the new Garth Greenwell novel. My friend’s like, it's so bad! What do people see in it?

I'm honestly kind of bemused by the whole exchange. Of course it's bad. Aren't hype-machine books usually bad? Does it even matter if they're actually good or bad? At this point I'm happy if they're even readable! One wants them to be plausibly good, so it's not an overt embarrassment to American letters.

But...obviously nobody is reading these books for fun. Like, why would you? Garth Greenwell's book is full of these immense blocks of text that are quite unpleasant to read!¹

I won't quote from the first page, because it's about the main character having a heart episode, which is based on something that happened in Greenwell's life, so it'd be in poor taste to say the writing is bad, but...if we skip forward (to a section that was also excerpted online, so I assume the publisher thinks it is particularly good):

But maybe a Snickers bar is a wonderful thing, I had thought, I mean in a strong sense, a source of wonder, like G’s chips; maybe it’s unfathomably wonderful, both in itself, as a product of science and experiment, and also as the end point of a whole system of production and distribution, the ingredients sourced I’m sure from all over the world, which can only be abstract to me, I don’t have the brain for complexity and systems. But even in my dumb cartoonish way I could imagine what it must take to make the chip that had lit up my brain, my whole sensorium: the potatoes came from somewhere, they had been planted and harvested and packed and shipped; the salt had been mined, which is a process I don’t know anything about, I’m entirely ignorant; whatever machines had been designed and built to slice and fry, all of it at scale; and then there was the packaging, which was its own miracle, really, an extraordinary invention, a bag filled with air to cushion these impossibly fragile things, somebody had thought of that; and then the systems of distribution to carry them all over the country, the world, so that you can walk into a store in the middle of America, in a college town in Iowa, and for a few dollars fire up those points in your brain that mean pleasure. If all that wasn’t a source of wonder what was, and of deep wonder, there was nothing saccharine about it; of awe, really, since of course it was at once amazing, proof of ingenuity and genius, and also the product of unimaginable suffering, of exploitation and violence and labor, whole histories of conquest and colonization, industrial agriculture and ecological devastation; and along the whole chain the devastation of human bodies, from laborers in the fields to fat Americans shopping organic markets; and there was truth in that, too, the intrication of wonder and depravity, pleasure and violence. It’s something that saturates the past, that soaks the very root of history, and that permeates the future, too, the whole scale of human time, no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism, no truer thing has ever been said, and it’s a truth we should acknowledge. Of course I see what the pundit was saying, it would be ridiculous to try to live like that, in the glare of all that wonder and horror, it would be absurd, simply impossible. But acknowledge that it would also be true, I thought as I listened to his laughter, the laughter of the audience, the conciliatory laughter of his interlocutor; acknowledge the inadequacy of any other response, acknowledge that it’s a failure to shut our eyes to it, a failure in the face of reality, a failure of perception and also a moral failure; acknowledge that the only vision of life we can bear is a lie.

It's got a few very quotidian gestures that we're already extremely familiar with just from having existed on Twitter in the last ten years—the zooming in and out, from the everyday to the macroeconomic, in a way that is not particularly typical of consciousness itself, but only of a very specific kind of consciousness. Yes, if you're the KIND of person who meditates on global capitalism while eating a Snickers bar, then...what? You can write about that. But so what? Anyone could do that. We all know that drug-store candy both tastes good and were created by a corporation in order to seduce our taste buds (that's why most of us don't let our kids eat this stuff by the way).² Those are literally thoughts we could all have while eating a Snickers. Personally I love drugstore candy. I love Kit-Kats. I would never let my kid eat one, because it drives her nuts—she starts shaking and screaming and fuming for no reason, with even the smallest amount of drug-store candy.

That's a story one could tell about drug-store candy. I've elucidated the ways in which the existence of this candy, with its delicious taste and its terrible chemical composition, have led me to have a complicated, ambivalent relationship to it.

The actuality of the substance is what makes it complicated! The actuality of how we interact with it—that is the complicated thing! What does it matter how we think about it? It’s totally unnecessary to meditate upon the nature of the Snickers bar and its role in global capitalism, because the complex, contradictory nature of cheap candy is already immediately apparent to every single person who’s ever eaten it. I enjoy this, even though it’s bad for me. That is it. That’s the thing. That’s literally what a Snickers bar is.

Now, I understand it’s stream of consciousness. But stream of consciousness is only meaningful if there’s actually something in the thoughts themselves that feels raw or forbidden or unprocessed.

Kind of like Knausgaard—his series was extremely troubling because...it was about Hitler. He named it after Hitler's memoir. Then he closed it with a meditation about Hitler. And in the midst of the series were these very raw thoughts and feelings—moments of internal callousness that often made him look quite bad! They were the sort of thoughts you're normally too ashamed to publish, which is exactly what made them interesting!

If there’s nothing in the thoughts themselves that feels intrinsically noteworthy, then it just comes off as hubris: “Oh these are the same thoughts everyone has, but I can make them sound pretty.”

And they’re not even pretty! Can you imagine reading page after page after page after page of this writing? It is actually impossible for any review to convey the full experience of reading this book, because the individual paragraphs are far too long to excerpt in full. Reviews can say “Where another writer might place a period, Greenwell uses a comma, creating an unfamiliar pattern by prolonging the sentence a little further than we might expect”, but if you actually open the book you are confronted with massive blocks of the most banal sentiments imaginable. The acoustic properties of the writing are terrible, but why even talk about them when your mind will literally refuse to even read an entire paragraph.

I told this to a friend, who had a copy of the book at his house. He said “I glanced at the first page and it didn't seem bad.” I agree with him! On the first page, it seems like the kind of book that’ll have something to say. But the moment you actually try to read it, you rapidly discover that on a sentence-to-sentence, paragraph-to-paragraph level, there is simply nothing in here that’s fresh or insightful. The book’s basic move remains consistently the same—lifeless description of events, followed by aw-shucks, gee-whillikers reflections of the blandest sort:

It was very early, I was the first person at the clinic when it opened. The woman at registration asked me to wait at the door while she pulled on her face shield, not the flimsy almost disposable kind I had seen around town but made of a thick hard plastic, black, almost military. It was open in the back but otherwise it resembled the helmets police were wearing at the demonstrations that filled the news, protests that were largely about the militarization and brutality of the police, brutality that began, I sometimes thought, with the helmets and armor that sealed them off from the people they faced.

Occasionally there are the tiniest hints of anger or frustration, but they are almost immediately shut down in the internal narration, and this tension never really builds. One gets the impression we’re supposed to be impressed by the author’s bravery in admitting to anodyne sentiments (like being frustrated at nursing staff) that book itself never fully allows its protagonist to truly feel!

We were in a little alcove with a curtain she left undrawn, I sat in a chair while she took my blood pressure and temperature, she stood at a computer mounted to a wall taking notes while I spoke. Mm-hmm, she hummed at regular intervals, which seemed less encouragement than skepticism. I disliked her, I realized, I felt an antipathy she hadn’t earned. Probably she was exhausted; I can’t imagine it, day after day seeing people in pain, at their worst moments, over years; how could you protect yourself from that, I wondered, there was some human regard I wanted from her that I had no right to demand…

Moreover, I cannot impress enough that these brief quotes, although extremely dull in themselves, are embedded in MASSIVE paragraphs of even-more-dull text. These dull sentences are actually the most striking features of the first ten pages! That’s why I highlighted them!

I asked my friend, “Okay, the first page seems alright, but do you want to read the second one? Or third one? Or fourth one? Do you want to read three hundred pages of this?”:

He said…”No, no I do not.”

And why would you? It would be awful! You’re almost certainly not going to do it, and why? Because you don’t want to! And that’s the key thing. You are no different from anyone else. You don’t want to read this, and neither do I. I don’t think anyone really does. Which is why nobody will mention Small Rain again until the next time Greenwell publishes a book.

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It's totally possible that I'm the person who 'just doesn't get it'. That I am somebody in 1920s Paris, sniggering about Proust, saying can you believe that this guy is writing such self-indulgent tripe. That's totally possible! I am 100 percent positive that if I'd read Proust de novo, without knowing what he was, I'd have thought it was self-indulgent crap. But because I knew he was a genius, I took the time, and his work rewarded that. 

The fact is, if Greenwell was a genius, we would still expect his books to receive a mixed reception. Proust couldn’t find a publisher for his book—he had to pay a publishing house to print it. Late Henry James was poorly received, and James also had trouble finding a publisher for his late novels. And I own a very amusing book called Fire The Bastards! that details the failure of contemporary book critics to recognize the genius of William Gaddis’s The Receognitions.

In contrast, Greenwell’s book has received glowing reviews from The Nation, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, Booklist, Kirkus, and a half-dozen other outlets. The only negative review it’s gotten came from Dwight Garner who, thankfully, said what we all know, which is that the experience of reading this book is tedious. Every other review simply took the book at its word, essentially quoting the back cover copy, and saying, “This is a masterful attempt at describing the experience of being in pain.”

This is why I don’t believe what critics say about a book. Because guess what—nine out of ten sophisticated readers do not enjoy reading Proust. They do not enjoy Gaddis or late Henry James. And yet nine out of ten book critics claim to love Greenwell’s book, which is equally difficult and (in my opinion) much less rewarding. That simply doesn’t make sense!

Listen, book critics are not special. The only difference between me and a book critic is that if a critic picks up a book and knows immediately that it's terrible, they have to force themselves to keep reading it, because they're paid to. Maybe the process of forcing yourself to read a book somehow trains you to like it? I have no idea. But nobody else experiences books that way. The rest of us only read books that we enjoy reading. We pick them up, we start reading them, we find the experience enjoyable, and we keep reading.

Anyway, I know lots of people who review books—I am exactly the kind of person who reviews books! I could literally go around pitching book reviews, except nobody would give me the review of the Greenwell book, because it's too big. And actually now that I think about it, if I did review it and panned it, a lot of places wouldn't print my review, because they'd be like, "Who are you?" So I'd need to have an established relationship with an editor, and then I'd need to be willing to stake a lot reputationally on 'taking down' this particular author who I really have nothing against!³

So I know what goes into reviewing a book. Then if you're an author yourself, you know your own creative work is going to be held to a much higher standard if you've made your bones taking down someone else. The business of literary reputations is a business—at some point, once enough people are behind somebody and have invested a ton of money into them, then is it really worthwhile to tell them they've wasted their money?

But that's how you end up in these comical situations, which happen more often than not, where you pick up the book, and it's just really not at all entertaining or fun or informative or lyrical or, really...anything at all. They're just plausibly good. It's definitely believable that they could be good. I don't actually believe it! But you could certainly convince somebody of this book's goodness, if you tried. And people do.

Like I said, I don’t think this book will last, because nobody is gonna read it. People might believe it’s a good book, and they might even say, “Oh I heard that was good.” But if nobody is out there actually saying “I read and loved this book”, then it doesn’t matter what The Atlantic says—a book simply won’t last.

The damage is instead to the institution of literature itself. My experience with even the most avant-garde novels is that, when they worked, it was because I actually enjoyed reading them. I enjoyed Wings of the Dove, I enjoyed The Recognitions, I enjoyed Proust. Enjoyment comes in different forms. Sometimes an author teaches you about new kinds of enjoyment. But when a book like Small Rain gets praised so uncritically and so little attention is paid to its obvious difficulty, the implicit message is that enjoyment doesn’t matter—that merely because a book is ambitious and dense and effortful, then you have to classify it as real literature and gush over it, even though neither you nor anyone else actually enjoys reading it.

Afterword

There are two kinds of negative reviews that make me more likely to read the book. The first is the sort where the reviewer clearly just hates the author’s (perceived) politics. The second is the kind where the author cherry-picks a bunch of isolated sentences from the text to ‘prove’ that the writing in the novel is pedestrian and dull. Both sorts of reviews make me think, “Oh, there’s something in this book that goes against the prevailing aesthetic and worldview in literary fiction, and, therefore, the book must be good.”

These kinds of bad reviews aren’t enough on their own to make me read a book, but if they’re combined with a personal recommendation by a friend of mine, they’re often enough to tip me over. In the case of Megan Nolan’s Acts of Desperation, a friend recommended the book and then, the very next week, the author received a scathing review (of the ‘her writing is terrible’ sort) in the NYRB.

I picked up the book and, unsurprisingly, I loved it. Acts of Desperation is told in very short (under 1000 word) chapters. It’s fast-paced, both in terms of its writing and its timespan. It’s an intensely-observed portrait of a relationship between two people who are utterly wrong for each other. It was billed as one of these “MeToo” narratives about a younger woman exploited by an older man (something like, say, Asymmetry), but it’s not really that. The protagonist is a girl with low esteem who realizes that she’s purposefully chosen a man who doesn’t or can’t love her, because only by winning him over can she prove to herself that she’s desirable. And she does! And then she tires of him! He doesn’t treat her well, but she’s very much an equal participant in this relationship.

I thought it was a welcome change from all these ingenue novels, where the woman’s problem is she’s so beautiful and so talented and so desirable that she doesn’t really know what she wants. Nolan’s narrator has many desires! She wants so much and wants so deeply—most of all, she really wants to be loved. But she ultimately wants to be loved for her messy, sloppy, honest self.

Great novel. Highly recommend. The writing is good, of course—it’s just not showy and overwritten. She’s a writer who you’ll read and enjoy without remembering any sentence in particular—she has this in common with most great novelists (V.S. Naipaul, George Eliot, Jonathan Franzen are other novelists who come to mind who have great writing, but few memorable lines).

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If I include the current post, I’ve now written three articles in the last four weeks that are scathing about contemporary literature. I realized that if I was going to keep writing about contemporary books, I couldn’t just be critical, as readers would rightly wonder if I just had an axe to grind and was envious of other writers’ success.⁴ But I also find that being free to speak my mind about contemporary books has also freed me to enjoy them much more! I think the feeling I had until now that I could only praise, never criticize, was really making me loathe to engage with my peers. Praise is meaningless unless it’s in comparison to something. I do not think Garth Greenwell represents a step forward or a viable model for Anglophone fiction. Megan Nolan, in contrast, is a much better model, and I’m happy for all the acclaim and success this book has gotten (even if I think much of it is based on simplistic or incorrect readings of the book).

I’m currently reading another (relatively) contemporary book, Fleishmann Is In Trouble. I love it just as much as I always thought I would! Will probably write about it at some point.

And I continue apace with the Mahabharata. I finished Volume 3 of the Debroy translation, and I’m about halfway through the fourth. The Mahabharata is divided into 100 parvas,⁵ and I just skipped my very first parva—it comes on the eve of war, when Dhishitrashtra asks his brother Vidura for advice on how to preserve peace. Vidura delivers reams of intensely boring advice that strongly resembles my most hated genre: wisdom literature!

Finally I was like…no. Life is too short to read these banalities about how good kinds do good things, and bad kings do bad things, and if you do bad things, then you’re a bad king, and if you do good things then you’re a good king, and good things bear good fruits, and bad things are bad, even if they seem good! It’s astonishing that it took almost three thousand pages for the book to devolve into wisdom literature, but I have a feeling that a lot more is coming.

Nota Bene

I also want to give a Substack recommendation. I really think y’all should be reading John Pistelli’s Substack: Grand Hotel Abyss. The underappreciated thing about Pistelli, since he’s a bit sneaky about it, is that the man is a great tour-guide to the current literary discourse! Every week he does a post called “weekly readings” where he opines about the discourse du jour and gives his own take on it (which is always scintillating and original). Pistelli has his own unique aesthetic and philosophy of literature, which rapidly becomes apparent the more you read his stuff. He also does a podcast called Invisible College, where he gives lectures on classic works of English and American literature. His novel Major Arcana was serialized originally Substack—it’s very thoughtful, readable, and ambitious—and is now scheduled to come out from Belt Publishing sometime next year. Just a wonderful literary citizen and very smart commentator.

1. I should note that I've read Thomas Bernhard, I've read Molly Bloom's soliloquy. I know that writing in huge paragraphs is a technique that exists. But when you write pedestrian sentences and bland sentiments AND you have no paragraph breaks, then there's simply nothing to hold onto, and the text becomes unreadable.

2. And by ‘us’ I mean ‘the kind of person who might read a Garth Greenwell novel’.

3. In fact, the one time I ever delivered a negative review of a popular book, the editor-in-chief of the Los Angeles Review of Books called me up, and we had a shouting match over the phone, and I never wrote for the publication again—all because she disagreed with my review of a book she had never actually read.

4. I do, and I am, but I’m not yet so bitter that every contemporary novel inspires my bile.

5. Actually the Mahabharata has two forms of organization, the 18-parva division and the 100-parva division. Parva basically means ‘chapter’.