Attacking the bestseller lists

Not surprisingly, the UK bestseller list smackdown that appeared in yesterday’s Sunday (Glasgow) Herald was greeted with something less than kindness in the crime fiction community. As I pointed out in a throwaway comment yesterday, what galls me the most is how unoriginal the whole concept is, and that a nearly identical piece ran in the Observer last July, as penned by a most snobbish Tim Adams. How identical? Judge for yourself after the jump.

From Colin Waters’ piece in the Herald:

Thirty years ago, Gore Vidal carried out a courageous cultural experiment. The man of letters set aside his own highbrow literary preferences to read and report upon the unashamedly populist “Top Ten Bestsellers According To The Sunday New York Times As Of January 7, 1973.” In 1994, Anthony Lane repeated the feat in The New Yorker. On the basis of his reading, Vidal feared the contemporary novel was in thrall to the art of the movies. Lane, meanwhile, discovered the banal beatitudes of self-help replacing insight, and the massed accumulation of factoids replacing imagination. Ten years on from Lane’s homage, what does today’s top 10 fiction hardback list tell us about our literary proclivities?

And now, the Observer article:

The American novelist and essayist Gore Vidal did something like this exercise exactly 30 years ago, though I have the sense he did most of the reading in a fairly leisured way beside his pool with a glass to hand, and he did not bother with statistics. Vidal’s intention back then, when these things still seemed crucially important to readers of the New York Review of Books, was to show how literary culture had become infected by the visual culture of television and film, how ‘reading these 10 books one after the other was like … staggering from one half-remembered movie-scene to another’.

OK fine, both have to cite the original source, but doesn’t it prove the point that there’s no real reason to revisit the idea? Do either of them think they have something new to add that Vidal didn’t originally say? So books of literary merit don’t make the bestseller lists. Oh, what a hoary chestnut, never mind that it’s not even true. Need I remind these folks that amongst the most popular UK offerings were the multi-award winning THE CURIOUS INCIDENT OF THE DOG IN THE NIGHT-TIME, Ian McEwan’s ATONEMENT, Monica Ali’s BRICK LANE, Margaret Atwood’s ORYX AND CRAKE, and others whose names escape me at the moment? I’m always amazed when I look at the NYT list and see as many literary darlings as I do amidst all the drecky schlock.

Never mind that in Waters, as Lee Child pointed out on his message board last night, got a whole bunch of facts wrong. A nice way to bolster an already weak argument.

So it’s easy to get up in arms about this sort of thing, to rally the troops and beat our chests that genre fiction stacks up just as well as literary fiction, thank you very much. But that’s not the point. What should be is that such pieces are never commissioned again, because they don’t do anyone any favors, regardless of who writes what.