basically linkspam

[queenlua]

Ursula K. Le Guin recently wrote a very nice blog entry, "The Narrative Gift as a Moral Conundrum," talking about the (uneasy) distinction between fluffy, fun-to-read, addictively readable literature, and "good" literature:

I read a book last winter that does an absolutely smashing job of story-telling, a compulsive page-turner from page 1 on. The writing is competent at best, rising above banality only in some dialogue (the author’s ear for the local working-class dialect is pitch-perfect.) Several characters are vividly or sympathetically portrayed, but they’re all stereotypes. The plot has big holes in it, though only one of them really damages credibility. The story-line: an ambitious white girl in her early twenties persuades a group of black maids in Jackson, Mississippi, in 1964, to tell her their experiences with their white employers past and present, so that she can make a book of their stories and share them with the world by selling it to Harper and Row, and go to New York and be rich and famous. They do, and she does. And except for a couple of uppity mean white women getting some egg on their face nobody suffers for it.

All Archimedes wanted was a solid place to put the lever he was going to move the world with.

Same with a story trajectory. You can’t throw a shotput far if you’re standing on a shaky two-inch-wide plank over a deep, dark river. You need a solid footing.

Or do you?

All this author had to stand on is a hokey, sentimental notion, and from it she threw this perfect pitch!

Seldom if ever have I seen the power of pure story over mind, emotion, and artistic integrity so clearly shown.

I don't really have much to add to the original entry, other than to say it's worth 100% worth reading (seriously, go read it now). And, if you like it, she's written a lot of really excellent entries there—Papa H, Uniforms, and The Death of the Book all come to mind.

Comments

[amielleon]

Nice post of hers. The question is a classic but she tells it well.

Personally I think there's something for retention throughout the course of the book, something for how you feel during it, and something for how long it sticks with you after.

But that's probably not quite right either. I remember some select bits of fluffy stuff I read when I was thirteen or so, and I could only give you the barest outline of The House of the Scorpions.

Whenever I've thought upon this issue myself it seems to me that the only arguments you can really resort to is universality. A black reader of The Help likely would've felt that unfairness to the point of finding the piece unenjoyable. Fluff is always unfair to the way someone acts somewhere. And someone will feel a bit shortchanged.

[queenlua]

I've generally heard the "higher pleasures" argument invoked wrt this topic (i.e., even though you may want to read meritless fluff right now, you would want to bring War and Peace with you to a desert island because it's timeless/deep/whatever), but I'm not super convinced by it. I like your "universality" metric much more.

[mark_asphodel]

Thanks for the rec! I quite enjoyed "Papa H" in particular.

[queenlua]

De nada; glad you liked =D