'At Least for the Inquisitive or Reflective Mind'

“Nothing written is utterly without value, without something to teach, whatever its intentions.”

Reluctantly, masochistically, I agree. When a book is bad, our instinct is to conclude its badness is irredeemable. It would be Pollyanna foolishness to go looking for something to salvage. Theodore Dalrymple, however, suggests that even worthless books, the most unrepentant pulp, regardless of authorial intentions, can supply us with good negative lessons:

   

“[T]he more books we read, the clearer it becomes that there is no book, however bad or merely mediocre it may be, that has nothing to say to us, for every book tells us something. Thus reading a book may be a relative waste of time, for we might be doing something better or more useful than reading it, such as reading a better book. But it is never a waste of time in the absolute sense, at least for the inquisitive or reflective mind.”

As theory, this holds up. Dalrymple volunteers to test it experimentally. At random, he selects a paperback romance novel, reads it, and draws moral and historical conclusions beyond my capacity and probably the novelist’s to reaach. I was reminded of the Cleveland bookstore where I worked in 1975. A large section of the second floor was devoted to Harlequin Romances and related items. Readers, invariably female, kept lengthy lists of the books they had already read to avoid buying the same one twice. They wrote down not titles or even authors, for these were unmemorably generic, but the serial numbers assigned to each volume.

But I also remembered a more personal reading experience. In 1977 I decided to read Gertrude Stein’s immensely long and repetitious The Making of Americans (1925). I was young and impressionable and wanted to be old and wise, so I read the damned thing. It is, of course, unreadable. That was Stein’s intention and the intention of many subsequent avant-gardists. The whole point of such work is to be puritanically obscure and boring, so only the enlightened ones, a literary priesthood, can appreciate their rare beauties. Stein is to fiction what Andy Warhol is to movies and Clark Coolidge is to poetry. If, as Dalrymple claims, “every book tells us something,” what did The Making of Americans tell me? I’ve read nothing by Stein in the subsequent forty-two years.