It's Not Jane Austen

This is probably the spot to say that for the sake of this assignment I made a good faith effort to read these books at my city library, but I wasn’t self-punishing enough actually to finish them and had to stop the agony halfway into the second volume. Dreck of this stupendous caliber has a particular advantage over literature in that one doesn’t have to read all of it to surmise, accurately and eternally, that it is all uniformly awful and awfully uniform—romance novels, like racists, tend to be the same wherever you turn. It’s pointless to spend much time impugning these books as writing because they really aren’t meant to be considered as actual writing, the same way a Twinkie wasn’t meant to be considered as actual food. Books ejaculated this easily have the inverse effect of being extremely difficult to read. Leonard’s creations are the cartoonishly erotic suppurations of a hamstrung, not terribly bright adult trying to navigate a midlife crisis, and you get the feeling that the sentences arrived on the page as if by osmosis, unaided by even a sub-literate serf.

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William Giraldi in The New Republic, in what is one of the most loathsome texts I have read in some time. It’s a review of Hardcore Romance, a book about the Fifty Shades phenomenon.

If anyone ever wonders why I don’t tend to engage in “value criticism”–especially of culturally marginalized or devalued texts–this is the answer, right here. When I do, it tends to be in the service of positive judgments, explaining why I think something is good rather than the opposite. I also try to explicitly define and explain my criteria for making these judgments. 

It’s not that I’m incapable of being nasty and acerbic on the subject of writing (I’m reining it in quite a bit here) or that I don’t somewhere believe my own judgments to be absolute (I think this article is absolutely valueless). I think I know what good writing is–and I can explain what I think it is, I do that for a living. But I also am grown up enough to know my judgments aren’t, actually, absolute, and that somewhere, someone else is judging by different criteria. 

If I think a text is “bad” writing, then people who think like me are likely to see it that way already. What do we imagine to be the critical project of a piece like Giraldi’s if not to lead a kind of orgiastic circle jerk of disdain around an already devalued work? Is it going to persuade any 50 Shades fans they were wrong? No, though it might shame them for their enjoyment, and indeed, that seems to be a major goal of Giraldi’s piece. But it’s not going to change any minds or point out anything anyone has missed, which is my preferred role as a critic.

There’s more to it than that, though. If you ever wonder why feminist scholars are skeptical or even antagonistic towards discussions of literary value or “quality”–this piece could act like a crash course. It’s like an extreme limit case of the kinds of misogyny that are usually more veiled or occulted in discussions of literary value that substitute hyperbolic scorn or praise for any kind of specific textual or rhetorical analysis.