Posted by Webmaven Maggie on February 18, 2007 at 13:23:10:
From today's NY Times, a review of Patrick Anderson's
THE TRIUMPH OF THE THRILLER by Luc Sante (whose LOW LIFE is one of my bookstore's all time favorite non-fiction books).
Rising Crime
By LUC SANTE
Published: February 18, 2007
THE TRIUMPH OF THE THRILLER
How Cops, Crooks, and Cannibals Captured Popular Fiction.
By Patrick Anderson.
272 pp. Random House. $24.95.
Older readers may remember a time when there existed something called “mainstream” fiction. It consisted of realist novels of varying literary quality but solid 19th-century roots: family chronicles, historical sagas, imperiled-marriage studies, medical dramas, war stories. Those sorts of works, by common accord, made up the broad center of fiction; they dominated the best-seller lists, swept the prizes, were accorded respectful reviews in publications like this one. Mainstream fiction was, so to speak, the city, while beyond lay the outskirts: the suburbs and mill towns and trailer parks of genre. Crime novels, fantasy and science fiction were segregated because they were considered mere entertainment bereft of moral sustenance, also because they were perceived as appealing to non-mainstream citizens: uneducated, working-class, possibly even “ethnic.”
Sometime within the last 30 years or so this hierarchical structure foundered, at least commercially. As Patrick Anderson, weekly thriller reviewer for The Washington Post, points out in his new book, the Top 10 charts these days are stuffed with thrillers, very nearly to the exclusion of anything else. As has also been the case with movies and popular music, the fringes have become the center. (Fantasy and science fiction have also risen mightily, if not to the point of achieving hegemony, but they lie outside Anderson’s purview.) The genres have not been accorded a corresponding measure of respect, however — the prizes and reviews still largely go to “literary” novels that seldom sell more than comparatively trifling numbers. It seems there are still people who, in Raymond Chandler’s words, “do not like it at all that ‘really important books’ ... get the frosty mitt at the reprint counter while ‘Death Wears Yellow Garters’ is put out in editions of fifty or one hundred thousand copies.” Anderson intends “The Triumph of the Thriller” to spread the gospel and to establish the critical landscape for a proper appraisal of the field.
It’s a big assignment, and Anderson undertakes it by compiling something like an augmented checklist. His book is a series of brief career assessments, divided into categories: dead writers, spy writers, lawyer writers, young writers, women writers, British writers, writers he likes, writers he doesn’t. He accounts for plots, notes trends, mentions style, considers sales figures. His tone is personal and casual, much more loosely conversational than in his Post reviews, which he sometimes quotes at length. He is writing as an enthusiast on a sort of busman’s holiday, and although he often makes sharp critical distinctions, he seldom engages in actual analysis, which would require greater detachment than he seems willing or able to assume.
Anderson is good at poking the established classics. He calls things by their names, demonstrating that what propels the Sherlock Holmes series are the two main characters, while the rest is largely hooey. He takes Dashiell Hammett to task for his inconsistency, Raymond Chandler for his racism and s*xism and Ross Macdonald for his insufferable piety. So far so good, although you might wonder about his ear when, discussing Chandler’s similes, he decides that “The sunlight was so bright that it danced” is “poetry,” while “The sunshine was as empty as a headwaiter’s smile” is “shtick.” He may have absentmindedly reversed the tags there, although elsewhere, when he points out a bit of what he considers felicitous style, his examples are unfailingly bland. For example, Dennis Lehane, author of “Mystic River,” has surely written better lines than “a brain-dead sociopath who was only slightly bigger than Rhode Island” or “eyes the color of melting caramel. Eyes you’d dive into without a look back.”
Anderson dates the rise of the thriller to its current pedestal back to the Kennedy assassination, which vacated the “ ’50s world of Doris Day movies, the Hit Parade, sock hops” and so on, demanding a darker view of the world. He argues that the phenomenon finally achieved critical mass in 1981, a year that saw the publication of Martin Cruz Smith’s “Gorky Park,” Lawrence Sanders’s “Third Deadly Sin,” Joseph Wambaugh’s “Glitter Dome” and John D. MacDonald’s “Free Fall in Crimson.” Anderson’s point in marking that date is not so much that the books broke new ground as that they all made the top 15 in sales figures for the year. After establishing this watershed in four breezy pages, he proceeds to run pell-mell through the genre, according plums to his favorites and, eventually, lumps of coal to the goats.
His dismissals are blunt and pretty convincing. James Patterson is “sick, s*xist, sadistic and subliterate”; Patricia Cornwell deifies her heroine to the detriment of her other characters; David Lindsey is the author of a novel in which “the terrorist can only be stopped by a forensic artist with a dead wife and a brain-damaged goddaughter who is blackmailed by a man with no face into going to Mexico City to impersonate the twin brother he never knew who unfortunately was murdered and had his tongue fed to a starving dog.”
Anderson’s praise is not as persuasive, however. I’ve read many of the writers he covers and agree with him on some and disagree on others, although I’m left with no particular sense of why or how he made his choices. Taste is a personal matter, of course, and not always explicable. The quality you cherish in one writer might be poisonous in another. No critic who really likes books will feel inclined to engrave a list of criteria on stone tablets. But Anderson just isn’t very good at making his enthusiasm infectious. I haven’t read John Sandford, for example, and have no idea why I should, given that Anderson, after listing him as a favorite, does little more than complain about Sandford’s excesses and superficiality. Since Anderson grouses about other writers in like manner, it might seem that he is primarily addressing readers who are already well versed in his subject area, with whom he can compare notes. Or maybe he’s just been too long on his beat.
But the book’s biggest failing is that Anderson never delivers on his subtitle. After reading it I know more names of thriller writers than I could previously recite, and have a small list of writers I’d like to check out — largely on the basis of their settings or plot premises — but I am no closer to knowing “how cops, crooks, and cannibals captured popular fiction.” It’s a difficult question, of course, but also an enticing one. It is easy enough to make sociological guesses as to why the former mainstream was relocated to the fringes, why the former fringes became the center, and why a violence-based genre became ascendant in a violence-saturated era, but wouldn’t it be interesting to hear specific insights from someone who has plumbed the depths of the subject?
When Anderson generalizes about the thriller, however, he engages in politicking. He tells us that Michael Connelly’s Harry Bosch is as interesting a character as “Bellow’s Herzog or Roth’s Zuckerman” and suggests that Connelly, Lehane and George Pelecanos are as deserving of the National Book Award as Jonathan Franzen, Michael Chabon and Jonathan Safran Foer. And well they might, but Anderson does not bother to make his case. He can only assert it, again and again, in various tones and pitches, as if the reader were hard of hearing. The sour and aggrieved note in his voice, with all the appeal of a member of Congress arguing that his district is the one most deserving of pork, damages his cause more than his vigor assists it.
Luc Sante’s collection “Kill All Your Darlings: Pieces 1990-2005” and his translation of Félix Fénéon’s “Novels in Three Lines” will both be published this year.