On Tolstoy, Entertainment, and Stuff Books Do

Oh man. Is it ever good to be back.

Several days ago -- while I was still very ill -- I found a message from an esteemed colleague addressed to me on Twitter, referring to the "Tolstoy" post that went up the week before:

you know, you can write a novel to entertain as well :L

I could think of a few things to say to this, but every time I tried typing them the effort of sitting upright made me lightheaded and I had to spend a couple hours sleeping it off. The flu has a way of stemming all debate.

Not long afterwards (an hour? a day? my perception of the last week is so distorted), I sat down and discovered my esteemed colleague had left me a pair of messages via Instant Messenger:

(3:15:51 PM) you can write a novel to entertain people, too
(3:16:03 PM) they're not all 100% explore the human condition

At the time, I could only repay his tenacity with a glib little Twitter message. But now that I'm beginning to feel a little better (I only vomited once today, and I've traded the fever for a shattered sense of equilibrium), let's see if I can't offer my esteemed colleague a more substantial response.

A MORE SUBSTANTIAL RESPONSE, IN THREE PARTS!

1.) Re: The tacit presumption that War and Peace is not entertaining

War and Peace is a classic. It is a very good book, and a very long book. But it is not a boring book. Just because literary snots like me call this or that novel "a timeless classic that illustrates the the human etc. etc. etc. etc.," you shouldn't assume it's a soporific drag that only someone with an English degree can appreciate.

As the first word of the title might suggest, this is a book about a war. Tolstoy comes to the writing desk with a period of service as a lieutenant in the Crimean War under his belt, meaning he's got more firsthand experience with the smoky pandaemonium of the 19th Century battlefield than every working writer on the planet who didn't serve in the military. War and Peace's battle scenes are intense, very often reading a little like a scene from a Hollywood-approved war flick. You've got people on horseback riding alone into sprays of bullets, cannonballs taking off peoples' limbs, grenades going off in the middle of crowds, motherfuckers getting run through with bayonets, adrenaline-crazed heroes performing apparently superhuman acts in the heat of the moment, etc. One would almost suspect Tolstoy wrote these scenes for the intended purpose of exciting people, but we both know such a notion is crazy. Literary merit and fun are mutually exclusive, after all!

What the dust jackets and armchair reviewers often neglect to mention is that War and Peace is also a very funny book. Tolstoy couldn't stand aristocratic twits and rich jackasses; War and Peace aggressively mocks the snooty men and women of high society. Tolstoy thought of the Germans as eggheads with funny accents, so he wrote a book full of German people with absurd ideas that they take very seriously and shout at each other in silly phonetic renderings of German-inflected speech. You like French-bashing? Tolstoy loves French-bashing, and nobody in the novel gets slammed worse than Napoleon himself. Andrey (one of the main characters), after vocally espousing his admiration for the visionary genius Bonaparte every five minutes for the first several chapters, gets wounded in battle, taken prisoner, and finds himself face to face with his hero -- whereupon he discovers Napoleon to be a fat, narcissistic little pissypants. It's really some entertaining stuff.

2.) Re: Books don't HAVE to be about "the human condition" -- they're allowed to just be entertaining.

Sure. I guess. But that whole "teaching us about ourselves, pulling back the curtain from our perception of the world, and remapping our boundaries" thing is what makes a book good. It's what separates the art from the distractions and toys.

You can certainly read books that "only entertain" if you'd like. Sure. But in the words of Mr. Kundera, life is short and books are long. If you're going to read books at all, why squander your time and effort reading ones less than great?

(Disclaimer/confession: superhero comics are a vice of mine. In my defense -- and lest I be accused of a double standard -- I am rather choosy about which ones I read, a trade paperback is less time-consuming than a cheap sci-fi pulp, and the pencil and ink work in an issue of Batman has far more artistic merit than Dan Brown's prose. I hold the act of reading a novel and the act of reading a comic to totally different standards, in any event.)

But what about the writers themselves? Why should a writer be expected to write about lofty subjects like the human condition? Why can't a good writer just write about things that entertain people?

Because that generally isn't what good writers do. They don't think that way.

Let's suppose an author decides to write a novel about a teenage wizard who falls in love with a green-haired tree elf and helps her fight the evil incubus king. Such an author will be one of two things: an amateur or a hack.

The only hopeful possibility is in the first case. There's a slim chance that our amateur author is an untried genius with an a precision of language equal to the richness of his boundless imagination. His efforts are guided by a keen intellect and strong aesthetic convictions. Such a writer can take whatever plot that strikes his fancy, no matter how trite or inane at face value, and make it part of something beautiful. He is also an exceedingly uncommon specimen.

More likely than not, our amateur's story about the teenage wizard who falls in love with green-haired tree elf will come out as unreadable schlock. Generally, unless you really know what you're doing or are a naturally gifted writer, you don't produce something brilliant by sitting down and thinking STORY ABOUT A WIZARD AND AN ELF, GO! That's not how writing works -- not unless we're talking about the second case.

What if the writer is a hack? Well, we can bank on the story being somewhat competently written. After all, it's being assembled by a professional. Our author goes by a formula, consults a list of character/plot bullets, bangs out the thing in a couple of weeks, collects his check, and drinks a few tequilas to get the juices flowing on his next idea. HEY! How about a story about a pair of dwarf brothers who accidentally dig a mine into a haunted city and have to lift a curse before it's too late? Easy as hell!

For the most part, the authors who write these "fun" books -- novels devised to be easy, entertaining reads that don't challenge anyone or anything -- are either not very good at what they do or cynical sellouts crapping out chapters in exchange for checks. I wouldn't give either a place on my shelf.

The really good authors tend to address lofty subjects because they are good authors. Their artistic and intellectual compasses point toward that which is beautiful, symmetrical, and true. Such writers usually tend to have more on their creative agendas then "WEREWOLF DETECTIVE IN TOKYO!"

3.) It's not as though you're not sufficiently entertained already.

The "why aren't books allowed to just be fun?" and "it's okay for books to only be entertaining, they don't have to make statements all the time!" objections might ring less hollow if today's multimedia landscape weren't so tremendously dominated by shallow, instantaneous amusements. Stop trying to shove your boring, stuffy "classics" down my throat! I just want to read something fun! I mean, the only other diversions my life affords me are television, Facebook, YouTube, Xbox Live, Minecraft, IRC, Wikipedia, Twitter, Gawker, Hulu, Team Fortress, Tumblr, iPhone apps, Cracked, the Wii, Newgrounds, Netflix, 4chan, World of Warcraft, and free streaming pornography! I'm dying of boredom here! Why won't you just allow me some levity in my life?

This is an entirely separate kettle of potatoes, but it worries me that we appear to be creeping toward a cultural point in which the worthiness of an activity is directly tied to how immediately fun it is. If something isn't instantly gratifying and doesn't aggressively commandeer my attention, I'm just going to go find something that is.

But anyway -- the printed word of the novel is one of the few extant media that can offer people something more conducive to useful intellectual stimulation than the noise, frantic speed, and commercial distractions of television, video games, and the Internet. I think it's important that publishers and authors take advantage of this. I want them to write books that challenge people. I want authors to place more importance on creating something true and beautiful than on writing something "fun" to read. The rest of our media asks so little of us, after all -- I fear that we're going to become less ourselves as a result. Ever read Brave New World? It will tell you all you need to know about what happens when "fun" becomes a cultural prerogative -- and is a supremely entertaining read, to boot.

It has been nine days since my last cigarette. This blog is just going to get bitchier and angrier and bitchier.