Overrated/Underrated

I figure Tyler Cowen’s search for the most overrated novel will have 200 comments before tonight, so I won’t presume to add anything direct, but rather to move the ball downfield a bit with a slightly different response. That is: reading the early returns, I would say that there are different ways of being overrated; not all overrated books are overrated in the same way.

Example: a lot of readers weigh in with their grievances about compulsory school reading, like Catcher in the Rye and To Kill a Mockingbird. My guess is that neither of these is a “great” novel—but they are perfectly straightforward and accessible and hey, nobody is going to like what is assigned to them in high school anyway (or even read it, as I said of myself a few days ago).

I doubt that John Barth is much assigned in high school and that if he is “rated” at all, it is by a pretty small treehouse assembly—so also William Gaddis and others not yet on the Tyler list: John Hawkes, Paul Bowles, Gilbert Sorrentino and there ilk. What the share is not necessarily awfulness—there is no accounting for tastes, and readers are perfectly welcome to like them if they want— but they do lend themselves to a good deal of posturing and scoldidng. Pynchon is a special case here: people do use him to beat up on their alleged inferiors, but he does seem to have a bona fide following of serious enthusiasts.

Ayn Rand, by contrast shouldn’t be judged as a novelist at all, but rather as a social phenom: the better comparison would be the Left Behind novels, whose readers for a band (no, a multitude) of passionate devotees, convinced of and committed to a highly particular world-view. As a developmental stage, its perfectly innocuous; most Ayn Rand readers outgrow it, and it’s a shame only that the same can’t be said for the Left Behind fans (I’ll put in a good word, though, for the “other” Ayn Rand novel—We the Living, about Russia during the revolution, which would be interesting and worthwhile even if its author were named Aylyce Rundt).

The debate over “the masters” takes place on a different plane. Re Henry James, my own taste tells me (pace Tyler’s early responders) that Portrait of a Lady may be his best novel—the later “grand style” entries seem to me just over the top. Re Virginia Woolf, I tend to think she can write splendid sentences even if not a great book (maybe her best work is in her letters and journals). Re Joyce, I tend to believe Ulysses may be over the top—I suspect he never improved on the best stories in The Dead. But, hey, all three of these are forces of nature, part of an entirely different dialogue or debate.

PS to Tyler: When you say "Sartre," maybe you are thinking of everything but the novels; the novels are, I think, actually pretty good.