« The most absurd sentence I read today | Main | Eating Strategies »
Overrated novels
Here is one nomination for the most overrated novel of the 20th century.
I wonder about Gide and Sartre as well. J.D. Salinger is too easy a target, as is John Barth. How about Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird? I keep on thinking there is an obvious and juicy British nomination (just look up how the Penguin Guide to Classical Music treats Elgar recordings), but I can't settle on a single glaring name which stands above all others.
For the most overrated major author, I'll pick Carlos Fuentes. I love Mexico (and I've tried reading his works in Spanish), but I find he deadens the place rather than bringing it to life. Had he not been around for the fashionably left-wing, anti-imperialist 1960s, he'd just be another guy with a pen.
The most overrated good book is Henry James's Portrait of a Lady, which although very good is far from his best work.
What are your picks?
Posted by Tyler Cowen on June 28, 2007 at 06:32 AM in Books | Permalink
Comments
Gravity's Rainbow -- It's as if Pynchon read Slaughterhouse Five and decided to make it as long, boring,
and confusing as possible. I wouldn't try to read this again without a Ritalin prescription to keep me
focused, and even with that I'm not sure I could do it.
Posted by: Tucker at Jun 28, 2007 7:09:37 AM
Ulysses
Posted by: Rue Des Quatre Vents at Jun 28, 2007 7:31:05 AM
Portnoy's Complaint
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
Posted by: Keith at Jun 28, 2007 7:45:36 AM
I recognize anything by dan brown is too poor to even make a "bad" list. You know, I could never get through Don Quixote ... twice I stopped halfway. I'm embarrassed to admit it, but at the same time consider the novel pretty over-rated.
Posted by: glenn at Jun 28, 2007 8:20:05 AM
Harry Potter
it's no wonder people can't appreciate joyce and pynchon when this stuff is so popular.
Posted by: walter at Jun 28, 2007 8:30:41 AM
Salinger is top notch, Franny and Zooey and Catcher in the Rye certainly have a place among the most significant works.
To Kill a Mockingbird is a good pick as most overrated, and I second the nomination of Pynchon and Barth. Barth especially, but I don't think he's been that highly esteemed anyway. I would further nominate John Steinbeck, Milan Kundera, William Burroughs, Salmon Rushdie, William Gaddis, Don Delillo.
Posted by: John Goes at Jun 28, 2007 8:34:15 AM
Glenn maybe your just not into poo jokes. :) I guess I never grew up so I love Don Quixote.
Posted by: a guy at Jun 28, 2007 8:47:17 AM
I can understand why people find Joyce hard to read and why people think Finnegan's Wake is nonsense, but his short fiction and Ulysses really are a phenomenal achievement, even in the purely material sense that Dublin is alive in the work. It is a bit dense and one may need time to understand his style (though I wouldn't bother about getting all the allusions), but there is a quite simple story underneath that is not insignificant.
Pynchon, though, seems to be a constructor of elaborate literary gadgets made of ego. I classify him with Barth. I think Joyce had a predilection for this too, but I think he has a classic storyteller in him that trancends this.
As a genre, the metanovelistic structure is a tired theme.
Posted by: John Goes at Jun 28, 2007 8:49:20 AM
Nabokov considered Don Quixote overrated, until he actually read the book and wrote a highly interesting meditation on it. I suggest you read Don Quixote first, then if you're curious, you may like to read Nabokov's essays on it.
Posted by: John Goes at Jun 28, 2007 8:50:59 AM
Over-rated Brits? Thomas Hardy, E M Forster? Amis the Younger?
Posted by: dearieme at Jun 28, 2007 9:01:43 AM
To Kill a Mockingbird is overrated?! This was the only novels we had to read in high school that students actually liked.
If you don't like Catch-22, avoid Heller's Something Happened like a radioactive plague.
I'm noticing a trend here and this is something I've been thinking about for a while. A lot of post-war novels don't seem to hold up very well. Heller, Pynchon, Salinger and even Vonnegut seem far less accessible today than 19th century authors like Dickens, Austen and Eliot.
Posted by: Ted Craig at Jun 28, 2007 9:03:08 AM
I'd disagree that Gravity's Rainbow is overrated, but only because I had so much trouble understanding it that I couldn't give it a fair shake. Going along the lines of defining overrated as receiving so much good attention to not merit the level of a certain book's quality, I'd say Atlas Shrugged would be up there. It's not a bad book, it's just that IMHO the book's quality is not on par with all the good attention I've noticed it happens to receive.
Posted by: Rafael Corrales at Jun 28, 2007 9:11:04 AM
Oh and Tyler how about a post on underrated novels???
Posted by: Rafael Corrales at Jun 28, 2007 9:12:24 AM
I had to read two or three novels by James Fenimore Cooper in college - you can't imagine my relief when I discovered Mark Twain's essay on his "literary offences."
Posted by: Our Bold Hero at Jun 28, 2007 9:14:17 AM
Catch 22 is absolutely awful.
Posted by: josh at Jun 28, 2007 9:16:23 AM
Ayn Rand being overrated is a given, it should be tacitly understood.
Posted by: John Goes at Jun 28, 2007 9:19:31 AM
Mrs. Dalloway
Posted by: Will Perkins at Jun 28, 2007 9:23:48 AM
Amen on Gravity's Rainbow. And I'd say a lot of Faulkner qualifies. Few writers managed to be both so great (Absalom, Absalom; Go Down Moses) and so bad (fill in any number of works here). A lot of Hemingway doesn't hold up that well, either. He wrote like no one else, at the time, and captured in an unpretentious way the same ideas that Sartre turned into unreadable tripe. But a lot of his work reads like riffs off the same theme (and, yes, I'm aware that you could say that about a lot of writers).
Posted by: Tim Gray at Jun 28, 2007 9:29:45 AM
Will Perkins, why not throw in all of Virginia Woolfe? Good pick.
It would be nice to see a post on underrated novels, as well.
Posted by: John Goes at Jun 28, 2007 9:33:43 AM
It'll be decades at least before we can really tell what's overrated and what stands the test of time. Despite so much being done in "internet time", literature is one of those things which can be evaluated IMHO only in hindsight. The best book I've read in the last couple of decades was Neal Stephenson's CRYPTONOMICON, which was fodder for lunch time conversation for weeks once I got my friends to read it. But will it stand up in 2057? Maybe not. Hard to tell what people will still be reading. But I suspect they may still be reading Harper Lee's book. (I'm a fan of movie soundtracks, which I think are the equivalent of today's operatic scores. I wonder if John Williams will be performed live in 2107. While he's not my favorite composer, I think he'll stand the test of time.)
Posted by: Chip Overclock at Jun 28, 2007 9:34:21 AM
The Old Man and the Sea by Hemingway requires a high threshold for nonsense.
Posted by: Zahid Avi at Jun 28, 2007 9:36:01 AM
Zahid Avi, fiction is fantastic. That's sort of what fiction is.
Posted by: John Goes at Jun 28, 2007 9:46:09 AM
Why do Joyce zealots often rely on the "You're stupid" defense of aesthetic value?
John Goes claims of Ulysses, "It is a bit dense and one may need time to understand his style."
The preferences of an intellegent few are of no interest to me, unless that intellegence correlates with something else like the preference for beauty or wisdom. Remember, crosswords and Sudoku are complicated, dense and require time. Whole systems of medieval thought are dense and require time. And indeed the people who loved these useless frameworks were probably intelligent.
Posted by: Rue Des Quatre Vents at Jun 28, 2007 9:47:51 AM
Most overrated: Slaughterhouse Five, which is just a ridiculous book.
Posted by: wph at Jun 28, 2007 9:57:39 AM
I don't understand how many people hold "Brave New World" in higher regards than "1984." Orwell's work is more entertaining and more powerful than Huxley's. This is no knock on Huxley though.
Posted by: charlie at Jun 28, 2007 10:07:03 AM
