Well, it happened. I got trolled.
We’ve all been there, gone to a site only to have someone disagree with us and point out what they consider to be our flaws. Hell, some of us have that happen on this very site, usually through the lens of having sex with goats.
What I never expected was to be trolled on Goodreads, the place where readers go online to review books and find new titles to put on ever-growing to-read lists that become more like a list of regrets and lost opportunities as we all age. It would be a sad and fascinating statistic to keep track of Goodreads users who die an how many titles are on their to-read lists. Wontreads.com
At any rate, maybe a year ago I “reviewed” the Scarlet Letter. Suffice to say, I didn’t care for it. The original review is reprinted below in case you’re interested.
As I often do, I used this review to also talk about a larger issue. I mean, how much can you really talk about a book, especially one that’s been talked to death in every American high school classroom? No, I find that connecting what I’m reading to larger issues at hand is a lot more helpful.
So, a scathing review of both the book and a questioning of the idea of “classics” was born, and of everything I’ve done on Goodreads, this review has gotten the most attention and positive feedback.
Until this happened:
I read the first couple of paragraphs and then got bored with your prose. I give your review one star. -Benjamin
Not terribly interesting or insightful. Now, I am not one to point out the problem of cyberbullying. In fact, I think maybe a little too much has been made of the scourge, the downfall of man that is cyberbullying. Frankly, we should see cyberbullying as a vast improvement. The bully doesn’t have to leave the comfort of his home, and the bullied doesn’t have cracked orbital sockets. Win-win. Plus, cyberbullying is really the first form of bullying that doesn’t rely on physical presence, so even the weakest of nerdly nerds can be an ace cyberbully.
What I didn’t particularly like about what Benjamin had to say is that I felt like he was attacking my personal style based not on my prose, as he claimed, but because I didn’t like the Scarlet Letter or “classics.” So, I responded in kind:
Good one. Couldn’t help but notice you gave the book 5 stars. Now I know where the world’s supply of tweed is being funneled.
Done and done, I thought. And then I got this:
Apologies for my tone, I was a bit drunk on Saturday night when I wrote that comment, also when I rated the book with 5 stars – I’d give it 4 and a half in a more sober state. I think your long winded review/rant is misdirected and borne of prejudice not than reason; the only true point from it is the observation that people who’re forced to read books by school syllabuses or by book clubs may react with violence or resentment out of proportion to the merits/demerits of the book. I’m sure you’re not the first angry comic book guy to want to take a dump on the ‘classics’, whatever that means in your generalised imagination but if you didn’t like the Scarlet Letter why not stick to criticising the book, instead of releasing your uninformed rant at a whole supposed genre of ‘classics’. The idea that the canon is never revised is also demonstrably false – tell that to Charlotte Yonge, E.M. Delafield, Mary Ward, Magraret Oliphant – it is constantly revised.
I own no tweed but I don’t have a problem with people who do.
Wow. Okay. I have so much to say here that I feel the need to take this apart line-by-line.
Apologies for my tone, I was a bit drunk on Saturday night when I wrote that comment, also when I rated the book with 5 stars – I’d give it 4 and a half in a more sober state.
This is perhaps the worst part. Right off the bat.
For one thing, saying you did something like an asshole because you were drunk makes you sound like a careless twat. Seriously. “Sorry that I had sex with your wife. I was drunk.” “Sorry that I crashed your car while drunk driving. I was drunk.” See, it doesn’t really work. I don’t know whether Benjamin was trying to prove something, maybe show me that he’s cool because he has purchased and consumed alcohol? Maybe I’m being hard on the guy. If he’s 10, he’s pretty advanced. And to be fair, Benjamin does walk on the wild side. Giving a book a 5 when it was truly a 4.5!? The literary world must have been set alight!
I don’t like that part because it’s not an apology, first of all. So don’t apologize and then basically restate the same thing in an even worse tone.
Secondly, I bet you think that it’s pretty sweet to be a drunken book reviewer, but trust me, I could drink you under the table and still have it in me to run home in cowboy boots in the snow, which is something I’ve practiced many times, friend.
Moving on:
I’m sure you’re not the first angry comic book guy to want to take a dump on the ‘classics’, whatever that means in your generalised imagination but if you didn’t like the Scarlet Letter why not stick to criticising the book, instead of releasing your uninformed rant at a whole supposed genre of ‘classics’.
Here’s the real problem.
Angry comic book guy.
This is a decision he made based on what I’d recently read, I suppose. Yes, I’ve read a lot of comic books lately. And yes, I do enjoy comic books. But what are some of my other top-rated books?
The Art of Fielding- On just about every top fiction list going for this year.
Stay Here With Me- Robert Olmstead, writing teacher at Ohio Wesleyan, waxing on about his youth.
House of Prayer No. 2- Mark Richard, a true master, finally wrote a memoir that I devoured immediately.
The Dog of the Marriage- Amy Hempel, Queen of the short story.
The Meadow- Poet James Galvin talks about nature and death for a few hundred pages.
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay- Oh, wait. That one’s vaguely about comic books. Buuuut it won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Call it a draw?
Crush- Yale Young Poet’s award winner.
In the City of Shy Hunters- One of the best-written books ever. Hands down. Ever. Try it out.
I could go on. However, it’s unnecessary. The point I’m making here is that you may call me a comic book guy if you’d like to limit me and make me sound like I don’t enjoy the Scarlet Letter because none of the characters swung around on webs, but to do so would be inaccurate and simply not true.
As far as having a “generalised imagination” I would have to protest and say that, of any criticism I’ve received in my life, it’s never been one that involves a failure of imagination. Some of the things I’ve imagined in the recent past?
-A Rolling Stop Sign to be put in place of most residential Stop signs. That way, instead of coming to a partial stop and maybe getting a ticket, you could legally come to an incomplete stop while still focusing on safety.
-A television sitcom about a dog, a cat, and their individual, robotic, Roomba friends.
-A long discussion on whether it’s legal to carry an infant in a Bjorn while riding a motorcycle.
Okay? Now you may not like those ideas, but to say they don’t involve imagination is sillier than the idea of a seasonal cereal called Frost Bites, which is ANOTHER one that I had, buddy.
So while you may not like the directions my imagination may take, to call my imagination limited is an affront that I won’t stand for, and honestly it demonstrates that you haven’t really taken the time to investigate what you’re talking about.
Had you taken the time, you would know this: One of the biggest problems with classics, as I see it, are the people who claim to love them as you do and use that love as some kind of proof of…being better.
I’ll give you a quick example. When I talk about a book, I generally say, “I’ve been reading this really great book called Big Ray, and in it…” However, I suspect that most of your book conversations start like this: “Have you read Proust?”
For people like you, it’s more important to announce what you’ve read than what you want to say about it. In fact, in criticizing my review, I notice that you didn’t really point out ANYTHING positive about the Scarlet Letter. Not one defense of it that was based in the text. So tell me, how strong of a point can you make when you haven’t even mentioned the text itself?
if you didn’t like the Scarlet Letter why not stick to criticising the book, instead of releasing your uninformed rant at a whole supposed genre of ‘classics’.
Well, because I write things that I actually want people to read and enjoy, so writing down my feelings about a book more antiquated than your personal tastes is not something I would expect people to read. It seems asinine to me that people are still writing about all this old shit. That’s exactly my point.
I suppose I neglected to say it up until now, but you may be surprised to hear that this angry comic book nerd was an English major. The required reading included:
-Over a dozen Shakespeare plays
-Young Goodman Brown
-Pilgrim’s Progress
-Dracula
-Frankenstein
-Jane Eeyre
-Wide Sargasso Sea
-House of the Spirits
-The Iliad
-Huckleberry Finn
-Gulliver’s Travels
-The Plague
-The Double
-Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
-The Great Gatsby
-Dubliners
Not to mention a metric fuckton of poems, essays, literary criticism, and other stuff. AAAANNND a bunch of things I chose to read on my own.
The point is, I think I’ve given the classics a fair shake. I don’t feel that I’m dismissing them without knowing what I’m talking about. For the most part, they don’t interest me, and I really think some of them are not good books to be reading today when taken outside of their historical importance. As artifacts, they may have meaning, but they are shit reads.
So as far as an uninformed rant, I would have to un-humbly disagree.
The idea that the canon is never revised is also demonstrably false – tell that to Charlotte Yonge, E.M. Delafield, Mary Ward, Magraret Oliphant – it is constantly revised.
Really? Okay, let’s see.
Charlotte Yonge died in 1901.
Delafield in 1943, her most popular work published in 1930.
Mary Ward? At least she lived to the 80’s, but The Snake Pit was published in 1946.
Margaret Oliphant DIED IN FUCKING 1897! She has been DEAD for 115 fucking years!
Obviously you and I have a very different opinion on this.
Perhaps part of the problem is that I should have clarified that my frustration doesn’t come from the fact that the canon is unaltered. By “nothing new” what I mean is that the items added are not new. Written recently. Written by people who have even vaguely similar experiences to my own.
1946 doesn’t sound like that long ago, but what are some big events that have occurred since then?
-Civil Rights Movement.
-The rise of television.
-The Cold War.
-The Kennedy Assassination.
-Man lands on the moon.
-The personal fucking computer
-Cloning
-The goddamn internet!
I know it’s not that long ago chronologically, but a lot of shit has happened since then. So to use those examples of the canon being constantly updated isn’t going to cut mustard with me. I bet mustard was invented after those books, you dumb bastard.
Okay, I think that’s about it.
Oh, wait:
I own no tweed but I don’t have a problem with people who do.
Good one. GOOD ONE! All of that work just for me to get wicked hardcore burned right there at the end. Pete, you have been motherfucking LAMBASTED!
I’d love to summarize this whole thing by addressing my critic and saying “maybe next time you’ll” but I won’t. Because we both know that’s a waste of time. You’ll continue walking around, asking people if they’ve read Ulysses. You’d argue with me if I said you find the classics to be inherently “better,” but I’m not arguing about that. I’m just saying that you think your association with said classics makes you feel like YOU are better. And my friend, it does not. Not even a little.
I am better than you. Because I have a web site where I can say so.
~
It’s great to finally get back to the classics. It’s been far too long since I read a book with careful intensity, noting throwaway lines that are likely to show up on a multiple choice or short answer test that misses the main themes of a book entirely while managing to ask lots of questions like, “In the fourth chapter, what kind of shoes was [character you don’t even remember] wearing?”
I was thinking maybe it would be nice to read a book like this without worrying about that stuff, just absorbing it for what it was and then moving on through my life drunk.
Wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong.
It’s hard to know where to start with this thing.
The prose itself is almost unreadable. Let me give you an example of what a sentence in this book is like:
A man- who was born in a small town, which bore no resemblance to the town his parents imagined for him when they settled in the area over 40 years ago with every intention of starting a small business selling gift baskets online that sort of petered out after bigger companies like FTD caught onto the whole thing and ran the little guys out with predatory pricing- decided to go for a walk one day.
I shit you not. Whenever I saw a dash I’d skip down to find the second dash, and usually managed to cruise through half a page to find the relevant piece where the prose picked up again.
Word on the street is that Hawthorne, who published the book in 1850, actually wrote it to seem EVEN MORE old-timey than it was, which is pretty goddamn old-timey at this point. As far as I can tell, writing old-timey means:
1. Describing furniture and clothing in such exhaustive detail that royal wedding coverage appears shabby and underdeveloped.
2. Using commas wherever the fuck you feel like it.
3. Structuring the plot in such a way that you already know everything that’s going to happen way before it does.
Let’s talk plot while we’re on the topic.
The plot is like <span style=”font-style: italic;”>Dynasty</span> with all the juicy parts pulled out. I’m serious. All events could be summed up by video of a guy sitting in front of a sign that says, “Banging people isn’t so bad” and winking from time to time. One of the characters is damned, and as she walks through the forest the bits of light that dot the trail through the canopy of trees literally vanish before she can walk into them. Now this would be fine in a book where the damned character was in the woods, say, leading an army of orcs. But in a book where the sexual and social mores of Puritan society are called into question, it kind of overdoes everything and kills the mood.
So it all begs the question: What the fuck is going on with these classics?
The Scarlet Letter, according to a recent study, is the sixth-most taught book in American high schools. It’s very popular, and you can hardly enter a Barnes and Noble without seeing a new version with such awesome cover art that it almost tricks you into buying it.
I have a frequent argument with my brother regarding what makes things (movies, books, whatever) great. To him, for example, a movie might be great because it’s the first movie to usher in a new era in filmmaking, really redefining an era while paying a loving homage to the past. Context is important to him, and reading the stuff on the IMDB page is part of the movie experience in his world.
For me, I don’t really give a shit about context. Knowing that Hawthorne had certain feelings about Puritanism based on his ancestry doesn’t really matter much to me. Finding out that the main character was based loosely on the author’s wife doesn’t really do a whole lot for me. In other words, I demand to be entertained on at least some level, and if the level of entertainment doesn’t spur me on to dig deeper, I think that’s a failure of the art and not an example of my own laziness contributing to my dislike of the art in question.
Furthermore, when the prose is TOO challenging I am constantly thinking, “This is a book I am reading and here is the next line of this book.” I am not at all swept up in the narrative and therefore don’t enjoy it nearly as much.
I like to think of books as being like magicians. Take a David Copperfield…the magician, not the book. His schtick is to do amazing tricks that appear effortless on his part, which is why they are, well, magical. David Blaine, on the other hand, performs feats that do not appear effortless whatsoever, and therefore far less magical. It takes a great writer to write a great book. It takes an even better writer to write a great book that appears nearly effortless.
One might accuse me of rarely reading challenging books, and maybe it’s true. I find myself drawn to books that compel me to finish them as opposed to those that I feel I have to slog through while other books are sitting in growing piles around my apartment, calling out to me with their promises of genuine laughs, heartbreak that is relevant to me, and prose that doesn’t challenge me to the point that it’s more of a barrier to the story than anything.
Perhaps most telling, at the book club meeting we were discussing this last night, and an older lady asked a pretty decent question: “Why is this considered a classic?”
There are two answers, one that is what the Everyman Library will tell you and one that I would tell you.
Everyman would say that the book is a classic because it is an excellent snapshot of a historical period. It has a narrative set within a framework that allows us to better understand our roots as Americans. The issues of people’s perceptions of women and rights of women are still very alive today. Overall, it gives us a chance to examine our own society through the lens of fiction, therefore re-framing the conversation to make it less personal and easier to examine without bias. Blah, blah, blah.
<span style=”font-weight: bold;”>I</span> would say it’s a classic because it was one of the more palatable books that came out during the period when “classics” were made. I would also point out that the canonized classics are never revised. We never go back and say which books maybe have less to say about our lives than they used to, or which might still be relevant but have been usurped by something that is closer to the lives we live today. I would also say that it continues to be taught in schools because the kind of people who end up teaching high school English are most often people who have a deep and abiding respect for these types of books and identified with these types of books at around that time in their lives. I think there are a lot of people out there who never liked these books, and rather than making their voices heard about what they think people should read they just drop out of the world of books altogether.
My point is, I think this is a bad book. It’s got low readability, even for adults. The plot is melodramatic. The characters are single-dimensional crap, the women being constant victims of the time and the men being weak examples of humanity. Also, a very serious story is halted in places where we are expected to believe that magic letter A’s pop up in the sky like you might see in an episode of Sesame Street.
It must have been a very exciting book in its time, without a doubt based on its sales. And if this kind of book is your thing, good for you. I don’t begrudge you your joy. It’s just not a book that I would ever dream of foisting on someone else, nor would I recommend reading it unless you are absolutely required.