What I Learned from the Worst Novelist in the English Language

Fatefully—some might even say tragically—Burrows accepted the offer.

As you might expect, the review was a hatchet job, one that would make today’s most dexterous knife-wielders—Patricia Lockwood, say, or Andrea Long Chu—stand up for unbridled applause. Strafing his way from one literary offense to the next, Weingarten lampooned the book’s premise (“you write very badly”) and lanced the verisimilitude of several of the central characters (“[they] don’t seem to have personalities”). In a crowning moment, he unleashed a stinging verdict: “I think The Great American Parade is a wretchedly terrible product that shames the American publishing industry.” 

It bears noting that in the weeks before starting this job I’d been toiling away at my novel, generating fresh pages at a Joyce Carol Oates–like clip. The book was a send-up of our post-truth climate, replete with a computer program running for president and an evangelical Christian kid who accidentally kills his parents. Think George Saunders meets Marilynne Robinson. Think Jamie Quatro meets William Gaddis. Like many first-time novelists, I was laboring under the delusion that I had something urgent to say about America, that the voltage of my dramatization might propel the reading public into a more expansive sense of justice. If there are any sins for which we can still forgive the young, one rather hopes they include idealism and hubris.

What happened next is so banal that I almost don’t want to disclose it. I froze up. The pen stalled in my hand. Whatever spell of optimism and self-delusion is necessary for sustained artistic creation seemed to have abruptly vanished, leaving me bereft and more than a little ill-tempered. I moped on sofas at home and, at work, snapped at recalcitrant students. Pitifully, I torched whole notebooks, melodramatically sparking my Zippo and watching as entire plotlines crackled to cinder and ash. Animating these little festivals of self-sabotage was my deepening conviction that even if my book was lucky enough to garner editorial attention, upon publication it would be swiftly consigned to the literary dustbin, panned as yet another bloviation from a twentysomething writer (which probably would’ve been accurate). After all, I was now a professor at the same university—in the same department even—as someone who’d been dubbed the worst novelist in history, and the proximity of that verdict haunted me, infecting the very air of campus like the whiff of bad cologne. 

This was how I found myself biking over to the library in lavish sunshine and bloodhounding around the stacks in search of the Burrows novel. Surely it couldn’t be as bad as Weingarten had said it had been. Surely it possessed some redeeming merit.

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The Great American Parade is set in the aftermath of the 2000 election, when George W. Bush claimed victory after an opera of judicial nonsense. The Great American Parade imagines that, in order to rally the country around the abolition of the estate tax, Bush secretly plans a parade for the wealthiest Americans, a garish jamboree of gold-plated luxury sedans inching down Pennsylvania Avenue and monolithic balloons of Bill Gates and George Soros floating over the capitol. Once wind of the ridiculous spectacle reaches the newspaper staff at the University of Wisconsin, a cohort of college students “embark on a crusade to reawaken America” and attempt to stage a mammoth counter-protest. Across the book’s final chapter, some Swiftian hijinks ensue, culminating in a showdown between Bush’s obscene pageantry and the tactics of the student protesters, the latter of whom ultimately win the media war by holding aloft giant balloons that say things like “BUSH = PAWN OF BIG OIL!” and “KILLING THE ESTATE TAX KILLS DEMOCRACY!” 

In the refrigerated darkness of my library carrel, I read the book in one sitting. And while Weingarten surely overstated the case in calling this the worst novel ever written, it’d be wrong to suggest that the book doesn’t give the reader much to wince and groan about—aborted plotlines, a confected love story. Because so much of the book’s argument depends on the reader understanding the intricacies of the estate tax, the characters are often pressed into delivering wonkish ad hoc lectures, which makes them sound like the test-tube babies of Thomas Frank and Slajov Zizek. “America suffers from an intense fever of greed,” one character says, 

…a characteristic of our society that become rampant during the Civil War and has flared up repeatedly since then—as evidenced by the Age of the Robber Barons and the excesses of speculation during the 1920s … But those shameful episodes of our history pale beside the excesses of today, dramatized by the recent Enron scandal which a former vice president of that infamous corporation attributed to the ‘greed that was at the heart of its corporate culture,’ a greed seen especially in the notorious limited partnerships, set up in various Caribbean islands, in which those in corporate hierarchy made such killings as $2 million in two months by two partners on an investment of $2500 and $4.5 million by another on his investment of $25,000 in the same sixty-day period.”

Apparently, when Burrows reached out to Warren Buffet for a blurb, the billionaire explained to him that he didn’t think a novel was the best vessel for his ideas. 

from Hacker News https://ift.tt/3ifoEsZ