WITH "The Da Vinci Code" in the dock here in Britain, the good bad book is in the news. It's a category that riles serious literary critics.
Reviewing Dan Brown's bestseller, the Times of London described it as "without doubt the silliest, most inaccurate, ill-informed, stereotype-driven, cloth-eared, cardboard-cutout-populated piece of pulp fiction." But 40 million or so buyers have been severely entertained by it -- always something that troubles the highbrows. The very literary John Updike criticized the very popular Tom Wolfe as "entertainment not literature."
George Orwell wrote an article on good bad books just after the end of World War II. This oxymoronic category attracted the author of "Animal Farm" because he was both personally and professionally committed to slumming -- either on the streets of Paris or in the great halls of literature. Orwell said "Uncle Tom's Cabin" would outlive Virginia Woolf. He found that you could be amused or excited by what the intellect despises. "By any test that can be devised," Orwell wrote, "Carlyle would be found to be a more intelligent man than Trollope. Yet Trollope has remained readable and Carlyle has not."
Good bad books are not the same as books that are merely bad. Good bad is more subtle. A good bad book is one that achieves a surprisingly exhilarating effect despite flaws of style and construction, which disqualify it as (what Updike calls) "literature." Significantly, good bad books translate very well into film, perhaps suggesting that cinema is an intellectually and artistically undemanding medium. "The Guns of Navarone," "The Graduate" and "Jaws," for example, were feeble literature but made magnificent movies.
The good bad critical label can be traced to G.K. Chesterton, inspired by the extraordinary number of very bad books, ripe with imperial pomp, scintillating with sexually repressed jingoism, that were published in the Edwardian era. But boorish pulp can be enjoyable. Bad can be good.
Indeed, there may be something in our circuitry that wills confusion between these poles. Urban blacks appropriated bad to mean its opposite many years ago, and the joys of inversion were taken up at the dawn of punk by Malcolm McLaren, who said of his Sex Pistols and their epic crassness on stage: "They are so bad they are good."
