On the rippers of Isabel Allende; or, how the culture of offense ruins literary discussion.

hen Isabel Allende said in a brief NPR inter­view that her lat­est nov­el is a par­o­dy of crime fic­tion, and that she is not a fan of the genre, you would have thought she had just admit­ted to being a ser­i­al killer. Here in full is what Ms. Allende said:

The book is tongue-in-cheek. It’s very iron­ic. And I’m not a fan of mys­ter­ies, so to pre­pare for this expe­ri­ence of writ­ing a mys­tery I start­ed read­ing the most suc­cess­ful ones in the mar­ket in 2012. … And I real­ized I can­not write that kind of book. It’s too grue­some, too vio­lent, too dark; there’s no redemp­tion there. And the char­ac­ters are just awful. Bad peo­ple. Very enter­tain­ing, but real­ly bad peo­ple. So I thought, I will take the genre, write a mys­tery that is faith­ful to the for­mu­la and to what the read­ers expect, but it is a joke. My sleuth will not be this hand­some detec­tive or jour­nal­ist or police­man or what­ev­er. It will be a young, 16-year-old nerd. My female pro­tag­o­nist will not be this promis­cu­ous, beau­ti­ful, dark-haired, thin lady. It will be a plump, blond, heal­er, and so forth.

Now what the author is describ­ing here is the kind of thing that has gone on in lit­er­a­ture for a very long time. Don Quixote, arguably the first nov­el, was a send-up of medieval romance. Jane Austen had good fun with Goth­ic hor­ror in Northang­er Abbey. And the exam­ples could be mul­ti­plied, from Alexan­der Pope’s The Rape of the Lock (a mock hero­ic) to John Barth’s The Sot-Weed Fac­tor (a par­o­dy of the 18th cen­tu­ry bil­dungsro­man).

But when Isabel Allende does this very com­mon thing, the lovers of the crime genre are OUTRAGED and want us all to know.

Erin Mitchell at Hey, There’s a Dead Guy in the Liv­ing Room accused Ms. Allende of “snot­ty elit­ism,” and of “being a nasty jerk” whose “mind is too small [and] world too nar­row to appre­ci­ate” crime fic­tion. As report­ed by the Hous­ton Chron­i­cle, the sen­si­tive and wound­ed Ms. Mitchell said the fol­low­ing in a phone inter­view:

I was raised read­ing what’s often referred to as pulp fic­tion. My dad’s an Eng­lish teacher, and I was nev­er told I should­n’t read some­thing.” [Oh. And where did Isabel Allende say that?] “Thomas Hardy, Elmore Leonard—one was not bet­ter than the oth­er. I object strong­ly to any­one who tries to make peo­ple feel like what they read is not good enough.

Oh. And Ms. Allende did this how? Where did she say crime fic­tion was not “good enough”?

Crime author Val McDer­mid claimed vic­tim sta­tus. “For years,” she said, “we’ve been the butt of igno­rant prej­u­dice.” But now, damn it, “we’re not going to stand for it any longer.” Rise up, ye oppressed!

Alli­son Hiltz of The Book Wheel, a fan of the wild non sequitur as well as the crime nov­el, claims that Ms. Allende, in some way, with delib­er­ate and nefar­i­ous intent I sup­pose, “robbed oth­er authors of sales,” placed an “unfair bur­den” on her fans, and caused book­stores to lose mon­ey. Ms. Hiltz has thrown her Allende col­lec­tion in the recy­cling bin and will not pay for one more ever again. Ever. Ever. [This post has appar­ent­ly been deleted—SEA, 8/11/19.]

McKen­na Jor­dan, own­er of the inde­pen­dent Hous­ton book­store Mur­der by the Book, was so hurt she returned 20 signed copies of Rip­per to Harper­Collins.

There has been no word yet, how­ev­er, of any fat­wa being issued on the life of Ms. Allende.

Let us remem­ber what Ms. Allende said in the first place, which caused all these emo­tion­al scars that may nev­er heal. She said she is not a fan of crime fic­tion and wrote a par­o­dy of it. That’s all. She did not say lit­er­ary fic­tion was bet­ter; she did not say those who like crime fic­tion are read­ers of low qual­i­ty; she did not say Stieg Lars­son fans should put down The Girl With the Drag­on Tat­too and pick up The House of the Spir­its.

She may have char­ac­ter­ized crime fic­tion in a way that makes lovers of the genre say, “That’s not quite true,” but so what? I love Agatha Christie; I don’t care. She did not say crime fic­tion was less, she only said she did not care for it. Her­self. Per­son­al­ly. And she said she wrote a par­o­dy of it, which is the kind of thing many, many writ­ers before her have done.

Too many peo­ple seem to be sit­ting around wait­ing to be offend­ed. Polit­i­cal cor­rect­ness is giv­ing us frag­ile ner­vous sys­tems, ready to shat­ter at the least gen­tle breeze. Say noth­ing more momen­tous than that you don’t like a par­tic­u­lar lit­er­ary genre, and those who do like it will break down in a fit of hys­te­ria, call you elit­ist, say you’re a snob and a hater and a jerk and a snot. My guess is that those who are rip­ping Isabel Allende in this vein, like Ms. Mitchell, reveal only their own self-con­scious fragili­ty about their lit­er­ary tastes. Call them Mr. Glass. (Or Ms. Glass.) Their gen­tle bones, suf­fer­ing from a sort of osteo­ge­n­e­sis imper­fec­ta, are too eas­i­ly shat­tered. Thus they demand that oth­ers express not even a mere dis­like for what they admire. The Cul­ture of Offense has run amok if we remove from an author the right to par­o­dy some­thing as triv­ial as a lit­er­ary genre.

If this were no more than a one-time fit of hys­te­ria from a few mys­tery fans who may have just missed their diazepam on the day of the NPR inter­view, it would not be worth the time to blog a response. But Ms. Allende is not the first to feel the wrath of the OUTRAGED.

If Harold Bloom (who is no mean judge of lit­er­ary qual­i­ty) says that Nobel lau­re­ate Doris Less­ing’s work amounts to “fourth-rate sci­ence fic­tion,” or that David Fos­ter Wal­lace “can’t write and can’t think,” or that Stephen King is an author of “pen­ny dread­fuls,” the OUTRAGED go mad and call him a “jeal­ous” “snob” and “an all-around puke.”

If William Giral­di stern­ly pans a duo of books by Alix Ohlin, again the OUTRAGED rise up to say HOW DARE HE? and OH I FEEL SO SORRY FOR POOR LITTLE ALIX. (See here and here.)

It is as though we are all wilt­ing vio­lets now. Are we not, any longer, allowed to make a lit­er­ary judg­ment or express a dis­like for some­thing, lest we be called a snob?

At stake in all this is our abil­i­ty to talk hon­est­ly about lit­er­ary taste and lit­er­ary merit—that is to say, our abil­i­ty to talk hon­est­ly about lit­er­a­ture at all. Although it is true that there is noth­ing wrong with read­ing Elmore Leonard, to pre­tend that there is no dif­fer­ence in mer­it between him and Thomas Hardy is insane. I love Stephen King, but I rec­og­nize that William Shake­speare is bet­ter than him because I am not an idiot.

And I can love a lit­er­ary genre (like goth­ic hor­ror) with­out demand­ing that the rest of the world share that love. If some­one says, “I don’t like goth­ic hor­ror” and pro­ceeds to write a par­o­dy of it, what dif­fer­ence should that make to me? Am I so hys­ter­i­cal and inse­cure and prone to OUTRAGE that I am going to call Jane Austen a snob and refuse to read her books and boy­cott any­one who stocks Northang­er Abbey on his shelves?

In an essay defend­ing hon­esty in lit­er­ary dis­cus­sion, Mr. Giral­di, who dared to say that Alix Ohlin writes bad­ly, speaks of “the intel­lec­tu­al and eth­i­cal oblig­a­tion to be out­raged by infe­ri­or art.” There is like­wise an “intel­lec­tu­al and eth­i­cal oblig­a­tion” not to pre­tend to like a genre you don’t. It is hyp­o­crit­i­cal for Ms. Mitchell to freely call Rip­per “crap,” but then assume a pitch of offense when Ms. Allende says mere­ly that she does not care for crime fic­tion. Ms. Allende did not say that Stieg Lars­son is “crap.” The first cri­te­ria for the hon­est dis­cus­sion of lit­er­a­ture is that we be grown ups first.