The bias of the experts

(N)o one is less welcome in the literature departments than the accomplished filler of multiple shelves of books.

Paul Theroux, Figures in a Landscape

Georges Simenon

Paul Theroux writes specifically of French novelist Georges Simenon in the essay quoted above. Simenon's books may, in many cases, have had high literary quality, but there were so many of them. And most of them were murder mysteries. Academics might sometimes accept a mystery writer like Raymond Chandler for class discussions, but Chandler wrote relatively few books. Simenon was a "filler of multiple shelves of books."

Quantity tends to be equated, and not just in academic circles, with a lack of quality. Might this in any way explain why Anthony Trollope, who wrote so many novels, is less highly regarded than Thomas Hardy or the Bronte sisters, who wrote relatively few? As for modern literature, I can recall when a young Joyce Carol Oates, having few novels under her belt, seemed to be more highly esteemed in literary circles than she is now, near the end of a prolific career.

This may have something to do with the difficulty inherent in giving serious study to a large number of books. It would be much easier to become an expert on the works of a writer like F. Scott Fitzgerald or Herman Melville than a writer like Trollope, Oates or Simenon.

Then there is the matter of popularity, not the question of how many of an author's books are published but rather how many are sold. Best-seller lists, with a few exceptions, discourage literary acceptance. Literary prizes usually go to books you have never heard of, let alone read. This is not to say that literary value should in any way be determined by popularity. I rarely read best-selling books, and if I do it's not because they are bestsellers. Yet I believe some best-selling novels, such as those by Ann Patchett and Donna Tartt, deserve more attention from literary scholars than they are likely to get. After all, Charles Dickens was once the most popular writer on the planet.

"How can (so the argument seems to run) a prolific and popular writer be any good?" Theroux asks in  his essay on Simenon. Academics, he says, favor the underdog. They also favor literature only they, not the common reader, can really appreciate, understand and explain.