Good and Bad

This week I've asked my creative writing students to give me some feedback on how their work is progressing and how the class is going for them. I've gotten some very thoughtful and interesting responses. For example, I was surprised (and gratified to learn) how interested many of them were in the fine art of line-editing.

One thing that's stuck with me from these responses and others I've heard from students in the past is their desire to know what makes for "good" writing and what makes for "bad" writing. When I used to teach poetry, for example, one student asked me to bring in a good poem and a bad poem, explain to the class what made one good and the other bad, and then hand out a list of rules so that students could follow them and write only good poems in the future.

It's a perfectly reasonable thing to want to know, and if anyone out there could provide me with rules of "good" and "bad," I'd be grateful to hear about them so I could pass this information on to others. For myself, I no longer can claim to know what "good" and "bad" mean anymore, and increasingly I find that I no longer care.

I think that Zadie Smith's recent novel On Beauty is a textbook example of a "bad" book. In fact I think it represents some of the worst tendencies in contemporary literature and constitutes a fundamental misunderstanding of E. M. Forster's Howards End, the book that Smith claims inspired her own novel. The New York Times Book Review, however, names it as one of the top ten books of the previous year. They think it is a "good" book. Good for them, good for me. I have my opinion, and they have theirs.

I also think rum raisin ice cream is an example of "bad" ice cream. What if I said that the New York Times sang the praises of rum raisin ice cream? Would you care? Would I change my opinion of rum raisin?

For me, the only opinions about literature that mean anything are ones that engage with the essential qualities of the text. We can talk about characters and word choices and plot structure and setting and the use of time. We can talk about how tired we ought to be as readers of books detailing (yet again) the petty tempests in academic teapots, or the cloying contemporary fetish for "updating" plots of classic novels by transplanting them roots and all from the past to the present, ever so cutely substituting "emails" for "letters," for example. Then we can have a real discussion about the validity of these specific decisions.

As for what's good and what's bad, I can only say what I like. But you, reader, are equally entitled to like what you like. But by simply exchanging our opinions about good and bad, we immediately end the discussion because we can go no further. Because as much as I hate rum raisin, you'll still go on eating it, and as much as you want me to switch from cookie dough, I'm sticking to that too.