JUNK FOOD LITERATURE? MARILYN PENN
Exclusive: Junk Food Literature? Marilyn Penn
Until Michael Pollan exposed the fact that high fructose corn syrup was ubiquitous in processed food (The Omnivore’s Dilemma), most Americans had no idea that this dietary manipulation was one of the leading causes of the alarming rise in type 2 diabetes. After reading the Sunday Times Book Review of June 27th, I have concluded that a similar conspiracy exists between publishers, publicists and editors of book reviews and it is being perpetrated on people who consider themselves serious readers.
Four of the most prominently placed reviews in last Sunday’s Times are of books that are top-heavy in degradation and degrees of pathological maladjustment.
Adam Ross’ Mr. Peanut is a novel about marriage and the murderous impulses it inspires. Imperial Bedrooms by Brett Easton Ellis is a sequel to Less Than Zero and another novel about shallow, narcissistic Hollywood bottom-feeders who do drugs, plastic surgery, pornography and murder. Portrait of An Addict As A Young Man by Bill Clegg is a memoir of a successful literary agent who was a gay, narcissistic, self-destructive crackhead. Double Happiness by Mary Beth Hughes is a collection of short stories about people described by the reviewer as standing “at the edge of chaos – a revolution, a scene of violence, the pit where the twin towers used to be.†Some of the characters are adulterous, some physically abusive – all are plagued by the dystopic temper of our times.
In the Style section of the same paper is an article by Jillian Lauren, author of Some Girls: My Life in a Harem. Her essay is about a narcissistic, tattooed Jewish EX-stripper/ prostitute/ sex-slave/ junkie who enrolls in beauty school and finds love with a sensitive rocker who is unafraid of marriage to a woman with this past. The reader cannot be blamed for coming to an independent premonition about this heartwarming beginning.
Most Americans are not readers of the Sunday Times Book Review; it has traditionally been pitched at people who are more educated and sophisticated than the readers of Danielle Steele and other writers celebrated for potboilers and mass market entertainment. Just as academic standards have fallen with grade inflation taking the place of rigorous work, the constantly narrowing market for literature has been besotted with books about drivel and they are commanding the prized place of a NY Times review. The Times receives more than a hundred books daily for consideration – out of 700 a week, it winnows a select fraction for attention. Isn’t it odd how many of those keep hammering away at the stale clichés of people living on the edge? These subjects are the equivalent of the non-nutritious fructose that insinuates itself into a preferred addiction, deadening our senses to books about more serious subjects than chronically depressed characters suffering from adolescent anomie and arrested development.
There is a strong argument for the theory that life imitates art and what we elevate in our most prestigious museums, theaters, journals and books eventually becomes normative instead of marginal. We are a nation of people who used to pride ourselves on our energy, our inventiveness and our intellectual curiosity. We are becoming more and more sluggish, more dependent on passive entertainment than stretching our own minds. Reading books about self-defeating losers is the equivalent of eating TV dinners instead of a gourmet meal. Let’s challenge the Times, that staunch advocate of environmentalism to clean its own house of recycled garbage and herald fresh and original writers instead of those endlessly fixated on an already depleted slough of despond.
FamilySecurityMatters.org Contributing Editor Marilyn Penn is a writer in New York who can also be read regularly at Politicalmavens.com.
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