C.Y. Gopinath's Blog: Bookitudes

May 23, 2012

Is bad better than good?

I was at a coffee shop in Mumbai. In tables around me sat about 30 of the city's young and cool, guys with gals, dudes with prudes. My friend Sumit, a self-made brand marketing guru, told me that these were the real audience for The Book of Answers, my first novel, which was recently shortlisted for the 2012 Commonwealth Book Prize. "They read Chetan Bhagat," he said. "And they would love you."

I did a spot poll right there, going to each table and asking the following five questions —

1. Have you heard of Chetan Bhagat?

2. Have you read his novels?

3. Do you like his writing?

4. Would you read his next novel?

5. Have you heard of C Y Gopinath?

All 28 people at the café had heard of Chetan Bhagat, and about 60% had read his books. Every one of them thought his writing was terrible, but added that they would still buy his next novel. None of them had heard of C Y Gopinath.

The Chetan Bhagat of the west for the moment is E L Jones, whose Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy is a runaway best-seller. Variously called mommy porn and Twilight fan fiction, the book — a non-stop paean to sexual submission and domination and pleasure through pain — seems to appeal to young and successful single American women in their 30s. Apparently what they like more than anything after a hard day of making profits and laying off men, is to get spanked by their stay-at-home husbands. Jones, like Bhagat, is candid that the writing is mediocre and neither has literary pretensions.

I am best described as a struggling author, despite my fifteen minutes of fame last week when my novel was shortlisted for the 2012 Commonwealth Book Prize. I wonder — why must a serious writer struggle so much more for so much less than an E L Jones or a Chetan Bhagat? And why, despite all their labors, will they never sell, while much less competent authors sell in the millions?

I have a theory about why bad writing sells more and faster than 'good' writing. Today's reader is a turner of pages who reads in the train and on the potty. He or she needs a story that can be read staccato, where even skipping a few chapters will make no difference. A book that does not need a companion dictionary, does not make allusions that require eclectic knowledge to understand, and one that is not built on nuances and hints. Broad strokes, easy English, straight talking, no literary handstands or somersaults. Above all, a book that does not talk down to the reader but stays poised at his or her reading and speaking level. These seem to be the requirements.

Come to think of it, wouldn't Hemingway's best writing fit that description? Why is he a master and Bhagat an imposter then? Is unpretentious straight writing necessarily poor? How are E L Jones or Chetan Bhagat different from Hemingway or Jhumpa Lahiri? Or me, for that matter?

Do writers who want to survive through writing need to dumb down their work and cultivate a line of sellable trash?

Talk to me.

The Book of Answers
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Published on May 23, 2012 19:30

May 3, 2012

A collateral boon

Since The Book of Answers, my first fiction novel, was shortlisted for the 2012 Commonwealth Book Prize, three sorts of comments have come my way —

Very good! Always knew you had it in you!

Enjoy the moment, friend. A nomination is as good as a prize.

It's only a prize.


It's difficult not to enjoy the moment, and only a rank cynic would turn up his nose at it. After all, this is the one irrefutable thing to have happened to my book since its relatively low-key launch in India last year by HarperCollins. The Commonwealth website points out that authors from 54 Commonwealth countries are eligible to compete, and I know that English is lingua franca for many of them. Perhaps a truthful assertion would be that The Book of Answers has been judged to be among the 18 books most worth reading in 2012.

Well, when I put it that way. What a lovely feeling.

What a lovely deception, actually. The inner cynic points out several flaws right away. For instance, one doesn't know how many books were submitted, and from how many countries. Perhaps these are the top 18 from a mere 200 books entered for the prize from a global total of — how many? How many books were published last year anyway?

Bowker, the agency that assigns ISBN numbers, has statistics only upto 2009. In that year, 288,355 books were published traditionally, and 764,448 books were self-published, a grand total of over a million books. Of course, the larger, self-published number there would be ineligible for the Commonwealth Book Prize, since only publishers may nominate authors.

Ahem. It seems we 18 shortlistees might not represent such a fair culling out of all the million plus books published after all.

What about the third comment, It's only a prize? Well, it's always only a prize. A better point for me to remind myself of is that it's only a judgment. For example, the jury of the Man Asia Literary Prize took a different view of The Book of Answers, and it appeared neither on a longlist nor a shortlist.

I reflect on the number of judgments that play into moving towards a prize such as this. First, a publisher judges the book to be worth publishing; then worth submitting for a prize. A judge or several find the book sufficiently interesting to argue for it to shortlisted. Personal preferences play into such choices as much as listed criteria. And as much as I trust any professional panel of judges to want to do their equitable best, selecting a book for anything at all is a professional judgment subject to personal limitations. A good judge, in my opinion, represents the apogee of enlightened subjectivity.

At the end of it, it is necessary for all authors that find themselves in such lists to recall the reasons why they wrote the book in the first place. I only became aware of the Commonwealth Book Prize last week, so you may be sure I did not have that in mind. Comment #1, I always knew you had it in you does not apply here. Nothing was further from my mind that winning any prize or being in any shortlist in my three years of writing this.

More to the point, I wrote The Book of Answers kicking and screaming that I was not really an author of any kind. When it was complete, I took my agent's word for it that the story had merit, and was grateful that HarperCollins agreed with him. As many have shredded it as exalted it. Many have given up quarter way through the tome, but at least two have read it twice. To this day, I find it impossible to read it as though I had not written it; I grope like a blind man for a glimmering of its worth and readability.

Writing this novel made me realize how much I enjoyed writing a novel, and how much I looked forward to the next. I know now that today's publishing has a high rate of infant mortality, so anything, anything at all, that helps set one book apart from the rest and draws attention to it, is manna from heaven.

A good author, like a good Zen monk, ought to be able to just cross the bridge and keep walking without a look back. The Book of Answers by C.Y. Gopinath
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Published on May 03, 2012 21:43 Tags: award, book-of-answers, commonwealth-book-prize, judge, jury, selection

Bookitudes

C.Y. Gopinath
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