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On the Rippers of Isabel Allende; Or, How the Culture of Offense Ruins Literary Discussion

On the Rippers of Isabel Allende; Or, How the Culture of Offense Ruins Literary Discussion

Last updated on: March 9, 2017 at 2:12 am by Scott Eric Alt

On the Rippers of Isabel Allende; Or, How the Culture of Offense Ruins Literary Discussion 2017-03-09T02:12:02-04:00 Scott Eric Alt

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Isabel Allende (Photo credit: Paal Leveraas, Creative Commons)

When 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.

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.

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