What makes a bad book bad?

American academics have been grappling with this question and rounding up some unusual suspects

Laying into Ian Fleming because his Bond books "consist entirely of clichés" is hardly revolutionary, but the 007's creator is not the only author to come under attack from a group of US academics asked to describe what constitutes a bad book for the latest issue of the American Book Review.

The Great Gatsby is, apparently, "incredibly smug about its relationship to the traditional realistic novel". Women in Love reads "like someone put a gun to Nietzsche's head and made him write a Harlequin romance". Revolutionary Road fares little better: "I am as illuminated as I am by a college essay decrying drunk driving," says its selector, while All the Pretty Horses gets Cormac McCarthy compared to Jackie Collins. He "wraps his characters in half-truths and idealised anecdotes, much like Jackie Collins does, only his are about the Lone Star state, the border, and its cowboy myths," says Christine Granados from Texas A&M University, adding that "McCarthy uses clichés and derivative characters to sell millions of copies".

This is all a bit say-something-controversial-for-the-hell-of-it for my taste. There's such bad writing out there (do I have the energy to bring up Dan Brown and Stephenie Meyer? No, not really) that it feels mean-spirited, even arrogant, to pick on the classics. I tend to believe McCarthy when he told Oprah, in a rare interview, that he didn't care how many people read his books. "You would like for the people that would appreciate the book to read it, but as far as many, many people reading it, so what?" he said. And anyway, it was only with 1992's All the Pretty Horses that he did actually hit the bestseller lists: his previous books – The Orchard Keeper, Outer Dark, Blood Meridian – only sold a couple of thousand copies apiece, so his "clichés and derivative characters" clearly weren't working from the start.

I much prefer the academics who've picked books which sound genuinely dire. I haven't read Nelson Hayes's Dildo Cay, but Pennsylvania State University's Jonathan P Eburne almost tempts me into giving it a go. "It is so earnestly bad as to call its own existence into question," he writes, calling the novel "the product less of an unsteady hand than of a resoundingly tin ear, [with prose] so categorically graceless as to supersede camp and plunge straight into ontological confusion."

Pondering whether "even the most sober war-era reader would leap to associate the titular islet with the tall Caribbean cactuses that populate it, rather than, say, with artificial phalluses", Eburne quotes a wonderfully bad extract from the novel. "'Father, I want to talk with you!' Adrian had been watching his father walk the dike unsteadily, and suddenly he had seen himself at the age of sixty walking the dike unsteadily, and on top of his restlessness it was too much for him. 'How strong do you think that pickle is?' his father asked, ignoring the tone of Adrian's voice." I want to know more.

And of course someone comes up with William McGonagall, "poet and tragedian". "[Poetic Gems] is great because it cannot but deeply entertain us with its earnest vigour, its invincible belief in its own genius, its merciless craft, its transcendent obliviousness," says Kim Herzinger from the University of Houston-Victoria. Just for fun, I clicked on the "Gem of the Day" at McGonagall Online to remind myself of the poet's glorious badness. It truly is a beauty:

A sad tale of the sea I will relate, which will your hearts appal Concerning the burning of the steamship 'City of Montreal,' Which had on board two hundred and forty-nine souls in all, But, alas! A fearful catastrophe did them befall.

You can sign up to receive a gem a day via email: I think I shall.

Like Carolyn Kellogg at the LA Times, I think respondent Sophia A McClennen's approach is a good one – she teaches "a bad book, an awful, poorly written, sometimes sexist, racist, reactionary book" without telling her students what she thinks of it, and waits to see if they'll notice. "I like to teach my students that they can trash bad books. Too much reverence for the literary can float around graduate programs in literature," she says.

And I love the response of a college professor to Kellogg's blog. "Unfortunately, some of my colleagues judge everything by how close it comes to Joyce's Ulysses, which they reread annually," he reveals. "A friend of mine was at an academic conference session about Ulysses. Someone on the panel referred to an episode where a character in thenovel had coffee at a restaurant. The rest of the panel turned on him, and one of them hissed, 'It was cocoa!' Now do you see why this ridiculous list came about?"

from: The Guardian