I was noodling through some of Lance Mannion's past posts, and I read through some discussions of the National Book Awards from last year in his Writer's Workshop category. One of the books that came up in the discussions was Philip Roth's The Plot Against America. I tried to read that book a while back, because every once in a while I make a point of readings authors I know are terrible, or I expect them to be. It's the reason I read Jackie Collins. Roth is just an exmaple of a bad writer who gets reviewed well. I liked Portnoy's Complaint just fine, but have found all of Roth's subsequent work to be wholly inadequate and limited in range. Really, so is Portnoy , but at least that book has the verve of the new.

Plot Against America was bad in the ways I come to expect from writers from the "literary" genre who take on tropes from other genres. Usually, these writers have a terrifically mediocre grasp of plot. And they are often extremely bad at explaining actions, or background information. And by bad, I mean dull as day-old dogshit. But when these writers add the difficulty of, say, a mystery plot, or science fictional plotting story techniques, they are worse than the most boring Boy Scout ghost-story teller around a campfire. In Roth's specific case, he fucked up all the world building, which is the essence of alternate history (and much other good science fiction). Boring dumps of information, like reading a history paper written by a retarded 5-year old. And I could frnakly care less about Philip Roth's same goddamn family dynamic I've read for 40 fucking years.

I can understand why Roth would want to use the alternate history technique, even badly, because it helps hide how little he has to say about the world, and about people.

Like a lot of literary writers, his world is so cramped and constipated, it gives me claustrophobia to read about it. Even when he changes the entire world, he doesn't really care about except in so far as it affects his own gonads and guts. That's fine, but frankly I can get a more expansive and interesting worldview from a freako right wing Mack Bolan novel, or a JAG novelization. I blame Saul Bellow, Ernest Hemingway, and JD Salinger for second-rate junk like Plot Against America. The huge self-regard that fueled the fiction of all those writers led to novel world that only existed to be reviewed and cataloged, often rejected, by the characters in them. OK, using fiction to judge the world is a reasonable use of pages and ink, but not when you're goddamn boring. Bellow is often boring, but at least he's boring in a way had never been done before. Roth is boring in a way that's been done for years in the slush piles in the offices of Tor and Baen Books.

Look, I am biased in favor of books that have interesting plots. I think Charles Dickens and Leo Tolstoy would be in favor of that. But even Ford Madox Ford's Good Soldier, which is a slow and tightly focused book, has a compelling and involving plot. Unlike the over-determined classist crap of Henry James, at least Ford shows non-obvious things about the people involved in his story. I think it's because Ford genuinely likes people, and James, Bellow, and finally Roth only like themselves.