LUDIC LOG

I brought home a pile of books from the resale shop I am currently favoring with my temporary employment. Goodness knows how -- the uncaring, pitch-it-anywhere machinations of some storeroom drone like myself, no doubt -- an "audiobook" got into the box I filled up with stuff to take home.

Unlike many literary snobs, I am not above reading the occassional bestseller. Like meat snacks, baseball and masturbation, they give me a much-needed link to the common man, and they give me ample opportunities to justify my terrible snobbishness. I make it a point to read at least one major best seller a year, just to see where my people are at, literarily speaking.

The results of these forays into the world of non-obscure writers range from the surprisingly readable to the utterly terrible, with most taking up permanent residence, with full meal privileges and a weekly dress parade in their honor, in the latter camp. Luckily, by its very nature, this is an exercise that takes up very little of my extremely valuable time, and is of great value in knowing what to avoid in the future; it's also nice to add the northern punch of smug satisfaction to my awesome kung fu arsenal of elitist pseudointellectualism by actually having read some of the swill than it's so entertaining to belittle.

Up until recently, however, I had eschewed the audiobook. No substitute for real reading, this, though I: the tool of lazy yuppies, the refuge of blind people with no taste, the final destination of has-been B-listers -- that was the audiobook, in my universe. It was only when I heard Charlton Heston railing against them in an interview that I thought there might be something worthwhile about the format (the contra-heston philosophy being a fairly sure guide to life's never-ending challenges); it later occurred to me that in fact, given the quality of most of the best-sellers I read, the audiobook was in fact a superior way of experiencing them: shorter, cheaper and usually abridged severely enough to eliminate most of the author's more egregious passages.

This, of course, proved to be the case with my new find. Naturally, it was terrible; predictable, dreary, missing not a single stereotype or stock character, and not funny in the way the worst sitcoms aren't funny. It had the further reek of being read by the author, who proved herself an even worse actress than she is a writer and was absolutely merciless in her cruel use of accents.

When the whole punishing ordeal was over, however, I felt strangely depressed. Fiction, after all, is the one art form I value over all other. I read fiction more than I intake any other cultural expression; I studied fiction, and the theory and criticism thereof, in college; I write fiction and am foolish enough to hope that someday I will publish a novel. This one little audiobook, though, did what 30 years of self-doubt could not: it made me ask 'why?'

Why bother writing a novel, when this -- THIS -- is a best-seller? Goodness knows why, but I had always flattered myself that book-readers were a superior breed; not perfect, certainly, but superior, intellectually, to filmgoers, TV viewers, music fans, etc., as a group. I've often bemoaned the fact that a writer is considered a major, major success if he sells a number of books which, if translated to tickets sold to a movie or albums sold by a musician, would be an unmitigated disaster, but in a certain sense, this reinforced my literary snobbery. There are so few people with the gift and the drive to read that they are naturally a minority; small success is good success, for you are reaching quality, not quantity.

So, what does it say for the novel as an art form that "Marrying Mom" is a best-seller? What does it say for the validity of fiction as a dynamic cultural medium that this cretinous piece of shit, which would seem trite and lame even if it was adapted for the stage by a community playhouse, was at a certain time one of America's favorite books? If "Marrying Mom" is a runaway hit by selling a mere few hundred thousand copies -- representing perhaps a hundred thousand actual readers -- what does this say about a Kathy Acker, a Don DeLillo, a Samuel Delany?

I'm not sure. I know this: if Dhalgren is ever adapted as a book on tape, the long-overdue resuscitation of Giancarlo Esposito's career can begin.