The Literary Hall of Shame

Marlon and Jake Read Dead People

Marlon James and Jake Morrissey return for their final episode of the season to critique the worst books by celebrated authors, exploring why even brilliant writers can

Key takeaways

• Journalists and critics often struggle to translate their skills into compelling fiction due to an overreliance on ideas and self-absorption rather than emotional depth.
• Great nonfiction writers can fail as novelists when they prioritize intellectualism or personal perspective over character development and narrative structure.

Main topics

• Literary misfires by acclaimed authors
• The challenges of transitioning from journalism to fiction

Notable quotes

"I read it for you so that you wouldn't have to. And I'm coming for my flowers, whoever published that book."

"It's a cry for help. How do we begin?"

Conclusion

While the podcast celebrates literary greatness, it also reminds listeners that even revered

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:00) Riverhead Books presents Marlon and Jake Read Dead People, a podcast with Marlon James and Jake Morrissey. Speaker 1 (0:06) I live for trashing people who can't trash back. Speaker 2 (0:08) You don't finish the book? If I don't like it, because there aren't enough days left in my life. Speaker 1 (0:12) When I read Kate Chopin, I am a woman in that era, and I'm like, well, she never. Okay. Best part of Absalom, Absalom is Speaker 2 (0:19) the comma between the two Absaloms. Yeah, Speaker 1 (0:21) pretty much. What about Gore Vidal? Speaker 2 (0:23) No. Speaker 2 (0:26) We're here, as Speaker 1 (0:27) usual, to talk about dead authors and their books. Absolutely. Give them shit, give them hell, give them praise that they're dead. Maybe they're in heaven looking down. Speaker 2 (0:40) Okay, that makes sense. In this episode, we wanted to sort of call out the worst books by the best authors or authors we like. We want to tell the truth about maybe people whose books we like to read or have liked to read in the past that we don't. think every book they've written is necessarily worth reading or that maybe we like Speaker 1 (1:00) that might be controversial. They don't have to be part Speaker 2 (1:02) of the literary canon. I'm looking at you, Jackie Collins. Leave her alone. Leave her alone, he says. Leave Speaker 1 (1:08) her alone. Speaker 2 (1:09) But I do want to hear what Mr. James has to say about what he's written or who he's read and whose books he doesn't like. Speaker 1 (1:18) So there, you know, God, there are so many ways I've thought about this. Like, I thought about writers who are great writers but turn out to be horrible novelists. Speaker 2 (1:28) Meaning? Speaker 1 (1:29) Like, say, Nick Tosh's. Speaker 2 (1:30) Okay. Speaker 1 (1:31) The Devil and Son of Listan. His repertoire is fantastic. Here in a novel called In the Hand of Dante, that's unreadable. Not good. And I read it for you so that you wouldn't have to. And I'm coming for my flowers, whoever published that book. It was famous because he had this long section about the publishing industry. And I think he named one or two names. Speaker 2 (1:53) This is sounding familiar, but I don't think I've read the novel. Speaker 1 (1:56) Yeah, it was. This would have been 2001. Because he, like a lot of authors at the time, he turned 9-11 into the ultimate deus ex machina. Speaker 2 (2:05) Right. Right. Speaker 1 (2:07) It's a terrible book. But he's a brilliant writer. It's a terrible book. Well, Speaker 2 (2:10) I will say in the case of somebody like Joan Didion, I did not like. The Year of Magical Thinking. Speaker 1 (2:16) I Speaker 2 (2:16) know there are people who do. I thought this was a bad book by a decent writer. I don't want to hear about your self-absorption. This is making me sound cruel. Her husband died. Her daughter was very ill. And it was a story about, it seemed to be too much about her. For all the Didion fans out there, read Slouching Toward Bethlehem. Speaker 1 (2:38) Yeah. You know, I mean, I wasn't the biggest fan of magical thinking. I wonder about turning solipsism into a virtue. Speaker 2 (2:46) Okay. There's no virtue to that, in my opinion. I will say it's a great jacket. A great book jacket. Because I think what they ended up doing was, it was the title and her name, but the four of the initials spelled out John. Which I think is like a clever thing to do because it's about the death of her husband, John Gregory Dunn. Anyway, that's a separate podcast about book design, Speaker 1 (3:11) about Speaker 2 (3:11) jacket design. But I think that's where you get in a situation, solipsism, somebody like Henry James, who might be the most self-absorbed writer we've dissed on this podcast. Like him, though, I do. Respect him, though, I do. Speaker 1 (3:24) That's because all the competition is still living. That's true. Speaker 2 (3:28) That's fair enough. That's fair enough. Speaker 1 (3:30) You know, again, another person, largely because this person was so critical of other people's work, Stanley Crouch. Now, Speaker 2 (3:38) and because he was like a public intellectual. Public Speaker 1 (3:41) intellectual, public critic, sort of a professional devil's advocate. There's a lot of stuff that he wrote that I like. I love a lot of his writing on jazz. His novel is horrendous. Speaker 2 (3:54) Okay, so what you're saying basically is... The nonfiction writers that you have come across who have tried to write fiction have not been uniformly successful. Speaker 1 (4:02) No. Speaker 2 (4:02) Or at least in these two examples. Yeah. Do you think in the case of a journalist, it's more difficult to become a successful? I don't know. Or maybe less of a journalist and more of a commentator or opinion writer? Speaker 1 (4:15) You know what? Considering how much I usually insist on my fiction students taking journalism courses. Speaker 2 (4:20) You do? Speaker 1 (4:21) Yeah. I don't think necessarily it's what they – I actually think what you have as a journalist can really work. I mean, look at Marquez. Right. And Garrison Marquez would have first to say his main training ground was the newsroom. Speaker 2 (4:31) Absolutely. And I think for him, though, it was about collecting – the story, if you will, and then pushing it through his own perspective and something amazing coming out. Speaker 1 (4:42) Yeah, and one of the things that Does the Moon Look Lonesome and In the Hand of Dante have in common are two people far in love with the sound of their voices. Speaker 2 (4:52) Which is always dangerous. Speaker 1 (4:54) Yeah. And it's almost like, I don't have to be a reporter anymore. I get to be a poet with a common pee. Right. Speaker 2 (5:01) And I can somehow think or fool myself into thinking people are interested in what that Speaker 1 (5:06) means. And I am trying to reach a level of a really good news report. In your own writing? In my own writing. Yes. I mean, I read, you know, like the journalists that were on the Margin of the King race beats. I want to be, I want to get there. I want to get. to like Robert Caro levels. You can't talk about him, he's still alive. Speaker 2 (5:25) But Speaker 1 (5:26) there is, with them, is almost a, I'm going to abandon the very things that make me good. Speaker 2 (5:31) Purposely. Yeah. Well, do you think, and maybe I'm putting words in your mouth that don't belong there, the idea that these people thought they could do it? Or that they were like Stanley Crouch and Nick Toshes were like, oh, I can do this because I'm good at something else? Speaker 1 (5:47) I think it's a combination. I think they could do it. But I also think there is this idea that fiction writing is easy. Speaker 2 (5:53) This Speaker 1 (5:53) idea that almost like it's not real writing. Speaker 2 (5:57) Okay. Or put Speaker 1 (5:59) another way, I get a sense sometimes from these books that they think they're smarter than the medium. Speaker 2 (6:04) Yes, I think that's fair. Speaker 1 (6:06) And I think that's also a dangerous part to be in. Speaker 2 (6:09) Well, absolutely. The thing about, for example, journalism, theoretically at any rate, is that you know what the story is when you sit down to write. Sometimes you don't when you're writing a novel or fiction. Right. And that somehow those require, I would argue, two very different sets of skills, which some people have and can do both well. Some people can't. Like, for example, I remember I went through a period several years ago where I reread a lot of Dickens. Speaker 1 (6:32) And Speaker 2 (6:32) the first Dickens I ever read when I was in college was the Pickwick Papers, which I thought was good. And I liked it a lot more better. I reread it and I'm like, oh, I hate this. Speaker 1 (6:42) And Speaker 2 (6:42) I hate it because it's like... coitus interruptus. It's like the Picker-esque novel. Nothing actually gets resolved. Speaker 1 (6:50) I Speaker 2 (6:50) understand why he wrote it. He was writing for magazines. There were way too many strands that didn't get followed up. It wasn't a novel so much as it was 600 pages of something that my English professor wanted us to read. Speaker 1 (7:03) I'm happy to read Speaker 2 (7:04) Barnaby Rudge before I would read the Pickwick Papers again. Speaker 1 (7:09) Derek Welk, I like Barnaby Roach. Well, Speaker 2 (7:11) he and I are probably the only two who actually thought it wasn't terrible. But do you think if you're a journalist, in other words, if you think yourself a novelist first, does that help you in terms of trying to write fiction? Because I'm trying to think off the top of my head who actually writes, who comes from that kind of world? I don't know, Tom Wolfe? Tom Speaker 1 (7:31) Wolfe is actually on my list. He is. Yeah. And he Speaker 2 (7:34) wrote, what did you not like of his? Speaker 1 (7:36) I am Charlotte Simmons, which is so bad it's like a cry for help. Speaker 2 (7:41) It's Speaker 1 (7:41) a cry Speaker 2 (7:41) for help. Speaker 1 (7:41) How do we begin? It's a cry for help. I mean, we could just go into the ick factor. Speaker 2 (7:47) All right. Explain what you mean about the ick factor with us. Speaker 1 (7:49) There is no way an old white man should be writing a sex scene involving a teenage girl. Speaker 2 (7:55) Completely agree. Speaker 1 (7:56) That there is no way he can pull it off. There is absolutely no way he can pull it off. And I think he thought he could. Speaker 2 (8:02) Do you think he thought he could because he was Tom Wolfe? Yeah. And nobody said, you know, dude, this might not be the right way forward? I Speaker 1 (8:09) don't think he had that kind of friend. Okay. Or if he did, he didn't listen to them. Right. I don't remember reading any interviews around the time it came out. I mean, to me, the campus novel is already a suspect genre. Speaker 2 (8:22) Absolutely. Particularly from the man who brought you Bonfire of the Vanities, which is much more the, you know, it's the landscape of New York. It's much more everybody behaving badly. And that's okay. Speaker 1 (8:34) Yeah. Although I don't think that novel has aged very well. Speaker 2 (8:36) Well, it's been a while since I've read it. So have you read, I mean, you don't think it's aged very well because of the time in which it was set? I think the Speaker 1 (8:42) time, I think the perspective, I think we want more. It's like pre-NYPD Blue. It's pre-The Wire. It's pre-television in some ways replacing the urban novel. Speaker 2 (8:52) It's also at the time of, oh. Greed is good. It's the whole sort of Wall Street kind of let's open the taps and let every, you know, every bad behavior flow. Speaker 1 (9:04) It's tone deaf to stuff