The Art of the Potboiler

Sanctuary
By William Faulkner

There is some exquisite writing in this book. Faulkner’s prose conjures a unique world, with its own vividly recognizable atmosphere and inhabitants. Sanctuary naturally partakes of that world, which the author renders with careful and often surprising attention to pertinent details.

Apart from the great beauty of the writing and the pleasure of revisiting the world it evokes – a pleasure of which this Faulkner reader has never tired – I found little entertainment in Sanctuary apart from a few episodes of broad comic relief: the funeral in the gambling-den, Clarence Snopes, the antics of an irrepressibly dipsomaniacal infant. The characters, even the hero manqué, are unsympathetic, often repellent and mostly far-fetched. The central figure (hardly a heroine) is in a state of wild hysteria in every scene save the last in which she appears. In our post-feminist world it has become depressingly clear that the great masculine colossi of the twentieth-century American novel knew almost nothing about women; their female characters are marionettes of cardboard and greasepaint glimpsed through a fog of drink, infatuation and resentment. In Temple Drake, this tendency may well have found its archetype: though terrible things happen to her, their telling stirs no sympathy in the modern reader, only boredom and incredulity. 

There are other women in the book besides Temple, but they are nearly all stock characters – the wronged but incurably faithful wife and mother, the tart (madam, actually) with a heart, the helpful but corruptible serving-maid, all of whom were well established in fiction long before this novel was written. Only two of the female characters ring true – the hero’s sister and her elderly, waspish aunt. But they are both middle-class characters, of a type whom Faulkner would have seen many examples. The others are all demimondaines, sensationalistically but unconvincingly rendered.

Faulkner wrote this book, we are told, as a ‘potboiler’ that might make him money. Apparently it did; Sanctuary is his best-selling novel. As a piece of genre fiction, however, it is a failure: by no means the sort of book you’d stay up at night reading because you absolutely have to know what happens next. On the contrary, there were times when I had to force myself back to it. But I did return, because in spite of all its manifest failings, Sanctuary is a work of art, a very beautiful one except in the places where it fails. But it couldn't be a work of art without those failures; if it had completely succeeded, it would have been No Orchids for Miss Blandish.

A Traitor’s Testament

The Kite Runner

by Khaled Hosseini

Garbage. The author writes poorly, has no psychological insight (apparent from the second sentence of the novel onwards), and displays the outlook and attitudes of his nation and class: quasi-mediaeval, that is to say, with a thin veneer of modernity pasted on and peeling right off again.
    His hero, Amir, is a treacherous coward, and the reader who retains an atom of sympathy for him beyond the climactic scene of Part I isn't thinking at all about what they read. This is a hero with no heroic qualities. Nor is he much of a protagonist, since he rarely does anything of his own volition; even his betrayals are the circumstantial products of his own cowardice. Life just carries him along, unresisting. And there is nothing Postmodern or experimental about any of this, in case you were wondering: that kind of writing is far above Hosseini’s pay grade. The Kite Runner is a book of pedestrian construction, frothing with cliches – no Pale Fire, I’m afraid.
    Worst of all, Hosseini plainly expects you to feel sorry for his repulsive creation. He seems to think this weepy, effeminate, backboneless sentimentalist, this selfish milksop pining desperately for the love of his father, is quite a likeable chap and hard done by besides. I suppose Amir’s sissiness is meant to be a contrast to the conventional Afghan machismo of his father Baba (which Amir aspires to but lacks both the courage and the dash to emulate). In fact, Amir’s character is redolent of nothing so much as repressed and curdled homosexuality, and makes you wonder whether the author is working through some identity issues of his own.
    Part Two of the book, set in the USA, is unspeakably awful: slipshod, boring and full of the kind of bad prose that people who attend ‘creative writing’ workshops generate so easily. Its main effect was to persuade this South Asian reader that Afghan society must be just as backward, and as grimly resistant to integration with the modern world (there are no non-Afghan characters to speak of in Amir’s America), as the Western imagination conceives. By the time I finished this part I was thoroughly sick of them all: Amir, his relations (he has no friends to speak of, having betrayed the only one he ever had back in Kabul) and even, unfairly, poor suffering Afghanistan itself. I certainly had no interest in finding out how they all fared in the end, and quit reading while Our Hero was still in Peshawar, Pakistan, en route back to Kabul in a self-flagellating attempt to ‘redeem himself’. According to the spoilers I read, this effort ends in another act of treachery committed by him. Well, at least that’s dramatically consistent.
    Awful, awful, awful, awful. I wish I hadn’t read it. It seemed to confirm my already dim view of South Asian elite culture and all the hardest things I’ve ever read or heard said about Afghanistan. I could have done without the endorsement.