What Makes a Book Good
It Isn't Impact
What marks a book as “literary?” A work of genre fiction can be literary, and many realistic novels aren’t literary, so how is a casual reader to tell the difference?
If the point of reading the story is to find out what happens next – whether what happens is a bit of interpersonal drama between realistic characters or the fate of a galaxy under assault by a species of interdimensional insects – it isn’t literary. Literary fiction has a point beyond its entertainment value. If the point of reading the story is something other than finding out what happens next (even if readers are interested in finding out what happens next), the book is literary.
But not all fiction with a literary point is good. The “discourse novel” – modern versions of the society novel (the point of which was to convey to nineteenth-century aristocrats how to dress and speak and eat and mate) – is a popular form which, while it has a point, often fails to rise above didactic social commentary which could have been a single tweet or perhaps a full-length essay in The New Yorker. This is the meeting which could have been an email of literary fiction.
What makes a book – literary or otherwise – good is the not the answer to the question, “What does the book do?” or even “Why does the author do it?” but rather the answer to the question, “How does the author do it?” In other words, elements of style, story craft, diction, quality of language, and so on. When an author crafts a story in which every sentence, every word, every bit of dialogue, every element of setting, every choice about characterization, every mood choice, every point of view technique, etc. performs a specific role, which in some way works towards the author’s ultimate goal or point, then we say that the book is well-written, masterfully crafted, or even “great.” This is hard to do. It is also hard to talk about, so most of us fall back on the easier conversation to have, the one about what the author was doing (“What was the theme of the book?” etc.).
The easiest conversation to have of all is “what was the ‘impact’ of the book?” Because then we don’t even need to have read the book. All we need to know is that “lots of people are saying” something about it, or that “everyone tells me it’s important,” or even just that someone had a viral tweet about it.
Impact is something which doesn’t need to come from a book (see above, “this could be a tweet”). Indeed, if impact were the only thing which made a book good, writers should give up now because AI will soon be able to endlessly churn out impactful dreck which will be targeted just at the right level to sell the right number of copies (so that we’re all talking about it, but nobody mistakes it for a “commercial” book).1 If it isn’t difficult for AI to make a tweet go viral, it won’t be difficult for it to make a book go viral.
Impactful Books: