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Plaster Saints? ...
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Monday, March 10, 2008 Last Update: 3:28 PM ET
http://papercuts.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/03/10/plaster-saints/?hp
March 10, 2008, 3:23 pm
Plaster Saints?
By David Kelly
Overrated? Joey Ramone and Franz Kafka (Associated Press)
My friend Deanna and I were driving back from Asbury Park after seeing the New York Dolls at the Stone Pony - she’s a young rock ‘n’ roll photographer and was working that night; I, somewhat older, was having an acid flashback to 1973 - and we started coming up with nominations for the most overrated band. She chose the Ramones, and I went with the Doors (certainly not the Dolls). The conversation turned to the most overrated book, and after first saying, “Everything I read in high school,” she settled, decisively, on “The Catcher in the Rye.” I wavered between “Women in Love” (unevenly written, philosophically confused) and the Bible (unevenly written, philosophically confused).
Of course, some famous writers have offered their own unofficial nominations. Vladimir Nabokov declared that “Don Quixote” was “cruel and crude” and that “Death in Venice” was “asinine” (compared with Kafka, he said, Mann was a “dwarf” or “plaster saint”). His onetime friend Edmund Wilson, on the basis of “The Trial” and “The Castle,” said he found it “impossible” to take Kafka seriously as a “major writer.” And then there’s Norman Mailer, who, after reading “Waiting for Godot” and seeing the 1956 Broadway production, proclaimed Beckett a “minor artist.” But Nabokov was Nabokov, Wilson was entitled to one blunder, and Mailer was always happy to make a fool of himself.
Are there other nominations out there for the most overrated book? It doesn’t have to be an acknowledged masterpiece, but it should be something worth hating. So “On the Road,” after all the 50th-anniversary hoo-ha, would be a credible candidate, while “The Road Less Traveled” would not. Careful, though: if your list goes on too long, you run the risk of turning into John Gardner, who wrote (or bleated) an entire book about fiction he considered overrated.
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