The Literary Hall of Shame

Jake Morrissey (0:00)

Riverhead Books presents Marlon and Jake Read Dead People, a podcast with Marlon James and Jake Morrissey.

Marlon James (0:06)

I live for trashing people who can't trash back. We don't finish the book.

Jake Morrissey (0:10)

If I don't like it, because there aren't enough days left in my life.

Marlon James (0:12)

When I read Kate Chopin, I am a woman in that era, and I'm like, well, she never.

Jake Morrissey (0:17)

Okay, best part of Epsilon Epsilon is the comma between the two Epsilums.

Marlon James (0:21)

Yeah, pretty much. What about Gurvedal?

Jake Morrissey (0:23)

No.

Marlon James (0:26)

We're here as usual to talk about dead authors and their books.

Jake Morrissey (0:32)

Absolutely.

Marlon James (0:32)

Give them shit, give them hell, give them praise that they're dead and that kind of thing. You know, maybe they're in heaven looking now.

Jake Morrissey (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 that might be controversial. They don't have to be part of the literary canon. I'm looking at you, Jackie Collins. Leave her alone. Leave her alone, he says. Leave her alone.

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.

Marlon James (1:20)

There are so many ways I thought about this. I thought about writers who are great writers but turn out to be horrible novelists.

Jake Morrissey (1:28)

Meaning?

Marlon James (1:29)

Like, say, Nick Tosches. The Devil and Sonny Liston, his reportage, fantastic. Here in a novel called In the Hand of Dante, that's unreadable.

Jake Morrissey (1:38)

Not good.

Marlon James (1:39)

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.

Jake Morrissey (1:53)

This is sounding familiar, but I don't think I read the novel.

Marlon James (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.

Jake Morrissey (2:05)

Right. Right.

Marlon James (2:07)

It's a terrible book, but he's a brilliant writer. It's a terrible book.

Jake Morrissey (2:10)

Well, I will say in the case of somebody like Joan Didion, I did not like The Year of Magical Thinking. I 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-absorbing, this making you 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 Towards Bethlehem.

Marlon James (2:39)

Yeah.

I wasn't the biggest fan of magical thinking. I wonder about turning solipsism into a virtue.

Jake Morrissey (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, great read done. Anyway, that's a separate podcast about book design, about 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, respected though I do.

Marlon James (3:24)

That's because all the competition is still living.

Jake Morrissey (3:27)

That's true. That's fair enough.

Marlon James (3:31)

Again, another person, largely because this person was so critical of other people's work, Stanley Crouch.

Jake Morrissey (3:39)

Because he was like a public intellectual.

Marlon James (3:41)

Public intellectual, public critic, sort of a professional devil's advocate. There's a lot about his stuff that he wrote that I like. I love a lot of his writing on jazz. His novel is horrendous.

Jake Morrissey (3:54)

Okay. So what you're saying basically is the non-fiction writers that you have come across who've tried to write fiction have not been uniformly successful.

Marlon James (4:02)

No.

Jake Morrissey (4:02)

Or at least in these two examples.