A Spork in the Road

Stephen King is a hack, a good hack, but a hack. That’s not what I’m talking about. Commercial success is independent of the need to want to write - or should be. Again, to reiterate: if it happens, it happens. But, who would you rather be: Stephen King or Franz Kafka? I’d rather be Kafka. Again - and I’m very different from a lot of writers and other artists - but I don’t think about the money, success, or potential fame. I just don’t. Don’t get me wrong. King is a very good writer and a very competent story-teller, but what he writes is utterly ephemeral.
-Rex Pickett in an interview with Screenplayers.net

I finished Sideways by Rex Pickett over the weekend — the novel on which the award-winning film was based.

This prompted me to do some Internet scouring. I always like to know a bit about authors after I’ve read their books, so I looked up Pickett. He has no author website that I could find, but I did find several interviews with him, and one of them included the excerpt quoted above. This comment prompted me to think a little about the struggle between Genre and Literary; the commercial preeminence of the first and the critical preeminence of the second; and authorial hubris in general.

Now, I want to look at the word “ephemeral” (one of Pickett’s favorite words, I discovered while reading Sideways):

e·phem·er·al (Ä­-fÄ›m’É™r-É™l)
adj.
1. Lasting for a markedly brief time: “There remain some truths too ephemeral to be captured in the cold pages of a court transcript” (Irving R. Kaufman).
2. Living or lasting only for a day, as certain plants or insects do.
-American Heritage Dictionary

And I also want to consider this, from that most ephemeral of encyclopedias, Wikipedia (yes, I’m lazy, but the quote is valid):

As the best-selling novelist in the world, and the most financially successful horror writer in history, King is an American horror icon of the highest order. King’s books and characters encompass primary fears in such an iconic manner that his stories have become synonymous with certain key genre ideas.

I don’t deny that King is trying to do something that is, in many ways, different from what Leo Tolstoy, or Edith Wharton, or James Joyce, or Jonathan Franzen have tried to do. (Although even there we could get into some fine hair-splitting debates.) But to call his work “ephemeral” defies logic. I find it easy to imagine that in 100 or 500 years people will still be reading — and reacting passionately to — Stephen King’s work.

Also: Stephen King, a “competent” story-teller? I’ll grant a certain distinction between King’s work and “high literary” fiction, but let’s all admit that Stephen King is a rip-roaring good story-teller, probably one of the best five novel-writing story-tellers of the twentieth century.

hack /hæk/ –noun
1. a person, as an artist or writer, who exploits, for money, his or her creative ability or training in the production of dull, unimaginative, and trite work; one who produces banal and mediocre work in the hope of gaining commercial success in the arts: As a painter, he was little more than a hack.
2. a professional who renounces or surrenders individual independence, integrity, belief, etc., in return for money or other reward in the performance of a task normally thought of as involving a strong personal commitment: a political hack.
3. a writer who works on the staff of a publisher at a dull or routine task; someone who works as a literary drudge: He was one among the many hacks on Grub Street.
-Dictionary.com Unabridged v1.1

I leave you with an excerpt from Sideways (which I must say I enjoyed, for the most part).

The road ribboned scenically along the Pacific, where large waves slapped against the black, seaweed-garlanded rocks, enveloping them with a brownish white foam. Stretching to the horizon, the ocean was a navy blue, still blistered by glistening whitecaps whipped up by a cold strengthening wind. Bordering us on the right, fields of tall emerald grass unfurled over gently rolling slopes that climbed steeply into craggy, gray spires that notched the bottom of the sky. Tenting the magnificent whole was an unstained, vast dome of infinite blue. Truly one of the most beautiful highways in the world.