Why you should not read 50 Shades of Grey...

Everybody knows that if you get a committee to design a horse, you end up with a camel. This is exactly how 50 Shades, and all of its sequels, was written: by a group of people online who had their content (semi)edited down into a readable dosage. It’s not the work of a single mind or point of view; it’s a camel by committee. And it shows.

So what made it such a blockbuster? It’s not quality reading. It’s not even good source material for movies, given that the only people who put their hands up for roles in the spun-off films are Z-grade actors who have exactly no shot at the big time except for these execrable filmed statements. The only answer is the sex. It’s a fact that women enjoy readable erotica, rather than the visual kind (which is more of a male stimulus)*. Women cop the rough end of the pineapple when it comes to titillation – there are fewer erotic magazines that cater for the ladies and they don’t last long (see the previous sentence), but there are the Mills & Boons reads that take their place, scooting under the censorious radar of general awareness. Recently, I visited a bookstore in Dunedin which specialised in “romance literature”: the staff knew absolutely, to the nth degree, the value of a particular M&B issue, their genre’s authors and all of the different editions – Sweetheart to Blaze – and back again. I had walked in expecting the typical secondhand bookstore routine: when I asked about horror literature, I was directed to a drawer at the back of the shop containing some well-thumbed Stephen Kings and little else. I was told that HPL was few and far between, but I managed to scoop up a book of New Zealand ghost stories in the dollar box at the front door. The staff had my measure: I was an interloper in the secret women’s business of their female erotica gig.

The people who buy E.L. James’ crap are – in the main - women. They are the same women who bought Stephenie Meyers’ vampire rubbish and, before that, Anne Rice’s Vampire Lestat chronicles. The only difference is that their reading material of choice has gotten worse over time. What they’re looking for is excitement of an explicitly sexual nature: this is Jilly Cooper and Sidney Sheldon for the millennials. However, unlike those authors, the new breed are poorly-written and (and I need to stress this) neither edited, nor proof-read. That they haven’t been given even the most cursory attention that any other published book requires has to say something. And what it says is nothing good.

My focus in reading material are books from the 1880s through to the 1940s. Just recently, I crossed a milestone off my list – Day of the Locust by Nathanael West – and I have to say that I was shocked and surprised by it. Much like Raymond Chandler’s The Little Sister, it’s a bleak excoriation of Hollywood during its heyday, but I was not expecting the sexual brutality that it encompassed. This isn’t a book that the female readership of today would embrace, I’m thinking, because it partakes too much of a ‘rape and pillage’ mentality; however, in the text, those who espouse this thinking are derided spectacularly, their targets (thankfully) escape, and the proponents are revealed as tawdry and ineffectual. For me, the most horrific parts of the book were the blow-by-blow descriptions of a cock fight, but the gruesome instances of Hollywood consumerist sociopathy were enough to make anyone think twice.

Hollywood has a tendency to water down any social commentary that writers choose to take on. I remember seeing the movie version of “Suddenly, Last Summer” once and not understanding anything that was going on. There was a holiday in Greece; Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift; some street urchins... suddenly Taylor was heading for a lobotomy and her cousin was missing. I had no clue as to what had happened, so I went to the source material by Tennessee Williams. I discovered a cannibalistic, homoerotic rationale that Hollywood had completely obliterated from their cinematic release, leaving generations of viewers scratching their heads. I assume that they thought the movie-goers would be too busy “necking” before the end of the First Act, so why bother making a coherent narrative? Why bother confronting 50s America with the gay cousin of a woman whom he exploits to lure Greek teenagers to their beachfront holiday home for his sexual entertainment? That’s what’s happening, folks... before they kill and eat him. “National Velvet”, this ain’t.

What I think I’m getting at is this: people think that modern literature is edgy and titillating, because of course – of course – we’re way more upfront, nowadays, than anyone has ever been before. This is a lie people. The literature that survives is the stuff that you should be focussing on; not the stuff that’s happening right now. Twilight? Twenty years from now it’ll be a footnote. 50 Shades of Grey? If anyone remembers it, they’ll be alone in a world of readers with other things on their minds. These are novels that only sociologists will be interested in 100 years from now. In the 20s, the bestselling novel of the era was a book called The Green Hat by Michael Arlen; these days it’s practically impossible to find a copy anywhere**. And if you did find a copy, it would probably be as dull as ditchwater. Not everything that makes it into print is guaranteed immortality, despite what Emily Dickinson has to say on the matter. Fashion prevails in the publishing world; today’s Jonathan Franzen is tomorrow’s James Michener, no matter how impossible you find that statement to be.

I’m now reading Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood. It feels a little overcooked after West, but I’m soldiering on. Edwardian literature seems to be plagued with bored, overly-entitled, main characters but I’m not letting that stop me – I’ve read Tender is the Night, so I’ve already seen how bad things can get. After that, it’s Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano. If anyone wants me, I’ll be out in the “old” literature, where it’s as edgy as it ever was...

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*I’m fully aware that that statement is a generalisation. These things are a spectrum rather than an absolute, a boiling-down of bell-curve results. There are women out there who enjoy visual stimulation as much as men do, and men who prefer erotica of a non-visual variety; they are, however, not in the majority according to the research. Given today’s ‘instant-gratification’ society, though, and the stupidly-easy access to Internet porn, I wonder if that paradigm is shifting?

**Actually, it's not that hard to find anymore. What a difference a few years makes! An edition came out in the US in 2008, and an Indian publisher is producing copies as well. As I discovered earlier, the majority of copies are in the Northern hemisphere, but I've just managed to snaffle myself a first UK edition from a dealer in Melbourne. Woo-hoo!