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trash lit 101

Drop those upturned noses! Every reader's diet should -- and usually does -- contain a leavening of bestsellers. - - - - - - - - - - - - -

I L L U S T R A T I O N   B Y   K A T H E R I N E   S T R E E T E R

BY DWIGHT GARNER | by now it's practically a tradition: Once a generation or so, a Serious Cultural Critic takes a deep breath, plugs his nose and dives headfirst into that cultural dumpster known as the New York Times Bestseller List. Gore Vidal did it in 1973 for the New York Review of Books, sinking his fangs into both "Jonathan Livingston Seagull" and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's "August 1914." Anthony Lane devoured the whole list for the New Yorker three years ago, yukking it up over the latest Michael Crichton and Clive Cussler entertainments. These pieces are great fun to read, even if firing spitballs at books that are embossed with the phrase "No. 1 New York Times Bestseller" is very much like shooting dead, bloated fish in a barrel. Vidal stares hard at Herman Wouk's "The Winds of War" -- "885 pages of small type" -- and begins to quiver hilariously. ("As I picked up the heavy book, I knew terror ...") Lane has a high old time sticking pins into Robert James Waller's "The Bridges of Madison County," observing that it contains not a single phrase that "you could not imagine being sung by Karen Carpenter." Both writers find love amid the rubble (Gore sends a valentine to the pop classicist Mary Renault, while Lane picks up on Sue Grafton's charms), but such moments are few. In general, Gore and Lane whoop it up like guys in pickup trucks doing drive-by target practice on mailboxes. There's nothing wrong with this, of course. (A good cheap shot can sometimes really make your morning.) But the subtext of Vidal's and Lane's pieces is that the bestseller list is a genuine cultural No Man's Land -- a place so completely cut off from most serious readers' lives that it's impossible to talk about except under the guise of slumming sociology. To a degree, Vidal and Lane are just picking up on what's in the air. There is a massive and unhealthy split in America between the books that get reviewed and talked about and the books (Danielle Steel, Judith Krantz, John Grisham) that actually fly off bookstore shelves. And Oprah Winfrey's mighty efforts notwithstanding, that gap is growing wider every day. Vidal and Lane misstep, though, by not recognizing that most committed readers imbibe a steady, gregarious mix of high lit and greasy guff -- we want the occasional meatball, in other words, even if there does happen to be a serious bottle of Brunello on the table as well. Who among us, stranded at a friend's beach house for a long weekend, wouldn't rather climb into the hammock with one of the best books of Elmore Leonard, Stephen King or Sue Grafton than with the latest 10-ton tome from Ved Mehta, Umberto Eco or William Gaddis? There are pleasures in writers like Leonard, King and Grafton that you simply can't get anyplace else -- namely, the innate ability to spin out a story so deftly and so quickly that you have no choice but to submit. NEXT PAGE: Jackie Collins creams, Clive Cussler smokes