Quality Filtration

Right now we are deep in the belly of the Tournament of Books over at TMN. Most of this year's tournament has been dominated by jousting matches over Roberto Bolaño's rat-crushing, epic tome 2666, and Toni Morrison's award bait A Mercy. I wish I read enough modern fiction to really have an opinion on all of this even though I put a good deal of sweat equity into this year's tournament code. I'm still just a bystander to it all, but from the looks of it, everybody else is as well.

Most of the Tournament reviews seem to be peppered with that sense of confusion about how you measure something like this. It's like comparing apples and oranges, or as Anthony Doerr described in an early match, "like comparing 777 and oranges". There's no metric here except personal opinion, which might be fine, except people tend to back down from their own opinions when confronted with the heady weight of a thousand page magnum opus that defines a generation. It looks bad to nominate those simple guilty pleasures that you actually enjoy since they don't look good on a pedestal. But this is all hearsay since I've never made it through one of these heady tomes.

This is what makes the Tournament so important. Considering the enormity of words being printed on dead trees these days, and soon to be on dead Kindles, and then to be hocked on talk shows, the need for quality filters is more important than ever. And with the competition for attention coming from every other avenue available, as well as the ongoing mining for the overlooked and unseen obscurities from time immemorial, who has the time to read anything new of considerable length? And within those limited time constraints, who wants to fill that time reading something that's demanding to be taken so very seriously when there's tawdry, salacious dreck available at the ready?

Personally, I would love an inverted Tournament where books race each other to the bottom of self-importance and intellectual depth. It would be a competition for the best of the worst of recent literary attempts, from pulpish revenge fantasies to torrid romance novelettes sold in grocery stores. It would no longer be akin to comparing "777 and oranges" but like comparing ignorable mindless titillation to perfect mindless titillation. Something I'm sure there's a proper metric for.

—March 26th, 2009

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