A 'Good Enough' Reader

or Why It Took Me More than a Year to Read This God Damned Book

“The culture industry perpetually cheats its consumers of what it perpetually promises. The promissory note which, with its plots and staging it draws on, pleasure is endlessly forestalled; the promise, which is actually the spectacle it consists of, is illusory: All it actually confirms is that the real point will never be reached, that the diner must be satisfied with the menu.”
— Theodor Adorno, from “The Culture Industry”

“Even if popular culture contained only debased and banal images it would be necessary for us to understand and explain them; but we know that popular culture also reflects the extraordinary creativity and ingenuity of grass roots artists and intellectuals.”
— George Lipstiz, “Listening to Learn and Learning to Listen”

“Don’t let us go to life for our fulfillment or our experience. … It makes us pay too high a price for its wares, and we purchase the meanest of its secrets at a cost that is monstrous and infinite. … And how can it matter with what pleasure life tries to tempt one, or with what pain it seeks to maim and mar one’s soul, if in the spectacle of the lives of those who have never existed, one has found the true secret of joy and wept away one’s tears over their deaths…?”
— Oscar Wilde, from “The Critic as Artist”

I should have loved John Gwynn’s The Shadow of the Gods. Its setting is inspired by ancient Norse sagas and viking-era history; its world-building is detailed but not gratingly anthropological; its mythologies and magics are bound into the story in just the right amount; its re-claiming of Old Norse and Old English word hoards makes me clap in nerdy excitement. As a narrative, it is fast-paced and action-packed, with multiple compelling point-of-view characters, engaging set-ups, high stakes. The blood flows and the heroes are flawed. Yet every time I picked the book up, I felt like I was wading in tar and would soon grow frustrated, lay it aside, and move on to another book. It took me more than a year to slog through it, and I only held out to completion because I’ve seen and read multiple interviews with John Gwynn and find him to be a top shelf, morally and emotionally aware human being; the personal inspiration for this book (and its two sequels) arose from the death of one of his children. I so wanted to love The Shadow of the Gods. Alas.

Who can explain the fickle vicissitudes of taste and pleasure? I started reading fantasy independent of adults with E.B. White’s animal fantasies—pigs, swans, mice, and such—, moving quickly to CS Lewis’s leonine Christian indoctrination, before discovering the darker world of Lloyd Alexander, which I still think of as classics in the genre. By Junior High, I’d left children’s literature behind and had begun reading widely in Science Fiction and Fantasy, scouring the local bookstore shelves for covers that appealed, saving up lawn-mowing money to buy the books I most wanted, and using the library for the rest. I’ve often wondered what drew me to Fantasy in particular, and why my particular taste for high epic fantasy with its moral clarity, heroic heroes (who, after puberty, were always very hot in my mind’s eye), and an ultimately triumphant Good. At the same time, as a queer, I balk at the question — why must I know why I desire what I desire at all?

What I do know is that as my tastes have developed and I have read many books across forms, genres, periods, and languages, I still return frequently to the reading-gladness that I get from Fantasy. The imaginary worlds, details of peoples and cultures that never existed, tropes of heroism, the phantasm of eldritch might, witchcraft, and sorcery. As a more mature (old?) reader, I now have a strong preference for fully fleshed out, believable characters; consistency of tone; command of the intricacies and lexical richness of English; and fun, engaging, interesting, challenging narrative. Like most fans of genre fiction, I know the tropes backwards and forwards, including those of many of its myriad sub-genres. For us genre fans, the tropes are not repetitive stumbling blocks, nor clichés. The ways an author can use and manipulate and transform the tropes are one of the primary sources of pleasure and, dare I say it?, beauty. Bend the tropes too far and they break; don’t bend them enough, and they are tired and stale and boring. It’s a delicate dance, but when done well, immensely satisfying to read.

Both J.R.R. Tolkien and Ursula K. LeGuin wrote essays defending the Fantasy genre, essays which fans still circulate, read, and debate to this day¹. LeGuin, for her part, argued for the value of conscious and intentional exercise of imagination in adult life. “I believe that maturity is not an outgrowing, but a growing up; that an adult is not a dead child, but a child who survived. … I believe that one of the most deeply human, and humane, of these faculties is the power of imagination.… And never, under any circumstances, to squelch it, or sneer at it, or imply that it is childish, or unmanly, or untrue. For fantasy is true, of course. It isn't factual, but it is true. Children know that.” For Le Guin, the ability to imagine is a key component of reason, problem-solving, and morality. She was building upon Tolkien’s earlier theory of Fantasy as a genre, or “Faerie Stories” as he called it at the time, wherein he argues that Fantasy is a more difficult kind of artistic creation because you must make the fantastical believable for it to work, requiring the creation of a “secondary world” and within the reader a “secondary belief.” When it is successfully created, the Fantasy provides not a mockable nor a reprehensible escapism, but a humane, necessary, and palliative escape—from the hustle and smog of industrialism and the workaday world (the escapism decried by Horkheimer and Adorno), but also from want, poverty, hunger, and death. “In its fairy-tale—or otherworld—setting, [the happy ending] is a sudden and miraculous grace: never to be counted on to recur. It does not deny the existence of dys-catastrophe, of sorrow and failure: the possibility of these is necessary to the joy of deliverance; it denies (in the face of much evidence, if you will) universal final defeat and in so far is evangelium, giving a fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief.” Although I appreciate and frankly accept these two apologia fantasia, I wonder that an intellectual defense of a genre that brings meaning and pleasure is necessary at all.

It is hard to think about the meaning, importance, and role of art in life without resorting to classist, elitist twaddle. Particularly after modernity, after the social sciences and history have made clear that aesthetic values, like all values, arise within particular groups in particular times and places. They are, in short, constructed. There is no going back to some quasi-Aristotelian notion that beauty is a thing unto itself that inheres in the authentic art object. No, aesthetics is contingent and contextual and historical. And yet, and yet. There are qualitative differences among art forms and genres and individual works; and the qualia of art constrain the range of meanings that can be derived from them. To speak of these qualitative differences and to debate their meanings—both the meanings of the works and the meanings of the differences among works—is in some ways what makes art art. The interaction of artist with work; and then the interaction of the work with a hearer, seer, feeler, thinker; then the interactions of those who have experienced the art with each other and maybe but not necessarily with the artist themselves: These interactions are the sina qua non of art.

One can still find the distinction between art and popular or mass culture floating around in the ether, and not just from academics in the way that Oscar Wilde separated the two in the late 19th century. Just a few weeks ago I read Sarah Schulman’s outdated and vexing declaration that pop culture can be easily distinguished from true art, because pop culture merely gives back to you what you already know and believe, whereas “true art” challenges you to see the world as it really is.

When Janice Radway published her research about women who read Romance fiction in the early 1980s, she was part of a growing scholarly movement researching the readers of mass-produced literature, rather than studying the noble literary work as if its meaning and beauty inhered in its objective being. These studies explored the cultural history of the Book of the Month club, ethnographies of genre fans, consumer interactions with abridged classics such as Readers Digest, aimed at the new post-war middle class. They pushed back on the Frankfurt School’s attack on the culture industry from the perspective of the artist-creators and, more importantly, of the consumers. They rejected the idea that there is something essentially different between popular, mass-produced art and “high” or “true” art. By focusing on the readers’ experiences and interpretations of Romance novels, including the “trashiest” of grocery store Harlequins, Radway demonstrated that readers were neither duped nor artificially mollified by the consumption of mass-produced, formulaic narratives. Rather, these women consciously and critically engaged with plot and character and trope; they gathered together in clubs and groups to talk, rant, and revel; and they generated complicated and nuanced meanings of romance, gender, sex, love, and marriage, which they used in making their own lived experiences intelligible and bearable. These were intelligent and self-reflective women, regardless of their class, race, or education, who not only easily distinguished their real lives from the romantic fantasy they loved to read, but who also created functional theories of that distinction.

John Dewey’s theory of art evades this conundrum of popular vs. mass art (as he evades epistemology and ontology (see Cornell West)). He insists that the self-evident constructedness of aesthetics—contingent, contextual, and historical—is merely a description of what aesthetics actually is, but not the obviation nor elimination of aesthetics as a kind of human concern, undergoing, and activity. To say that aesthetics is contingent, contextual, and historical does not mean that it does not exist nor that it does not matter. Rather, it is to open us to a more fruitful and meaningful interaction with art as such. To underline his point, Dewey refers to people who engage with art as “participators,” which in his analysis means that as soon as we encounter art (eschewing the false popular vs. “true” art distinction), we are participating in a dialogue, a conversation, an argument about the meaning of the work of art and the connection of the work with the larger meanings that we are struggling with in life. For Dewey, there is no ultimate answer to the question, “What is beauty”; but discussing, debating, and arguing with each other about whether or not a work of art is beautiful, that is, participating in art, illuminates our own particular moment in time, our own experiences, and makes life and the experience of beauty intelligible and social, all while being the constitutive core of art itself, its human value.

Dewey argues that when a work of art works for a participator, there is an experience of consummation, a word he choses purposefully for both its religious and sexual connotations of union (unification). An artist, for Dewey, draws upon their experience, their active-undergoing interaction in the world, to convey meaning by using tools (a paintbrush, a typewriter, a banjo) and materials (paints, words, tones and pitch and melodies) in new or unexpected or meaningful ways to create an experience of meaning to and for others (participators). Consummation is an embodied experience, both intentional and unbidden; it occurs when the material forms of the artist’s creation and the meanings generated out of participation unify with that very complex moment in the participator’s life. Consummation includes not just lived experiences and knowledge of artist and participator, but emotions and desires and hopes and for a future that is not present and bodily sensations. For Dewey, this might be a reinforcement of what is already known, or a completely new discovery created by participating with the art, or most often, some blend of the two.

A few years ago, I started calling the experience of consummation from reading for its own sake, reading as participating in art, reading-gladness. (In the moment I was trying to distinguish it from the kinds of instrumental reading I do constantly for work). As a reader, my reading-gladness ranges widely, sometimes merely from the beauty of the language; sometimes from that moment of illumination when I realize something new or enlightening; sometimes its erotic; sometimes it feels very human and social, like connection and intimacy with people I care about; sometimes its pure escapism from the pain of living in a collapsing society.

In mid-June, just before I turned back to Gwynn’s The Shadow of the Gods to try to finally finish it, I had had two great moments of reading-gladness: a gay erotic novella and a very popular science fiction novel. Three Nights with the Manny tells the tale of a marketing executive with a new baby who hired a nanny through an agency. Said nanny turns out to be a sexy, tattooed rock musician who happens to be excellent with babies. The manny cares for the exec's daughter and emotionally supports him in his stressful business trip. Carefully scripted, trope-y hot gay sex ensues. Consummation on multiple levels. Happily ever after, they are now a couple having all the sex. This book was pure entertainment, romantic fantasy, and erotic cough consummation—and it was also a hackneyed nearly clichéd plot, not great prose (high school level English, I’d say), written for the mass digital independent market in m/m literature, which caters mostly to the demands and tastes of a straight female readership (the overwhelming majority of readers of m/m romance and erotica (as well as, it must be said, gay porn)). Yet I thoroughly enjoyed it, so much so that I bought another book by the same author to read when I’m in a certain mood.

Project Hail Mary really suffered from, shall we say, not-great writing. Pedestrian use of the English language, awkward sentences, repetitive words and phrases. Yet, again, I loved this book so much I could barely put it down, and two nights in a row I got only a few hours sleep from staying up into the wee hours reading. My reading gladness here was partly due to the structure of the novel, which moves the reader back and forth between a frightening and unknown present and flashbacks of gradually recovered memories of a post-coma amnesiac. Intellectually, the book’s astral physics fascinated as did the creative xenoanthropology and xenobiology. I am, I will admit, somewhat a snob when it comes to English, so normally I would have tossed this book aside within a few chapters. But again, I loved it and will likely read it again soon. Reading-gladness of the fun kind.

So as I set out to finish the admittedly well-written, well-structured, award-winning, much-beloved Gwynn novel, in my favorite of all genres of genre fiction, I couldn’t help but compare The Shadow of the Gods to some gay erotica and some fun pop sci-fi. These were inverse cases: In the previous two, on the surface, I should’ve hated and abandoned them; in the later, it should’ve risen to one of my favorites in the genre. As I was reading the last few chapters, I finally understood, and the revelation of why this novel was so painful for me to read became clear. The ways that Gwynn constructed his characters made them cold, distant; like I was observing them from the outside and could see their facial expressions, hear their words, see their actions, but had no idea what they were thinking, why they were doing what they were doing, who they actually were as people. Because Gwynn shows us their backstories and their narrative present, I always knew the three main characters’ narrative motivations, but only instrumentally to make their actions intelligible within the plot. As I was reading one of the final scenes of the book, where a character is slaughtering a band of kidnappers to defend the children they’d stolen for some evil ritual, Gwynn tells us that she is desperate to find her own kidnapped son, that she is enraged, and he describes for us the bloodbath. But it occurred to me that I had no idea what was going through her mind, what she was thinking and feeling, how she was experiencing this moment.

Grim-dark fantasy as a sub-genre is usually gritty and violent, to say the least. I had my first real experience of it when I read Stephen R. Donaldson’s original Thomas Covenant trilogy as an 8th grader, so I’m no stranger to the dark side of fantasy. Grim-dark resists and openly subverts Tolkien’s happy-ending escapism and capital-G Good heroes. Normally my problems with grim-dark are its insistence on the darkness of human nature and the inevitability of a violent, painful death; and in a few instances, the violence devolves into pornography, spectacle, the aesthetics itself (aside: I think Pulp Fiction plays with this line and its not clear to me it succeeded). But Gwynn has none of these problems. His violence is always contextually appropriate, the darkness and hopelessness always present, but never determining the actions of the characters, who are driven by their own senses of morality and need. In the best grim-dark, either through 3rd person omniscience or 1st person conceit, the reader can enter the inner worlds of the point-of-view characters (one of the things that makes George R.R. Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire so masterful). You come to know the characters, see their world through their eyes, hear them think.

Gwynn’s books have a large and devoted following, so thousands of readers are finding their reading-gladness in his stories. In the end, though, I found that I simply didn’t care about the characters, because I didn’t know them. (By contrast, I had come to know, rather intimately, two gay dudes and a lone human astronaut trying to save two different planets from extinction.) Gwynn gives us the barest of descriptions of their emotional state, but always observed as if from the outside, 3rd Person without the omniscience. There are bald declarations “she was annoyed” or “he felt rage” and outward descriptions of their emotional responses, like “she wept for the first time in years,” usually while decapitating a foe or drinking a horn of mead. Gwynn does give us enough that an enterprising participator will fill in the rather huge gaps of intention, feeling, and experience of the characters. It is possible for the reader to create the characters’ inner lives. Indeed, there are many situations where resistant pop-culture participators have done this historically as a culturally creative and political act in itself, as when African American tv viewers created entire lives and backstories for black side characters, who in the actual show were barely more than cardboard cutouts; or as when queer participators re-imagine characters as being queer like them, queering the narrative as it were. But leaving the point-of-view characters as surface-only paper dolls moving through a story is a particular constructive choice on the novelist’s part. What Gwynn excels at is plot and story—this is perhaps a novel for our time, then, when we need constant stimulation of frequent plot points and capital-H Happenings to keep our mind on the book or we wander back to our phones. Plot as an end-in-itself, perhaps. But ultimately, what is literature without inner life?³

Twenty-first century aesthetics across the narrative arts (literature, theater, film, tv, radio-plays, etc.) has a couple problems, in my opinion, that are not universal, but are present in ways that challenge my own participation with them. First, in his review of Yanagihara’s A Little Life, Daniel Mendelsohn dismisses the acclamation for the book, and notes instead the novel’s bludgeoning non-stop obsession with traumatic, pedophilic, and (homo)sexual violence as indicative of author’s and readers’ shared misapprehension of emotion and feeling, or perhaps, he surmises, the ability to understand one’s own emotions, let alone the feelings of others. I’m not going to be able to diagnose the breadth and depth of society’s emotional ills from literary trends in popular genre fiction (let alone Yanagihara’s hateful torture porn), but that extreme, pointless violence and trauma on a central character has come to be seen as the height of “deep aesthetics” is notable and perhaps a symptom of something else. Second are the potential dangers of spectacle, as described by Horkheimer and Adorno and many others since. This is no pearl-clutching, finger-wagging church lady criticism; but rather a deeper question about what art can mean when all is spectacle. Publishers (and Netflix) have by now developed the formulas that sell narratives down to a data-driven science, much like an analogue, scripted algorithm. And these kinds of plot-only narratives sell and are well-liked and often critically acclaimed. When in novel form, it’s a kind of literary, slow-moving spectacle, as reading requires the participator to slow down and spend time with the art in order to experience it. Yet humans have loved spectacle across cultures and time, so this is not new and not in itself a problem. I myself have been known to squeal with delight at a 1970s blaxploitation film or a 1950s alien-invasion B-movie. The problem for me isn’t that Gwynn’s novel is a driving, pounding, bloody plot within a cool fantasization of Norse culture. The problem is that I could find nothing humanizing to hook into and settle into and care about. In the end, I should just say that this novel simply did not work for me. I do not hate that it’s in the world. Despite my belief in the value of a range of popular art, I have the nagging feeling that The Shadow of the Gods is a rather well-constructed symptom of something larger, this art without inner life, denuded of its most powerful meaning-making potential. Perhaps Horkheimer and Adorno were onto something when they noted that when the spectacle is all there is, there’s something wrong with the art.

Notes and Bibliographic Do-dads

1. Neil Gaiman did too, but…

2. Dewey derives his argument about aesthetics from his earlier arguments about the source of all human values, including ethical and political, in interactive, historical, experiential processes, which he'd been developing since the 1920s. For a summation of this aspect of his theory, see “Theory of Valuation” [1939].

3. “Empathy” is a contested word in philosophy and cognitive science, and the definitions and struggles between empathy, sympathy, and compassion get a bit tedious in my non-expert opinion. But for my purposes here, I just mean (along with the research) a heightened theory of mind within the reader. The cognitive science research at this point pretty clearly shows how reading literature has the unexpected side effect of teaching empathy3 to readers by exposing them to the inner lives of others in ways that do not require them to actually live what the other lives through.

Adorno, Theodor and Max Horkheimer. “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception” in The Dialectic of the Enlightenment [1947]. New York (Seabury, 1972).

Dewey, John. Art as Experience [1934]. Los Angeles: Tarcher Books, 2005.

Fabrizi, Mark. “Introduction: Challenging Fantasy Literature” in Fantasy Literature: Challenging Genres, edited by Mark Fabrizi. Rotterdam, NL: Sense Publishers, 2016.

Le Guin, Ursula K. “Why Are Americans Afraid of Dragons?” in The Language of the Night. New York: Putnam, 1979.

Lipsitz, George. “Listening to Learn and Learning to Listen: Popular Culture, Cultural Theory, and American” in American Quarterly Vol. 42, No. 4 (Dec., 1990): pp. 615-636.

Mendelsohn, Daniel. “A Striptease among Pals: Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life” in New York Review of Books, Dec. 3, 2015.

Radway, Janice. Reading the Romance. Chapel Hill: Duke University Press, 1984.

Tolkien, J.R.R. “On Faerie Stories” Oxford University Press 1947.

Truman, A.J. Three Nights with the Manny. Self-published EPUB 2021.

Weir, Andrew. Project Hail Mary. New York: Ballantine Books, 2021.

West, Cornell. The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989.

Widle, Oscar. “The Artist as Critic” [1891], in The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde: Stories, Plays, Poems, and Essays. New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2008.

— Todd
lovingkindness, curiosity, and faggotry

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