Interrobangs Roundtable: Underrated Authors

Sean on Meg Rosoff

Artistic merit is not a guarantor of popularity. Everybody knows this: you know, it, I know it, the critics know it, and the people queueing up all over the world to be overcharged for a ticket to see Gnomeo & Juliet (sorry, Shakespeare!) most likely know it. Everybody complains bitterly that Transformers 2 made millions and millions of dollars while the Scott Pilgrim movie tanked, yet nobody could honestly claim to have been surprised. It almost seems as though there is an inverse relationship between creative or artistic merit and the potential for profit; again, everybody knows this.

But those examples are from the world of cinema, where hundred-million-dollar budgets reign supreme and creativity is a rarified commodity. Surely, you might say, the world of publishing is different? It deals in books, for God’s sake. Books are intellectual. Books are respectable, even, as long as they’re written by the right sort of person and have other right sorts of persons on the cover. Surely books are different?

Well, no, although it seems to be an enduring myth that they are. I’ve come across the idea many times before that a truly ‘good’ book, defined here as something with genuine literary merit (answering a question with a question there, but let’s go with it), will be appreciated and championed by readers even as it becomes a commercial disaster. It feels almost unfair that a really good book could fail to make millions for its author while simultaneously being underrated by readers.

Exhibit A: Meg Rosoff.

Rosoff’s first novel, How I Live Now, was released to massive acclaim and a string of awards. It tells the story of an anorexic American girl who gets sent to stay with English relatives on the eve of WWIII – or at least, the reader is left to assume that the conflict is a third world war, since it’s never explained in any detail. More interesting is the fact that her cousins appear to have supernatural abilities. Oh, and she falls in love with one of them.

So yes, it’s a magic-realist ‘issues’ novel featuring an incestuous relationship at its core, set to the backdrop of a near-future armed conflict. It’s also brilliantly written. I read it when I was a teenager and was completely entranced from start to finish – it may even have been my introduction to ‘literary’ fiction, since I distinctly remember thinking that I had never encountered a book like it before. It deserves its accolades, and the reputation it garnered for its author.

Go and look up How I Live Now on both Goodreads and Amazon. I’ll wait.

You’re back? Good: you now know that, according to the forces of the democratic rating system, the book is of about average quality. It has a solid 4 stars on Amazon (very few widely-reviewed books get less) and a 3.7/5 rating on Goodreads. By comparison, both The Hunger Games and Catching Fire have higher scores on both sites: 4.5 stars on Amazon, and a 4.5/4.05 rating respectively on Goodreads. All three of the main Uglies books also edge it out on Goodreads, although only by a thankfully small margin.

Am I being elitist if I say that How I Live Now is a much, much better book – better written, more important, of greater merit – than any of the others I just mentioned? Well it is, and yet its target audience has apparently decided that it is the worst of the lot.

The second book I’d like to mention is also by Meg Rosoff. What I Was is, again, something of an oddity: its unnamed protagonist is a 100-year old man telling the story of how he fell in love at the age of sixteen. Exiled to a Spartan boarding school on the east coast of England, he sees nothing but mediocrity in store for him until he meets Finn, a strange boy who lives in a fisherman’s hut close to the sea. What follows is a beautifully written and painfully evocative account of their very odd friendship/one-sided romance. The standout scene for me involves Finn and H (as he’s known) taking a kayak out to a submerged Roman fort. Rosoff’s description of the ancient, sunken building has stayed with me since I first read it, and I doubt I’ll forget it any time soon.

I’ll admit that What I Was is not as good as How I Live Now. The plot is meandering yet simple, the main character is not always likeable (although I maintain that main characters don’t need to be likeable in a story like this) and there’s a near-infamous plot twist at the end that almost reverses a lot of the thematic buildup that came before it. There’s also a fairly important side character who I still think was handled very badly. But even if all of those faults were orders of magnitude more serious, they still wouldn’t diminish the strength of Rosoff’s prose or her genuinely brilliant portrayal of obsessive first love. This is the kind of book where plot and pacing almost don’t matter; it is pure emotion on the page.

You can probably see where I’m going with this.

Goodreads average: an unusually low 3.49. Part of this may have to do with the fact that the book straddles the line between YA and ‘adult’ fiction, although people claimed the same thing about The Hunger Games and still showered it with praise. Apparently a book is allowed to cross publishing categories only if it does so unproblematically, retaining thematic simplicity while adding a smattering of violence.

What bothers me more than the not-great ratings from Goodreads users, though, is the fact that authors like Rosoff are practically unknown compared to the heavy-hitters in YA. Suzannne Collins has become a household name by writing mediocre science fiction, Scott Westerfield has become a household name by writing bad science fiction, and as for the paranormal romance crowd…well, let’s not go there.

I’m not one of those people who chide adults for reading ‘kid lit’ and insist that they go and cleanse themselves with some Faulkner every time they accidentally walk through the YA section of a bookstore. No, I’m one of those people who chides adults for only reading the ‘blockbuster’ children’s titles: Harry Potter and the Hunger Games, if you insist, but why not also Meg Rosoff or Patrick Ness?

It’s because both of those authors are still underrated by YA readers as a whole. Based solely on the quality of their writing, they deserve to be up there with the popular luminaries.