If there’s one word that sums up everything that’s gone wrong since the War, it’s Workshop.
—Kingsley Amis, Jake’s Thing (1978)
The required reading list of an American high school student usually includes, along with works by Remarque, Knowles, and Salinger, a famously awful “anonymous” offering called Go Ask Alice. The book, billed as the real diary of an average Sixties teen, chronicles a terrifying descent into drugs and depravity. Picture Marcia Brady helping William S. Burroughs tie her off in a public lavatory and you’ve got the idea.
The thing is, it isn’t a real diary. Neither, unfortunately, are Jay’s Journal (descent into Satanism), It Happened to Nancy (descent into AIDS), or Annie’s Baby (descent into teen pregnancy). All of these penny-dreadful pseudographies were written by their supposed editor, an octogenarian Mormon former youth counselor and “music therapist” named Beatrice Sparks. You really can’t make this stuff up.
No wonder the bookshelves are dusted with the fallout of so many bad Junior Proms.
Bearing that in mind, I have to wonder at times whether there might be a similar entity behind much of the literary fiction seeing print these days. Consider some of this year’s releases and their purported authors:
Fireworks (Alfred A. Knopf): “Elizabeth Hartley Winthrop … graduated Phi Beta Kappa and summa cum laude from Harvard University in 2001. In 2004 she received her MFA in fiction from the University of California at Irvine.”
Born Again
