McGinnis: Sparks of arrogance
Written by Jeff McGinnis | | jmcginnis@toledofreepress.comThe subject today is ego, and why it’s important for artistic people to regularly have theirs checked.
The artist in question is author Nicholas Sparks (“The Notebook,” “The Last Song”). This is the writer of romance tales that many readers love and even more tolerate so as not to upset their spouses. Sparks’s work has reached that rarified class that most authors only dream of; his audience is so dedicated he could pound his fist haphazardly on a keyboard, publish the results and it would still shoot to the top of the New York Times Bestseller List and get a movie deal at Disney.
Oh, I’m sorry, I dared to connect Nicholas Sparks to the term “romance.” He hates that. As he stated in a recent USA Today interview: “If you look for me, I’m in the fiction section. Romance has its own section … I don’t write romance novels.”
Sure, Sparks is splitting more hairs than a werewolf’s barber, but I guess classification is everything to him. He doesn’t write “romance,” he writes genuine, literary fiction, darn it. And heaven help you if you refer to his overwrought, clichéd work as “melodrama.”
Sparks: “There’s a difference between drama and melodrama; evoking genuine emotion or manipulating emotion. It’s a very fine eye-of-the-needle to thread. And it’s very rare that it works. That’s why I tend to dominate this particular genre.”
Ahem. Webster’s definition of “melodrama”: “characterized by extravagant theatricality and by the predominance of plot and physical action over characterization.” Seeing as how many critics have pointed out how thin the characters in Sparks’ books are, and how the plot of each tends to rely on an out-of-left-field tragedy to give them “genuine emotion,” I think the definition is more than appropriate.
Frankly, the article’s quotes give the impression that Sparks suffers from extreme tunnel-vision, and lives in a world where his work reigns supreme as a unique and unparalleled vision. Asked to name his favorite “tale of youth,” with the world of literature to draw from, Sparks chose his own book, “A Walk to Remember.” Asked to name his favorite authors from his own genre, Sparks modestly replied, “There are no authors in my genre. No one is doing what I do.”
Uh-huh. But then we get to the highlight of the USA Today article, the moment that caused a stir: His comments on Cormac McCarthy.
“Horrible,” he says, looking at “Blood Meridian.” “This is probably the most pulpy, overwrought, melodramatic cowboys vs. Indians story ever written.”
Later in the article, he claims he does not like to speak ill of other authors. Except McCarthy, because “He deserves it.”
Cormac McCarthy is a national treasure. His lyrical, remarkable prose is an inspiration and an example of what literature can be when it aspires to more than a simple description of action and rises to the level of poetry. He has written for over 40 years. He received a Pulitzer Prize in 2007 for The Road, he’s won numerous national critics’ prizes, he’s been called by many America’s greatest living author. Blood Meridian? That was on Time Magazine’s list of the 100 greatest books of the 20th century.
And here’s Nicholas Sparks, popular but critically dubious author, taking potshots at him in USA Today. In film terms, this would be akin to Michael Bay calling Martin Scorsese an overrated hack.
Even Sparks seemed to understand the magnitude of the firestorm he had unleashed. His attempt at a mea culpa (or rather, his attempt at an “it was the interviewer’s fault”) came in an interview with MovieLine:
“That was a small snippet of a very long conversation. I was actually surprised he put that in. What would be your question? Look — The Crossing Guard? His early work? Very strong.”
Um, yeah. One, the novel is called The Crossing, not The Crossing Guard. It is the story of a teenage cowboy set during the Second World War, not a tale of the guy who makes sure your kids get safely to school in the morning.
And two, perhaps more troubling is his apparent belief that The Crossing was among McCarthy’s “early work.” The novel was published in 1994, a good 30 years after McCarthy started writing, and about ten years after Blood Meridian, that pulpy, overwrought mess that Sparks so maligned.
How much of McCarthy’s work does Sparks really know, anyway? Based on the evidence in these interviews, how much literature does he know at all? How seriously can we take the criticism of a man whose view of the book world seems to end where his own nose begins?
We are all entitled to have and express our own opinion. But if that opinion is ill-informed and wrong-headed, we must be prepared to deal with the consequences, and hopefully try to better ourselves before it happens again. Is it wrong of me to suggest that Nicholas Sparks could stand to write a little less and read a little more? Who knows, it might make him a better author.
E-mail Jeff at PopGoesJeff@gmail.com.
I couldn’t agree with you more…this guy seems to be a major-league jackass. And his work is an overrated, treacly, mishmash of cliches with “twists” that somehow manage to be contrived and predictable at the same time.
This comment was posted on April 17th, 2010 at 10:51 amCormac McCarthy can say in 200 words what it would take Sparks three chapters to plod around.