Hickey: Don’t judge authors by their bestsellers

A few years back, Spinner.com posted a list of 10 chart-topping songs whose creators now play… A few years back, Spinner.com posted a list of 10 chart-topping songs whose creators now play them grudgingly or not at all. Radiohead lamented the success of “Creep” (at one concert, its audience booed the band members until the song was played). The Beastie Boys groaned when “Fight for Your Right (To Party)” became the un-ironic anthem of the folks it was meant to lampoon. Madonna said you’d have to pay her 30 million dollars to ever sing “Like A Virgin” again.

As an artist, it’s got to be frustrating to be loved and remembered for a work you don’t consider your best. And although authors very rarely come out and “disown” their most popular books — possibly because, unlike musicians, they’re not expected to perform these works aloud to large audiences day in and day out — they are not immune, in this columnist’s humble opinion, to being known for a novel that doesn’t accurately reflect their talents.

Anthony Burgess’ “A Clockwork Orange” is perhaps the most immediate example, as the author made like a rock star and dismissed the best-selling novel himself. In his nonfiction book “Flame into Being,” he calls “A Clockwork Orange” “a jeu d’esprit knocked off for money in three weeks, [which] became known as the raw material for a film which seemed to glorify sex and violence.”

Like the Beastie Boys, Burgess cites widespread misinterpretation as the main cause of his distaste for his most celebrated work. For this misunderstanding, he blames the film and the American publisher who chose to omit the work’s 21st chapter, in which the protagonist reaches young adulthood and grows bored with his destructive lifestyle.

And who could blame him for being peeved that “A Clockwork Orange” was recast as a celebration of all things “ultra-violent,” when the novel has been remembered at the expense of his more intelligent works? Burgess is responsible for dozens of novels written over the span of almost 40 years. “Nothing like the Sun” chronicles Shakespeare’s love life and explores the inspiration for several of his plays, whereas “Napoleon Symphony: A Novel in Four Movements,” imagines the life of Napoleon Bonaparte, and is written around the structure of Beethoven’s “Eroica” symphony. One can sympathize, then, with the author’s frustration at being known as the man who penned a funny-talking gangbanger’s handbook in 1962.

Perhaps the lesson to be drawn from Burgess’ plight is that shock value is a common reason for a book to be remembered at the expense of the author’s better work. The success of J. D. Salinger’s “The Catcher in the Rye” — which is simultaneously one of the top-10 most frequently challenged books in America and one of the top-10 most widely assigned in schools — seems to support this theory.

Don’t mistake me: I might lose half my readership for saying it, but I love “The Catcher in the Rye.” However, I would be glad to see its place in schools usurped by Salinger’s lesser-known “Franny and Zooey,” which explores the same themes of mental illness, adult falsity and adolescent frustration, but without the oppressive first-person self pity that made 15-year-olds all over the country hate “Catcher.”

Other books you’ll read in class at the expense of the authors’ better works seem to have been chosen for their thematic simplicity. Such is the case with Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale,” a feminist dystopian novel whose spelled-out cautionary tale about the dangers of the Religious Right pales in comparison with the ambiguity and multilayered storytelling in Atwood’s other works, such as “Alias Grace” and “The Robber Bride.”

As a feminist and a die-hard Atwood fan, I enjoyed “The Handmaid’s Tale,” but it doesn’t escape the predictability and moral two-dimensionality that plague most dystopian novels. Similarly, Edith Wharton’s “Ethan Frome” — according to hearsay at my high school, one of the most hated required reading books in history — is described by the author and critics as a “tale” rather than a novel, its lessons difficult to dispute. Meanwhile, Wharton’s “The House of Mirth,” a novel that deals with the same theme of obligation vs. personal fulfillment with more nuance and against a different socioeconomic backdrop, unfortunately receives little attention.

It’s tempting to write off an author because you read his or her most famous book and disliked it. But I would advise readers to follow up a book that left a bad taste in their mouths the same way they would follow up a book they loved: by researching the author’s other work to see what else they have to offer.

Obviously, no reader owes an author a second chance, and perhaps there’s something else you’d rather be doing with your time — like reading a book whose author pleases you consistently. But if your first taste of a writer is not consistent with the rest of his or her repertoire, a bad reading experience could be the ironic beginning of a wonderful journey into an author’s more rewarding body of work. Many a European history buff could miss out on a great body of speculative fiction if they let “A Clockwork Orange” put them off.