PEOPLE'S CHOICE LITERATURE: The Most Wanted and Unwanted Novels...fascinating!

PEOPLE'S CHOICE LITERATURE: The Most Wanted and Unwanted Novels
TOM COMITTA
Columbia University Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$24.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: What do Americans truly want in a novel? What would it look like if their preferences and aversions materialized in book form? In People’s Choice Literature, Tom Comitta has taken up this challenge, writing two groundbreaking novels based on a nationwide poll about literary taste—one featuring the story elements Americans most desire and another containing everything Americans despise.

The Most Wanted Novel is a fast-paced thriller evoking page-turners by Dan Brown, David Baldacci, and Janet Evanovich. It follows a California woman pulled into a tech tycoon’s apocalyptic ambitions after her brother’s kidnapping, teaming up with a hunky FBI agent with a tragic past. The Most Unwanted Novel is a genre-bending an epistolary Christmas novel set on a near-future Mars, where elderly aristocratic tennis players scour the globe for lost love, venturing from the coldest of arctic wastelands to the darkest caverns of the macabre. Variously recalling Kathy Acker, César Aira, and Phillip K. Dick, it features sentient robots, talking animals, and a hundred-page collection of horror stories.

People’s Choice Literature is inspired by the artists Komar and Melamid, who created two now-infamous paintings based on opinion polling. A similar experiment by Dave Soldier produced “The Most Wanted Song” and “The Most Unwanted Song.” Comitta has adapted these methods to fiction, drawing on readers’ preferences about everything from genre to verb tense to characters’ identity. Audacious and shockingly entertaining, People’s Choice Literature also asks big questions about taste, authorship, and the notion of “good writing.”

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: A jeu d'esprit comparable to Patchwork in its fun, wacky, sneakily serious affect. I said in that review: "It's refreshing, to say the least, when someone looks afresh at shibboleths like Literature and sees what's under its underpants instead of reverently praising its court dresses."

It's still true. This iteration of Author Comitta's most-ridden literary hobbyhorse is no less interesting, no less impactful, and because of its release's timing, it is a sage observer's warning of the encroachment of AI slop into the realm of literature.

Could it be these are the future of idea consumption via text?

It could.

Will it be?

Dunno. I guarantee you this: Read these two pieces, and you will will come away radicalized. Pro or con, you can't look at these works and not see the message staring back at you.

I'm impressed with Author Comitta's work in these oddball, offputting stories, though if someone tried to sell either of them to me without a knowing wink, I'd be outraged. Columbia's tipped a wink or two. I won't give all five stars because I got the joke before the the enterprise ended. I solved that problem for myself by reading the stories each until I got bored, then jumping into the explanatory and analytical parts; this way I didn't waste an undue amount of my precious remaining eyeblinks on stuff I hated, or just mildly didn't care for; that's as good as it ever got.

Art is not about consensus. Art is not created in committee meetings. Literature is art.

Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.