Buckets of Peanut Butter

Abstract

Buckets of Peanut Butter Kim Herzinger We don't know the really bad books. The really bad books, most of them, were never published. They're out there, though, hundreds of thousands of them, in drawers, in a box in the garage, in publishing house dumpsters worldwide. Some of them, perhaps, are buried deep in the dumpsters of vanity press publishing houses. Perhaps there are books so unreclaimably bad that even the money the author was willing to put out for publication just wasn't enough. Perhaps, once, even a vanity press house turned in shame, refunded the money, and bandied the words "it's just not for us" around the room. Perhaps. Perhaps the people who are writing us emails from Nigeria, telling us we are heirs to 2.35 million dollars if we would only allow them to deposit it in our accounts (enter your routing number and account number, please)—perhaps they are writing books, too. What would they be like? They would, I believe, be bad. Really bad. But of course what we are talking about here, I think, are the bad books that have been published. Better yet, we are talking about the bad books that have—at one time or another—been thought by a significant number of people to be good. These buckets of peanut butter—Donald Barthelme's phrase for bad books—sit sadly on the shelves of every used bookstore in the world, hundreds and hundreds of bad books, wretched books, books once produced by gleeful publishers and bought by hopeful readers, books which await new company from the buckets of peanut butter now sprightly lining the shelves at Barnes & Noble and Borders. But what we are really talking about are bad books which have been seriously acclaimed as good books, even great ones. Or, at least, bad books written by writers who have been acclaimed as good, even great. With this we enter into a more joyous world, a world of laughter and tears. Across the River and Into the Trees (1950), Grimus (1975), The End of the Affair (1951), half of John Updike, the bad William Wordsworth, the bad Percy Bysshe Shelley. And now, big danger: Pamela (1740), the poems of James Joyce, Frankenstein (1818). I am in trouble now, so I will get out of it. Frankenstein is a book made great by its badness. We cannot do without it. Nor can we do without one more book, the greatest bad book in the English language. It is not great in the way that Frankenstein is great, of course. It is great because it cannot but deeply entertain us with its earnest vigor, its invincible belief in its own genius, its merciless craft, its transcendent obliviousness. I give you this, if you have not already heard: Poetic Gems by William McGonagall, poet and tragedian. Kim Herzinger University of Houston-Victoria Copyright © 2009 American Book Review