Stephen King has called him “a terrible writer.” Patrick Anderson of Washington Post thinks he is the “absolute pits, the lowest common denominator of cynical, skuzzy, assembly-line writing.” But his name is on the cover of one out of every 17 novels purchased in the United States, and he topped Forbes’s list of this year’s highest-paid authors worldwide, racking in an astounding $70 million. His name is James Patterson, and he’s even outselling that vampire romance bullshit.
For a man who sold 10,000 copies of his first novel, The Thomas Berryman Number, in 1976, it is somewhat befuddling to learn just how fat his wallet is. Of course, the trick isn’t in the writing—and whether you’re a critic of Patterson for bastardizing the publishing industry and literature in general, or one of the millions sitting on a beach towel somewhere engrossed in simple-minded and unimaginative plot twists, you can’t deny that he’s at least marketing himself well.
That makes sense. Before becoming a blockbuster novelist, James Patterson had a six-year run as chairman of the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency in North America. Since his career change, he has often made marketing decisions that his publisher Little, Brown & Company thought were foolish, but they seem to have learned by now that Patterson knows how to sell himself. When they second-guessed his decision to run a television advertisement for 1993’s Along Came a Spider, he went ahead and did it anyway. Five million copies later, it is his best selling novel to date.
The difference between Patterson and writers deemed literarily and culturally significant is that Patterson writes for his readers. To garner a market that large, an author really does have to write for the lowest common denominator of novel consumers, appealing to our natural barbaric instincts. Short and simple sentences fill the short and simple chapters with what millions of people apparently find interesting: violence, some of it sexual (Kiss the Girls has a villain who rapes and tortures college girls, at one point putting a live snake into the anus of a victim), romance, and predictable cliffhangers designed to keep you on the edge of your airplane seat.
As he explained in a Time magazine interview, Patterson considers himself a good story-teller, not a noteworthy prose stylist. At the same time, he claims he has the power to save a community from illiteracy by showing them how fun it can be to read.
With his young adult series Maximum Ride (written by Patterson and uncredited co-writer Gabrielle Charbonnet), he had hoped to get children interested in reading by telling them stories about a group of teenage human-avian hybrids on the run from the scientists who made them, as if, at the heart of the issue, reading anything is better than not reading at all. Judging by the empty prose of his adult works, it would follow that his young adult readers will not graduate on to worthwhile literature but instead stick with Patterson’s brand of mind-numbing entertainment.
Television viewers who cut their teeth on Laguna Beach are not likely to watch The History Channel or Discovery years later, and simply because Patterson is using the same medium as intellectuals like James Joyce and William Faulkner, it doesn’t mean that he’s doing anyone a favor. He has, on the other hand, proven yet again that the majority of contemporary culture craves brainless entertainment. While he’d like you to say he’s put books into more hands, all you can really credit him with is helping propel the degradation of another medium of art and perpetuating the mass-market mindset where profit trumps product.
Volunteer to be Jim’s personal ghost writer at jmcgrory@georgetownvoice.com
