Friday, January 14, 2011

Obscurity

Although "The Eighth Day" was a bestseller and won the National Book Award in 1968, it wasn't universally loved. The New Republic called it “a book that means nothing.” Newsweek called it “a worthless bauble.” The New Yorker said that “none of the characters, major or minor, rings credible to the reader."

And it has fallen out of favor in the years since. A new edition was published in 2007, but for most of the past 40 years it's been out of print. I had never heard of it until I saw it on a list of National Book Award winners. When I went to get it from the Wichita Public Library, they had to dig it out of storage.

Do you think the book deserves its fall into obscurity? Why do you think it's not more popular?
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4 comments:

kc said...

I really love Wilder, but I had never heard of this book until you picked it. (So I'm glad you picked it). I noticed it doesn't even have its own entry on Wikipedia. (Maybe we should create one).

I kind of wondered about the time period. If this came out in the late 1960s I can see why people weren't doing back flips over it. It probably seemed prim and old-fashioned compared with other books coming out then. (And yet it also has some liberal "multiculturism" elements, like the Indian church and the Japanese intermarriage and the unapologetic embrace of unwed motherhood).

Even though I really enjoyed the book, there were certain passages whose extreme length I didn't comprehend,like some of the scenes in Chicago seemed drawn out and Lansing's sick-room scenes too. From reading "Our Town" and "The Bridge of San Luis Rey" (one of my all-time favorite books), I had associated Wilder with tight, sharp, compact, poetic writing, and "The Eighth Day," which was also more difficult to digest for its "philosophical" concerns, upset that expectation.

11:47 AM, January 18, 2011
Erin said...

I think you're on to something. It would seem pretty stodgy in the late '60s. And I agree it could have been tightened up a lot. The word "plodding" came to mind in some sections. And yes, that does seem unusual for a writer known mostly for shorter works, especially plays. I read somewhere that he secluded himself in a small town in Arizona for a year, and that's where he wrote "The Eighth Day." I think maybe being all alone and far from home might make you a little more ambitious in your writing than you would be otherwise.

5:33 PM, January 18, 2011
kc said...

Do you think, too, that some writers, once they achieve a certain amount of fame and critical acclaim, become less willing (through over-confidence or something) to edit their own work? And perhaps editors themselves pay undue deference and go lightly with the red pen. So books that should be 300 pages — and would have been earlier in their careers — bloat up to 500 pages?

Maybe I just don't properly appreciate the book's ending, but it feels like that dangling "some" could be a similar lack of discipline, like no one was willing to say, "Hey, this ending really needs to be WRITTEN as a complete thought, instead of just dwindling down to a vague fragment."

5:47 PM, January 18, 2011
Erin said...

Yes, I think that's right, too. Once they're famous and known as a great talent, they're given an unhealthy deference by editors.

11:36 AM, January 19, 2011

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