[2ndDivisionVet]

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[Revolting cat!]

They call them ‘penny awfuls’. If you don’t know the difference, that’s your loss.

[RansomOttawa]

So why is the Life of Pi great literature and Cardinal of the Kremlin just paplum? It's not the writing: Pi is incoherent, characterless, illiterate drivel; Cardinal is literate, complex, coherent, and filled with people drawn from life.

Well, Literary Blogger, that's your opinion. I enjoy reading Tom Clancy, but, well, he's Tom Clancy, and you get exactly what it says on the label: submarines, the CIA, big explosions, increasingly over-the-top plots, and a particular sort of stilted and repetitive writing style. Also, Clancy's personal politics have moved front-and-centre since Executive Orders—not that I necessarily disagree with those opinions, but I find him heavy-handed and preachy in presenting them. His characters are "drawn from life" insofar as your exposure to "life" consists mainly of Navy bases.

Life of Pi, on the other hand, has an entertaining protagonist with a humorous history who is caught in an original situation (Pi is a castaway, stranded on a lifeboat with an improbably-named tiger that he has to keep happy lest he become its next meal), and it concludes with a twist ending that compels you to re-evaluate everything you've read up to that point. I don't buy into the postmodern premise of the novel (that true faith consists in believing the more engaging story, even if it flies in the face of cold, dry facts), but even a bad message can be packaged in good art.

BTW, I suspect that most of the reason we regard Twain and Hawthorne as both great literature and popular fiction is simply that the intervening 100+ years have winnowed out the now-forgotten crap. Who's to say that in 2112 we won't think back fondly to Yann Martel and Kazuo Ishiguro, and have forgotten all about Tom Clancy?

[Revolting cat!]

bad grammer

[St_Thomas_Aquinas]

Marxists took over the academy, destroying art and literature, among other things, while promoting vice, perversion and ugliness.

[ImJustAnotherOkie]

Tom’s time is past. He can still write but I don’t think people don’t want to read about the Government much anymore.

[Revolting cat!]

Lame defense of bad writing, as that is what the likes of Clancy, Steel, Crichton have produced. Cartoon characters, cliche ridden sentences, simpleminded stuff all over.

[Rebelbase]

My guess is that the author isn’t old enough to comprehend living in a time when there was only one enemy and descriptions of the technology in Clancy’s novels were like sci-fi themselves.

Any attempt to compare those writings to literature classics is dysfunctional analysis.

[hecht]

i have read most of his books. while the story outline is often excellent, his writing style is very tedious. it takes about 100 pages to get hooked. he goes off on so many unnecessary tangents spends 3 pages describing irrelevant characters that don't reappear, but the final conflict is often only a few pages long. I also found Ryan to be Clancy's masturbatory fantasy.
the best description I once saw was that he was the “John Fennimore Cooper of his day. “ the most famous bad writer of his generation.

[gorush]

Clancy doesn’t compare to the classics, for example:
The Count of Monte Cristo
Les Miserables
A Tale of Two Cities
Crime and Punishment
anything by Dickens

[buffaloguy]

One of the changes that I have seen is that many of the pieces of great literature of the past had their share of action and conflict. The modern great novel is not great but simply intellectual musings set to paper. Boring as all get out.

Modern Great Literature = chic lit. Usually involves chamomille tea and internal doubts and questions.

Junk literature = guy literature. Usually involves “Arkon the Gratiutously Cruel” and some big bombs...in other words, real conflict.

I’ll take the latter and leave the former to the remainder bin.

[ADemocratNoMore]

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Atlas Shrugged

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