Kevin Howell

What's Your Favorite Guilty-Pleasure Novel?

Yesterday, The London Telegraph published the results of their poll of “the greatest novels of all time.”  In the #1 position was Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird (followed by Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings; C.S. Lewis’ The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe; Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice; and Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code).

Joel Rickett, deputy editor of The Bookseller, is quoted in the article saying, “People tend to come back to their favourites.”  That statement got me thinking. Without a doubt, To Kill a Mockingbird is my favorite novel of all time, and although its rare for me to go back and re-read a book, it is one of a handful that I’ve re-read several times over the years.

But, lists of “the best” novels (or movies for that matter) can sometimes be predictable. We tend to list things we’ve admired rather than something that brought us joy or connected with us. I think people’s guilty pleasures (or not-so-guilty) are more interesting.

Mine choice would be Jacqueline Susann’s Valley of the Dolls.

Published in 1966, Susann ushered in the pulp novel as blockbuster (leading the way for Jackie Collins’s 1968 debut, The World is Full of Married Men, and Sidney Sheldon’s first novel, The Naked Face, came two years after that). She is credited with revolutionizing the author tour (she not only bought and signed copies of her book for bookstore employees–making them more likely to read the book–but delivered coffee and doughnuts to the truckers who dispatched her books to those bookstores).

She was hard to beat as a non-stop promotion machine. Everyone remembers her “feud” with Truman Capote (who said, “She doesn’t write, she types.”), but forget that the media attention benefited her novel and the book he was promoting, In Cold Blood. (In 1969, when Philip Roth’s comedic ode to masturbation, Portnoy’s Complaint, usurped her second novel, The Love Machine, in sales, she playfully barbed that she wouldn’t mind meeting Roth, but didn’t want to shake his hand.)

But, aside from the facts and figures, Valley of the Dolls got people who rarely bought books to purchase it because Jacqueline Susann wrote a big fat, juicy roman a clef that was impossible to put down. And 42 years later, its still grabs you and doesn’t disappoint.

So….what novel do you love that may not be high art but you really enjoyed and are proud to defend (on an anonymous blog)?

Posted by Kevin Howell on June 17, 2008 | Comments (12)