On the New York Times Bestseller List(s)

At the risk of revealing, as Michael Korda puts it, an unjustifiably "snobbish or elitist attitude toward the bestseller list," I've been thinking about the "literary" fiction that makes it onto the lists in 2011, sandwiched between chick lit, mass-market thrillers, books-based-on-the-film-based-on-the-book, and all other manner of newly-published pablum (okay, I'm betraying my biases). Scroll through the online version of this week's list, and you'll find swaths of white and black sparsely punctuated with little blue links to the corresponding Books of the Times or Sunday book reviews: the handful of books that received them are exceptions to the rule. This is not to say that the Times Book Review is the ultimate arbiter of literary quality—that all fiction that gets reviewed is serious, and the rest is trash. In fact, the Times has been accused of pandering to the publishing houses, of being a "puff sheet" that's part of the promotional juggernaut and over-interested in celebrity culture. But it does give a broad sense of what's considered worth reviewing, if not reading, these days. It's a kind of bridge, however exclusionary or slanted, between the serious and the popular.

So what gives a book its "crossover appeal"? What are Eugenides, Barnes, and, farther down on the list, Whitehead and Ondaatje doing amidst Picoult and the indefatigable Patterson, who has two books (both co-authored) on the current e-book and hardcover lists? "In every decade, from 1900 to the end of the twentieth century, people have been reliably attracted to the same kinds of books," writes Korda in his introduction. "Certain kinds of popular fiction" succeed, "as do diet books . . . self-help-books, celebrity memoirs, sensational scientific or religious speculation, stories about pets, medical advice . . . folksy wisdom and/or humor, and the American Civil War." Do the Barnes and Whitehead fit into this algorithm, too? Have the "literary" titles that appear on this week's list succeeded not because of but despite their literariness?

Take The Help, which received a Times review in February 2009 and now stands at #1 on the paperback trade fiction list. DreamWorks made it into a major motion picture earlier this year. From the official movie site, the expected hyperbole: "The Help is an inspirational, courageous and empowering story about three very different, extraordinary women in the 1960s South who build an unlikely friendship around a secret writing project." From Janet Maslin's Times review: "[S]o it goes in this ultimately soft-pedaled version of Southern women's lives, one in which real danger is usually at a distance. . . . 'The Help' might have ventured outside of its harsh yet still comfortable, reader-friendly world." Reader-friendliness, then, may be part of the answer—a certain muting of the harsher tones, and perhaps too the hint of camera-readiness. Eugenides' debut novel, The Virgin Suicides, turned into a popular film six years later, though it had a more highbrow arc than The Help did: its first chapter appeared in the Paris Review several years before it was published; Sofia Coppola directed the film version. Middlesex, his big realist, generation-spanning epic, was a bestseller and received the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2003. So it's no real shock that his latest novel turns up on today's list. But wait—there's Franzen's Freedom, and Jennifer Egan's A Visit From the Goon Squad, which won this year's Pulitzer for fiction, at 10 and 17 on the paperback list. Will there be filmic versions of these books? Does a book become a bestseller because it seems made to be a movie, or does it become a movie because it makes it as a bestseller? These are the sort of chicken-and-egg questions a look at the list might prompt, and I emerge from it all more puzzled than ever about the "literary" titles that made it. If we can agree that looking at the bestseller list is hardly a key method of determining a book's literary merit, then why do some literary books make it onto the list, while others don't? Is there an essential quality they share? An interesting if perhaps unanswerable question. Thoughts?

Zoë