literary diet pt. 2: for the love of money
This Week in Reading
Camino Island by John Grisham
Last week I walked three blocks to my local supermarket and bought a bag of coffee beans, a package of tortellini, and the latest John Grisham paperback, Camino Island. I listened to an interview with John Grisham when he was on the Longform podcast last summer (perhaps that is what planted the initial seed for this little reading/life/art project), and I listened to it again yesterday as I neared the end of the novel. It is a great episode, for the record. After working a series of blue collar jobs, Grisham went to law school and became an attorney. He served as a Mississippi state representative for a little bit before becoming a writer. In the interview, he laughingly says that his critics always disparage his books as mere beach reads, so with this latest one (his 30th novel!) he set out to craft the ultimate beach read.
Camino Island is set, as you might have inferred, on a literal beach in Florida. The premise, like most of the books available at the Vons Reading Center, is a little bit bananas, featuring a host of characters with progressively campier names. A gang of thieves stake out the Princeton library and pull off a literary heist of five of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s original handwritten manuscripts. The stolen goods make their way into the hands of Bruce Cable (lol), a charming playboy rare book dealer who owns a successful indie bookstore in Florida. The insurance company that insured the manuscripts (super sexy) plans a sting operation (what?) to infiltrate Bruce’s world and recover the work. They plant Mercer Mann, a young novelist with crippling student debt, a half written novel three years past due, and deep ties to the island, as a mole to penetrate the literary community of Camino Island.
Despite the implausibility of the plot, Camino Island is actually a delightful read. With more than two dozen books under his belt, John Grisham is a master of his craft. I love a good heist plotline, and Grisham excels at action sequences, fast paced chapters full of diversions and smoke bombs and hidden cameras. Camino Island is not high literature, but then again, it never claimed to be. In the Longform interview, John Grisham says that he has never been interested in writing a book that wouldn’t sell. I loved this, loved the transparency in which he talked about commercial success. Artists and writers have a tendency to back away from monetary aspirations. To crave wealth is somehow gauche, tacky, benign. Artists are expected to be motivated by passion and principle. Suffering, starving, living in poverty, subsisting on toast and cigarettes-- this is what society’s vision of an artist’s life consists of. A terrible vision, to be sure. Misery is not more creative than comfort.
I am an artist, and I am also not afraid to admit that I plan on being very successful. I want to make art, and I also want to have a 401k and own property and buy international plane tickets. I make barely any money from writing and art right now, but only because I’m not smart enough to figure out how to monetize what I do. I am bored of the concept of selling out. Months ago, I was emailing with a friend who described her plans to go back to school to get a more commercial degree. She was on the defensive, quick to explain that she was still painting; that the skills she would learn in this program would benefit her art practice. I told her not to apologize. I admire anyone who can convince people to pay them to do something creative. Writing is not really a career anymore. Even Mary Karr and Junot Diaz, two of the most celebrated contemporary writers of our time, freely admit that they pay their rent with their teaching salaries, not their book sales. John Grisham however, gets to write full time, cranks out one or two books a year, sells millions and millions of copies. Critics can go ahead and call John Grisham lowbrow trash, I’m sure he’ll cry himself to sleep on a mattress made of money. I am tired of the notion that art has to be pure, has to exist untouched by the idea of capitalism. Capitalism is a trap, but while we are forced to play the game, it would be foolish not to try to win. To desire is to be human. Martyring ourselves for the sake of the craft does not serve us, or the things we are trying to make. It is easy to bemoan that only mediocre, middlebrow culture is rewarded commercially, but maybe the mainstream was the only one that openly asked to be paid.
This conversation happens in a very meta way in the book. Camino Island is home to an eclectic array of writers. Some write obtuse, literary novels that fail to sell more than a few hundred copies. Others write the exact type of trashy genre fiction available at the Vons Reading Center. The authors spar playfully over dinner, the high brow literary types looking down on the pulpy romance writers, while simultaneously envious of the massive royalties erotic vampire novels bring in. The trashy paperback writers fight a feeling of inferiority when they converse with the literati, but are smug in their paychecks and their book signing lines that wrap around the block. These conversations are a way for John Grisham to defend himself, to argue that being popular does not necessarily come at the price of being bad.
The central plot, the stolen Fitzgerald manuscripts, is particularly interesting when contextualized within a John Grisham book. Camino Island is about a collection of first editions worth millions of dollars, but Camino Island itself is a flimsy grocery store paperback. As an object, it has barely survived this first reading— already the spine is broken, the back cover has been carelessly bent in my lunch bag. Surely tens of thousands of copies were printed in the first run; it is unlikely that a first edition of Camino Island will ever be worth its initial hardback price again, let alone become a collector’s item. First editions have been fetishized and commodified, but to what end? The story printed inside an autographed copy of Catcher in the Rye is the same as the one available for the kindle.
At the end of the book, Mercer debates whether or not she should turn Bruce in to the feds. Besides his shady business dealings, Bruce is a good man. And moreover, his bookstore is an asset to the island, and a huge boon for the authors he champions. I wouldn’t go as far to say that Bruce is a nuanced character (one of his defining traits is the fact that he is always dressed in a pastel seersucker suit) but I do think Grisham poses a nuanced question. What is more valuable to the writing community, a man who is a staunch advocate for the living writers he knows, or a handwritten manuscript by a man who died more than half a century ago, that is permanently locked away in a university archive? I love objects and have spent many semesters researching material culture. There is something remarkable about the way physical objects absorb history and memory. But the object is not the story. History will continue to stand regardless.
Further Reading
Other books I would describe as beach reads: I genuinely enjoyed JK Rowling’s post-Harry Potter mystery thriller series, which she wrote under the name Robert Galbraith. They make good audiobooks.