Thrilling mediocrity: why James Patterson is a rich, pathetic fraud

James Patterson is a rich, pathetic fraud. He may be an internationally best-selling author with millions of fans. He may make bucket loads of money. He may well go down in history as one of the best-selling and most popularly read authors of all time. But deep down he knows he’s a fraud and even he admits it.

Conversely, today I saw the new comic-book-comedy-action film Kick-Ass that was no fraud and certainly lived up to its title. The film had awesome fight scenes, a kick-ass cast of actors (the girl with the purple hair was the best young performance since Little Miss Sunshine for my mind) and the final showdown was over-the-top brilliance that fitted in perfectly with the tone of the film. Moreover, the main character could teach James Patterson a thing or two about integrity.

The hero of Kick-Ass is a ‘nobody’: a teenager, ignored by girls with his small group of friends just living out his life. Then one day he decides to don a superhero outfit and try and fight crime because of his disgust at society’s lack of care for its fellow humans. In doing so he gets his ass kicked numerous times and by different people but wins the admiration of some real superheroes and the girl of his dreams. Importantly though, there is a scene towards the third act in which he realises that he is a fraud: sitting in his room after nearly being killed again, he looks at himself in the mirror and realises that his whole act is a sham. He recognises his own failures and his inability to actually save people and decides that he would rather give it up than continue to live the lie. Ultimately however, the situation demands that he becomes an authentic hero and he gets to act out his fantasy one last time.

I wonder if James Patterson ever looks in the mirror (he probably has heaps in his large estate) and asks himself the question: am I a real author? I hope he doesn’t do that too often because he might has a severe panic attack. I’ve never met the man but an interview in this week’s Spectrum was enough to convince me.

The first thing that set me off was the by-line: “One of the world’s most successful authors must churn out a new book every six weeks – no wonder he brings in hired help.” I was in shock, a famous author getting someone else to write his books: impossible! Reading further on worsened my initial dismay: he’s writing six books at once and has a “small team of co-writers to help him meet demand.” So he isn’t really a proper author after all, he just writes outlines and gets other people to fill in the bits that don’t excite him. There had to be something wrong here, how could this man dare call himself an author if he was producing books like a sausage factory?

The answer soon became clear: he isn’t really an author. He’s a writer: a fraud of an author who is so crap at what he does he doesn’t even pretend to treat his subject material seriously. A few quotes to highlight my point:

“He abandoned the book he was writing because he didn’t think he could match the work of his heroes, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and James Joyce.”

“Patterson set out to evolve a new style based on what he felt held the most appeal for a mass audience, with the last shreds of literary aspiration boiled from the bone… ‘I’m going to stop writing the parts that people skim’… The result – writing so spare it is nothing but plot and narrative…”

So in summary: he realised that he couldn’t write with the talent or flare of the great writers so decided instead to produce pulpy crap that would sell millions of copies. Moreover, he decided to hack off the limbs of writing, character and setting, to ensure that people wouldn’t be bored by what he wrote.

I must admit that this was ingenious. He tapped into the unlimited resource of human laziness and idleness and redefined a genre. In fact, his writing was so crap that even Stephen King, one of the princes of genre based pulp, has labelled him as a “terrible writer”. In doing so he had netted himself a fortune and will undoubtedly be studied in years to come if not now.

However, there is something inherently wrong about this. Like the hero from Kick-Ass I feel like donning my superhero author suit and blowing this guy to a million pieces with a rocket-launcher. As a teacher and lover of literature, this man is an appalling, disgusting, leech on society. Rather than help his readers to aspire to better quality prose that delves into the emotions and meaning of existence, he instead encourages us to switch off even further. This is the television equivalent of Melrose Place: populous garbage.

Moreover, he is desecrating and vandalising the very people he inspired to be. Imagine if Marquez had decided while writing One Hundred Years of Solitude or Love in the time of Cholera to abandon detailed character and setting so that people might not be bored by his novel. I wonder if Patterson read Ulysses and got bored and just skipped the uninteresting bits. I bet he didn’t because these authors created masterpieces of writing that have a timelessness that people will continue to connect with long after the authors have perished. These books challenge the reader to rethink their assumptions and values while also stretching their vocabulary. In short: these writers did not dumb down their writing to suit their audience; they trusted that their audience would rise to theirs.

Back to Kick-Ass, I wonder at what point Patterson realised he was a fraud. The man doesn’t really write his own books anyway: I wonder how much his co-authors contribute and whether he is just an overseer on a production line so that he can stamp his name on the cover. He must have realised that in vandalising his heroes that he was in fact degrading himself and the profession of writing. By hacking at the limbs of literature he is degrading culture and speeding up our terminal decline into mediocrity and mental laziness. If he doesn’t realise this then he is simply moronic and stupid but if he realises this and continues on anyway then it something much more sinister.

Let us hope that James Patterson is an anachronism (yes James, it is okay to use polysyllabic words that your audience may not know the meaning of) and that society may eventually move away from the dumbing down of culture (for other examples see Twilight and Harry Potter) and aspire once more for greater heights. If not, in twenty years time Patterson may be still publishing adult best sellers: only this time they’ll be picture books.