I think I’ve found it: the worst book I’ve ever read. (I’m only talking about novels here, by the way.) In general, there are books one likes or loves, others one dislikes, and then many that are ranged across the space in between; but a single best-loved book or a single least-liked – those are harder to fix on. My own best? Maybe Anna Karenina or Crime and Punishment or Jane Eyre or Emma. To settle for just one is a challenge.
Yet I now have just one most detested novel. The odd thing is that it’s by a writer I really like: Tom Franklin. He’s the author of Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter, which I recommended here. Because I liked it so much, I went on to read Franklin’s Hell at the Breech and his collection of stories Poachers; the latter has behind it the word of Philip Roth, no less, but anyway I was disappointed by neither.
Then, however, I read Smonk. Far be it from me to be too categorical about this, but Smonk is a relentless catalogue – and by ‘relentless’ I mean page by page by page – of graphic violence, incest, murder, rape, cruelty, faecal episodes of one kind and another, one’s guy’s glass eye carried around in someone else’s mouth, and on and on and on. Normally I would have abandoned a book I was disliking so much, but I had to see if it added up to something that made this all worthwhile. It doesn’t. It’s the vilest book I’ve read.