The Difference Between a Good Book and a Masterpiece
And why the distinction matters
When I was 18 years old, I was gifted the complete works of Jane Austen, in English, in one humongous book. I started with Sense and Sensibility because I already knew it from Ang Lee’s excellent 1995 screen adaptation. I enjoyed it, but when I next read Pride and Prejudice, I thought it was absolutely fantastic. There’s a reason it’s Austen’s most read and best known book. In fact, many readers consider it her masterpiece and that’s how it was described to me.
I read Emma and Mansfield Park in college. I thought the former was fun — though not even close to the previous two — and the latter slightly boring, with a heroine I couldn’t relate to at all. In fact, Mansfield Park is the least liked of Austen’s books, for reasons I won’t get into here.
Several years and a couple hundred books later, I picked up Persuasion, her final novel. It floored me. It instantly rearranged all the received wisdom on Austen that I’d been exposed to, and my previous favorite became a distant second. It was now clear to me that all of Austen’s novels are good, but Persuasion is her masterpiece.
Does the distinction even matter?
I understand if you feel like this kind of distinction is just academic, or maybe even an exercise in elitist nitpicking. Can we even draw an objective line between a masterpiece and an excellent book? If you connect with a text on a deep level, and it makes you think, and you want to recommend it to friends, shouldn’t that be enough?
I would say yes to that last question and call it a day, if it weren’t for the glut of masterpieces that the publishing industry — indeed, the whole arts and entertainment industry — has been choking us with for decades. By definition, a masterpiece, or a magnum opus, is the crowning achievement of a person’s career. It implies years of apprenticeship, of honing your skill until you reach the highest possible standard in your area of work.
If we accept this definition, then it’s highly unlikely that 50, or even 10 books every year can be labeled as masterpieces, or any number of synonyms that marketers and reviewers will use to sell a title, such as my favorite oxymorons instant classic, and gem (rare by definition).
Sure, it’s possible that every once in a while, a writer’s first published work will already qualify as a masterpiece, and that it remains the peak of their output. But a Mary Shelley doesn’t come along very often, and that’s the whole point of greatness.
That’s why I’m going to insist on a more nuanced view of literature and of the labels we attach to books.
What exactly makes a book a masterpiece?
In my last text, I quoted Kafka, who said that we need books that shake us to the core, not books that make us feel good.
‘If the book we are reading does not wake us, as with a fist hammering on our skull, why then do we read it? … what we must have are those books which come upon us like ill-fortune, and distress us deeply, like the death of one we love better than ourselves, like suicide.’ (Franz Kafka, 1904)
So does a book you’re reading need to make you feel like you’ve just been gut-punched in order to qualify as a masterpiece?
Obviously, few books are like Kafka’s Metamorphosis or The Castle when it comes to skull-hammering. And yet, as we can see from Austen’s work, gentle but persuasive nudging and a healthy dose of humor also work to move us.
What I think Kafka was trying to say is that we need to read more books which wake complex emotions in us — not that we shouldn’t read any others. I believe he was telling us to challenge ourselves more often with the complexity of what we choose to read.
In her memoir M Train, Patti Smith channeled Kafka but put a slightly different spin on what makes a book a masterpiece:
There are two kinds of masterpieces. There are the classic works monstrous and divine like “Moby-Dick” or “Wuthering Heights” or “Frankenstein: A Modern Prometheus.” And then there is the type wherein the writer seems to infuse living energy into words as the reader is spun, wrung, and hung out to dry. Devastating books. Like “2066” or “The Master and Margarita.”
I appreciate and agree with Kafka’s sentiment, but I think Smith nailed it.
Good books talk to each other
So what about books that are not divine and devastating and hammering on our skull, but are still very well-written, ask interesting questions, and give us food for thought? How do we gauge their value?
I’m thinking especially of books which critics were quick to label and put in a special drawer, as if they were tainted, or reserved only for a certain type of reader. Books whose condescending blurbs read “a classic of the __ genre,” a/k/a as good as it gets for this type of book, and absolutely not to be confused with a “normal” classic. Books like Frank Herbert’s Dune, or Shirley Jackson’s Haunting of Hill House.
I wouldn’t call Dune either monstrous or devastating, but it certainly transcends its genre. Like all good books, it’s rooted in an ancient struggle (thirst for power and ambition), but also prescient in addressing topics that will continue to engage future readers (in this case, ecology and sustainable development). Its value can be gauged by permanence: although it was written 55 years ago, it continues to find a wide audience, not just among fans of science fiction.
Had I read it as a teenager, I probably would have right away declared it a masterpiece: when we are still young readers, we are not only more easily impressed, but also don’t have that many books in our mental library to hold up for comparison.
In the early years of our journey as readers, we don’t realize that a good book always engages in a dialogue with its spiritual predecessor, that classic masterpiece that ignited its imagination. Books don’t just talk to readers, they also talk to each other. In that sense, all good books stand on the shoulders of giants that precede them. Some pale in comparison, and some rise up to the same level of mastery.
Good books have spiritual ancestors
For avid readers, recognizing and reading a good book will always be its own reward, even without knowing anything about what informed its creation. But if we’re not familiar with what George Steiner calls the book’s “line of spiritual descent,” we’re not getting the whole message; we don’t know which text(s) stand on the other side of the conversation.
As much as I love Dune, Solaris, The Left Hand of Darkness, and The Time Machine — all of them great books, all “classics of sci-fi “ — I cannot place them on the same level as the book to which they are all addressing themselves spiritually: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.
The reason for this is that Frankenstein is a masterpiece which continues to haunt our imagination 200 years after its publication. It continues to do so because it calls into question and subverts the elemental modern premise that man, through science, is equal to God. As much of a “cult classic” as Dune is, I cannot say that it haunts me, or that it touches on the essence of our human existence.
A great poem, a classic novel, press in upon us; they assail and occupy the strong places of our consciousness. They exercise upon our imagination and desires, upon our ambitions and most covert dreams, a strange, bruising mastery. Men who burn books know what they are doing. (G. Steiner)
The good and the best
Comparisons to classic books do not diminish the value of a good book. My only aim in this text was to establish that there is a notable, qualitative difference between such books and a true masterpiece, and to urge reviewers and critics to choose their words more carefully when presenting to us the value of individual books.
Classic books throw long shadows. They come to us with a lot of received wisdom, in the sense that we know before we even begin to read them that they are considered masterpieces. This doesn’t leave a lot of room for us as readers to develop our own opinions, and also places a lot of expectations on us. This is why I’m not surprised when people lie about having read Nineteen Eighty-Four or Anna Karenina.
This is also why I harp on the importance of building our own syllabi: the more — and more widely — we read, the more attuned we become to the subtle nuances between the good and the best. We then also don’t have to rely on others to make the judgment call for us.
