The Sunday before I taught Beloved last spring, I sat on my couch wondering how I was going to convince a room full of second semester seniors that, before they left high school that June, they should spend a few weeks reading a difficult book that would disturb, terrify, and confuse them.
Every weekday from around the beginning of September until the end of June, approximately 600,000 of my fellow American public high school English teachers and I undertake one of the most astonishing public efforts in our nation’s daily life: we try to offer 16 million young adults in high schools the chance to read, discuss, and write about literature—to experience the humanities, free of charge.
This is not an easy thing to do these days. The high school English class has changed over the past couple of decades in many of our schools, due in part to education reforms that prioritize standardization and assessment. Teachers feel pressured to instrumentalize our discipline and turn the high school English class into a fundamentally nonliterary experience of “skill building” and test prep. This is why you hear about students reading only excerpts in class or spending months in an English class without reading any literature at all. Put simply, many of us work in an education policy context that tacitly endorses the belief that literature is frivolous and does not warrant time or attention—the students pick up on this.
Now seems like a particularly terrible time to give up on trying to help students develop meaningful relationships with books. Our students’ attention is up for grabs, and we are not winning them over. People eager to keep young people’s attention have unprecedented access to their desires; they appeal to them in ways that we all know are disturbingly successful. Because of this, many of our students’ imaginations are effectively immobilized: it’s difficult to get them to look up from whatever device or algorithm is designed to grip their full attention and lure them into the unfamiliar and sometimes boring and confusing pages of books that are not interested in giving them whatever they already want. Adults responsible for tending to our students’ learning have a responsibility to help remedy this situation, and teaching literature can be a part of this. Students who wrestle with something like a serious novel are freed, temporarily at least, from the infinite feedback loop of entertainment and distraction that grasps constantly at their attention. Public high school English shouldn’t stop at skill building. That’s an obvious first step, but we should aim higher than that, try to give all kids the aesthetic education historically reserved for a lucky few.
This isn’t easy to do. For this reason, beginning a “novel unit” usually includes, for me at least, a succession of panicked thoughts and questions about my job. The Sunday before I taught Beloved last spring, I sat on my couch wondering how I was going to convince a room full of second semester seniors that, before they left high school that June, they should spend a few weeks reading a difficult book that would disturb, terrify, and confuse them. But we gave it a shot. We did a lot of reading out loud together in class; we sat in circles and discussed chapters that moved or confused us. I was glad we tried because, for a little bit at least, their hearts and minds found something wholly new to engage with.
This question of aesthetic tastes, and of reading’s role in either appealing to or disrupting them, is at the center of Tom Comitta’s People’s Choice Literature: The Most Wanted & Unwanted Novels, a two-part novel (or, rather, a two-novel novel) Comitta composed using data they collected to determine what kind of fiction Americans most and least want to read. The Most Wanted novel is a tightly plotted, 250-page thriller about criminal activity in the tech world. The Most Unwanted Novel is a 400 page experimental novel about aristocrats who live on Mars—and the journey one such aristocrat takes to find love. Because each of the two novels responds to what people do or do not want out of a reading experience, the book as a whole affords readers the chance to reflect on the scope and intricacies of American reading preferences. We experience everything from the smooth, predictable surfaces of a bestselling airport novel to the kinds of baffling complexities you might find in the most deliberately off-kilter avant-garde literature.
As a public high school English teacher, I obsess daily over the importance of broadening young people’s access to an authentic experience of the humanities, an experience that is increasingly under threat. I want to offer my students reading experiences that shake them out of what they already believe are their aesthetic tastes. This book is, among other things, an argument for exactly those kinds of experiences.
The book opens with an introduction by Commita about their project’s method and rationale. They drew inspiration from Russian emigrant artists Vitaly Komar and Alex Malamid, who in the 1990s conducted a survey about American aesthetic preferences to create two paintings: America’s Most Wanted, which is a large-ish painting depicting George Washington in nature alongside some deer and school children, backdropped by a large sky flush with hues of blue; and America’s Most Unwanted, a small, abstract geometric painting that Comitta calls “‘my kid could do that’ raised to the highest degree.” They were likewise inspired by musician and neuroscientist Dave Soldier’s follow-up musical experiment, also composed using survey feedback. The Most Wanted Music is a jazzy, tight, bright little song; The Most Unwanted Music is a clamorous multi-instrumental madhouse with a singalong, operatic rap, and a lecture about American politics shouted through a megaphone.
To conduct their own survey about American reading preferences, they enlisted Katherine Cornwall, a social scientist and survey design expert at Johns Hopkins, and the polling company Qualtrics. To supplement the survey data, Comitta read Jodie Archer and Matthew Jocker’s The Bestseller Code, took on-demand Master Classes with bestselling writers like David Baldacci and Walter Mosley, and analyzed a pile of bestsellers. They also relied on answers to the open-ended question If you had unlimited resources and could commission your favorite author to write a novel just for you, what would it be about? to help with their development of The Most Unwanted Novel. Because these answers were unique to each respondent (“[i]t would be about the secrets to success with hobbies”), and each therefore represented .1% of survey answers, Comitta could use them as engines of the most unwanted characters and plot. Finally, they used OpenAI’s Playground to help them compose occasional parts of the novel because they figured this was a way to remove their subjectivity from the process and thus further prevent their own preferences from creeping into the text.
These experiments, in other words, all aim to position authorship at the whims of popular taste: Comitta allows whatever readers want, or do not want, to do with this book what they will (or don’t).
The result: a two part novel. The first, The Most Wanted Novel, is a thriller. It follows a woman named Alix Finn who works at Genera, a large tech company. Because she is a protagonist in the most wanted novel, she is a morally good white woman from a working-class background who eventually falls in and out of love with a strong man. When we meet her, she’s working as an assistant to the company’s CEO, D.J. Wylde. In keeping with the data, he is a politically unpredictable rich guy: “a democratic socialist vegan who regularly wore $14,000 Tom Ford Alligator boots.” He is about to unveil Quanta, a mysterious new technology that’s bound to change everything.
Eventually, Alix’s brother John—a Genera security guard with a likable creative side (he is a wannabe a writer)—makes a disturbing discovery about Quanta that threatens the company’s reputation and accidentally reveals that information to gAIa, one of Genera’s competitors. John is kidnapped. Alix’s life takes a dark turn as she tries to figure out what happened to her brother, and what secrets her company might be keeping from everyone. Thankfully, she has the help of a devastatingly handsome FBI agent, the recently widowed Jason Stone (also working class, the son of a teacher). A tale of power and corruption ensues (63.1% wanted).
This wanted novel is entertaining and hilarious, and it succeeds as a satire the way all good satire does: Comitta takes their subject seriously. The funniness of it is not in the plot itself, exactly, but in the disorienting experience of knowing you’re in on a joke about the kind of book you’re reading. Because you’re aware that Comitta’s working so hard to produce a wanted book in a way that does justice to the form, the elements of the book that scream wantedness double more effectively than they would otherwise as commentaries on the sometimes-goofy features of popular books—on the strange things people want, or that they think they do.
Of the many elements of wanted fiction here—cliffhanger chapter endings, italicized inner thoughts (“Gosh darnit!!!”), forced references to “real literature” (John Finn hates Joyce, loves Kerouac), the refusal to use explicit language (“We’re so fricked”), the swiftness with which characters fall in love—the one that stands out as particularly effective at spotlighting the paradoxical qualities of popular taste is a series of belabored descriptions of the setting. Several chapters open with these, and they’re often disruptive to basic narrative elements like character development and the plot. They hover inexplicably over the chapters they open. This is, according to Comitta, a feature of the genres they’re playing with; in Dan Brown’s books, they tell us, “every chapter…begins with a long description of a historic or cultural site…that reads like a Lonely Planet Travel Guide.” It is also a response to the fact that many people (54%) apparently prefer such long descriptions, perhaps because they have developed an expectation for them from their past reading. I laughed and shook my head each time I read one of these. For example, “Spanning over the 4,310 acres of rugged terrain in the Santa Monica Mountains, Griffith Park reigns as Los Angeles’s largest municipal park…” So begins a two-paragraph description of Griffith park in Chapter 6 where a mere name would have sufficed.
The peculiarity of wantedness here seems fairly clear, and it vibrates out into other, more troubling aspects of wantedness, like the predictability of the characters’ desires, the trivialization of their socioeconomic statuses, and their bland moral narrowness. Many features of popular fiction are not only tired and overdone, they are also essentially contingent, unjustifiably bad tropes tethered in place by prejudices that favor familiarity; they are preferences we cultivate without really thinking about them, remnants of patterns we have entered into and can’t escape because we simply don’t know any other way. These are the kinds of tastes a high school English class—and an authentic experience of the humanities more broadly—can help undo, or at the very least complicate. If taught well, a good book can intervene in these preferences, cultivate a taste for something new.
The Most Unwanted Novel eschews those preferences. Narrated in the unwanted second person, the narrative unfolds over a single day (Christmas Eve—people don’t want to read about religion). Our protagonist is Lord Tickletext, a 160-year old aristocrat who loves Jesus and Christmas and falls madly in love with a woman he meets, loses track of, and then spends the entirety of the novel’s 300 pages trying to track her down. We are on Mars (only 17% want distant planets), which has been colonized by aristocrats who escaped an Earth scorched by climate change (an unwanted topic) and overrun by liberal, humanoid cats. All the aristocrats play tennis (0% wanted). Because people do not want to read epistolary novels, much of the book’s development proceeds through messages sent directly between characters’ brains.
An unwanted novel does not follow a linear plot. To achieve adequate unwantedness, the narrative is interrupted by a series of digressions. At one point, we wander with Lord Tickletext through a set of nested VR adventures framed as historical fiction, (an unwanted genre), in which we witness things like cowboy babies serving shots of chocolate milk, a turncoat scene from the American Revolution, and a glimpse of the Holy Roman Empire. Towards the end, as we approach the book’s resolution, the point where we find out who this lost love might be, we meet someone who seems an awful lot like Robin Hood (Hobin Rood)—an unwanted reference to classic literature. Throughout, an authorial persona named Tom explains the process—people do not like it when writers comment on their own art.
In one explanation, Tom reflects on a central takeaway here: their decision in this unwanted book to “go so far to the extreme” of unwantedness (this note follows an especially explicit horror story entitled “Ball Boys”). They refer, in this moment of self-reflection, to Japanese sound artist Masonna’s Spectrum Ripper, a “twenty-five-track album of noise music” that is “the most extreme that music can get.” Works of art like that, we are told, do “more than just shock us or make us laugh.” More importantly, “they both reveal the range of what is possible in a given medium and provide listeners, readers, and viewers with levels of thought and feeling not achievable with business as usual.” Most readers will find in this unwanted book something they happen to like that maybe others do not—experimentally hypotactic sentences, overwrought diction, transgressively explicit sexual content, a degree of self-referentiality, freewheeling speculations into science and politics and the future—and they will see that thing rendered almost unbearably extreme.
But that extremity can remind us of what draws us to unwantedness—indeed, to reading in general—in the first place. Books that operate in the unwanted mode invite us into “levels of thought and feeling” that are beyond “business as usual,” have the power to carve out in us a space that makes room for something entirely new. This is reading’s complicated gift to us.
These experiences can be what Sarah Chihaya calls life ruiners; they can disturb us in sometimes unwelcome ways. We rarely leave our most important reading experiences unchanged. This is because a truly great book collapses the specious boundary between wantedness and unwantedness. Literature that endures does so by rupturing old wants and creating new ones: we discover new narrative forms, encounter new stories or new ways of telling familiar ones, experience our own language fashioned anew. Those of us who reject romantic notions of individual genius nevertheless can admit that there’s something to be said for a dose of extreme, un-assimalable newness—an aesthetic experience that does not appeal merely to our existing tastes and preferences, that does something unprecedented to us.
And thinking about this all brought me back to my classroom—to the work I do daily trying to convince kids to read books that do not align with what they immediately identify as their tastes. Why, for example, do I plan to keep teaching Beloved, despite the challenges? The book is a nonlinear ghost story, a work of historical fiction that forces readers to confront, in violent detail, the horrors of slavery and of America’s history more broadly. It is also a book that, as Dan Sinykin explains in Big Fiction, challenges literary convention and conglomeration from within. By writing a book that “allegorized” experiences that led her to leave the publishing industry, Morrison crafted a book that is thoroughly and terrifyingly, in Sinykin’s words, “about the exhilaration of freedom.” Reading it with my students—many of whom find it a baffling and disturbing experience that is ultimately deeply rewarding—feels especially important now. So I am going to keep doing it.
Broadening access to the humanities, to experiences like reading great, disturbing, challenging, and ambitious literature—an effort that gives, for example, a room of public school kids the chance to experience the thrill of something entirely new—is needed now in ways that are difficult to overstate. There’s an essential kind of freedom at stake. When efforts to collect information about our preferences inform everything from the mission of artistic institutions, to strategies of political campaigns, to the ways we raise and relate to our children, we need to do some serious thinking about how we persuade people to pursue the kind of aesthetic experiences that challenge and change us, rather than the ones that leave us right where we already are.
Certainly the classroom seems like a good place to pick up that kind of work, and those of us who are fortunate enough to do this work should do exactly that.
John Downes-Angus is an English teacher at Baruch High School in New York City, a small public high school. His students call him Mr. DA and will likely find—and critique some aspect of—this essay.
Article photo: James McNeill Whistler, Reading, 1879, Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public Domain.