Pop, Pulp and Hypocrisy : AN AESTHETICS OF JUNK FICTION <i> by Thomas J. Roberts (University of Georgia Press: $30; 284 pp.; 0-8203-1149-9) </i>

My favorite story in the history of art and human nature begins on Aug. 21, 1911, when the “Mona Lisa” was stolen from the Louvre. During the 2 1/2-year period before it was recovered and returned to the museum, more people came to stare at the empty wall where Da Vinci’s masterpiece no longer hung than had visited in the 10 previous years to see the painting itself. I take comfort from this lesson that the appeal of true crime over the sublime isn’t a recent (or wholly American) phenomenon.

Thomas J. Roberts would be especially interested in the probably not insignificant number of Parisians who’d seen the actual painting--with varying degrees of pleasure--but who also felt drawn to the bare wall. Their counterparts today are palpable enough: the banker who enjoys Melville but also Ludlum; the teacher who moves comfortably between Austen and Dick Francis. (I describe people I know.) How unusual, Roberts wonders in “An Aesthetics of Junk Fiction,” “is the serious reader who deeply enjoys pulp fiction as well?” Not very, he concludes, though probably less common than the “aesthetic pretenders,” those gentle hypocrites among us who believe they know which is better but choose what they think is worse.

Scholars have been casting their analytical eyes upon popular culture more and more often recently. They tend to view it one of two very different ways. A small band of aesthetic traditionalists--”Fascists,” as they are often called by their opponents--despises the products of popular culture or at least regards them as threats to the values they hold dear. Allan Bloom is the most conspicuous of this fraternity. You may recall his assessment of Mick Jagger and Michael Jackson in “The Closing of the American Mind” (“one wonders what new strata of taste they have discovered”) or his description of “Kramer vs. Kramer” as “an exercise in consciousness-raising, trashy sentimentality and elevated sentiment.”

Much more common in our universities today, though, are aesthetic anarchists of various stripes--those who question the traditional distinctions between elite and popular culture, shunning all value judgments in their commentary on art, whose very boundaries no longer are distinct. The much-talked-about (but now waning) deconstructionist movement has found popular culture a fertile field for its musings. One of the first issues of its seminal journal “Glyph” deconstructed the “Pirates of the Caribbean” ride at Disneyland, and Madonna seems to be referred to in more trendy journal articles these days than “Middlemarch.”

Roberts, a professor of English at the University of Connecticut, displays a striking lack of familiarity with--or maybe it’s interest in--either of these current approaches to popular culture. Perhaps paradoxically, that’s one of the book’s strengths. Neither an anarchist nor a traditionalist, Roberts believes that the fiction we call classical (Emily Bronte, Thomas Hardy) is greater in some absolute way than that of, say, John MacDonald. But he admires MacDonald anyway. “An Aesthetics of Junk Fiction” is a discursive, refreshingly non-theoretical report on one man’s pleasurable grazings at the smorgasbord of vernacular fiction: thrillers, mysteries, Westerns, romances and science fiction.

The title misleads a bit, however. For one thing, the book offers less an “aesthetics”--by which term we’re led to expect a systematic account of what distinguishes the good from the bad from the ugly--than an amiable hodgepodge of speculations about who reads popular fiction, and why, and how. For another, “junk” fiction--a term Roberts admits he chooses with some misgivings to describe a class of books that at one time only appeared in paper--might seem an awkward use of traditionalist language to characterize works he seeks to defend.

Roberts’ discussion of junk (read genre) fiction and its practitioners also is oddly dated. Of the 45 or so novels he discusses at some length, 16 were first published between 1970 and 1979, and 22 appeared before 1970. Nothing more recent than John MacDonald’s 1982 mystery, “Cinnamon Skin,” comes in for much attention. Among writers not treated or only mentioned in passing: Louis L’Amour, Stephen King, Sidney Sheldon, Danielle Steel, Lawrence Sanders. Among recent trends in vernacular fiction not noticed: the techno-thriller (Tom Clancy and his imitators), the resurgence of horror fiction (King, Clive Barker, V. C. Andrews, Dean R. Koontz), the novel of the Very Rich and/or Famous (Jackie Collins, Dominick Dunne).

None of these omissions invalidates Roberts’ remarks, of course, but they do suggest that the book may well have been written five or more years ago, and quite possibly drafted even earlier than that. Nowhere, in any case, does Roberts suggest that he intends this as a historical study of fiction no longer being written.

In developing his account of who reads genre fiction and why, Roberts is fond of the sweeping generalization. “We all read junk fiction,” he begins the first chapter, even those of us who usually prefer serious recent fiction (Raymond Carver, Italo Calvino) or the classics. All serious readers visit the pulp “bookscape” from time to time, he argues, for while it “may be that there are readers who have only low taste . . . there are no readers who have only good taste.”

Later, on people who read solely in one paperback genre, he writes: “The exclusivist is not a significant presence for popular fiction,” since “we are all willing to read now and then in some area we favor less.” On how genre readers regard authors: “Readers’ interest in writers is weaker in the paperback bookscape than it is in the literary bookscape.” On detective fiction: “If we look closely at these stories . . . we find they always leave us disturbed and thoughtful.”

How fatal is it to Roberts’ argument when all readers think of exceptions to all these absolutes? I can concede, for example, that the people who read paperbacks “are not the simple souls their critics make them out to be”: Many are well educated, and most are well read. But I don’t believe that “all” serious readers also enjoy junk fiction. I recall a professor of mine in graduate school who seemed to feel he had hit aesthetic bottom when, flu-ridden, he read “Madame Bovary” in English. My acquaintance with romance and science-fiction readers, moreover, convinces me that, here at least, genre exclusivism isn’t uncommon. And my father, who’s been reading paperbacks since the year Pocket Books was founded (1939), eagerly awaits each new Ed McBain police procedural, and never seems especially “disturbed” by it.

Charitably perhaps, I’m inclined to take Roberts’ generalizations as provocations for thought rather than signs of the book’s fatal weakness. To disagree is not to dismiss.

Why do we read junk fiction? Roberts rejects such hoary explanations as our need for escape (“When people read paperbacks, they do not feel as though they were running from something else”) or mindless pleasure (a lot of popular fiction, he reminds us, is demanding or grim). Rather, he argues that pulp fiction’s appeal stems partly from its capacity to immerse us in the newspaper reality of our time in ways that serious fiction (as Tom Wolfe has recently complained) rarely tried to do. It also provides us with information--on everything from interstellar dust to courtroom tactics to the handling of cattle--we seem to enjoy acquiring in this apparently effortless way. (James Michener’s popularity must have a great deal to do with his talent for teaching pleasantly what his readers think they want to learn: about Alaska, Poland, etc.) All junk fiction is inexorably time-bound--it will die with us--but that apparent limitation is precisely the source of its value to us.

Making broad statements about why we read this fiction is bound to be a perilous enterprise. The closer you get to popular fiction, the more variegated it looks. Any explanation you develop for the recent popularity of sword-and-sorcery fantasy, for example, will say little about the appeal of Regency romance or men’s adventure fiction, two other current trends in mass-market paperbacks. The mass-market readership is simply too diverse. (Actually “mass market” is a misnomer, since no paperback published today gets read by more than 10 million people; 50 million see “Batman” and 100 million the Super Bowl.) The only constant here is that our most popular fiction styles and genres--thrillers and melodramas; Westerns and detective stories--have been popular for more than 100 years, emerging as they have from the pulp magazines of the ‘20s and ‘30s, which themselves emerged from the dime novels of the 19th Century.

Roberts’ most interesting insight into the way we read junk fiction involves something he calls “thick reading.” Classic fiction invites and rewards study--it’s a literature of the monumental individual work. Vernacular fiction, by contrast, is without important single texts, but it is dynamic when viewed as a system of genres.

Shrewd paperback readers, he argues, pay less attention to the work than they do to the genre or sub-genre (the parallel-universe story, the manor-house mystery) which seems to have produced it and which it comments on. Thus Philip Jose Farmer’s 1952 story “Sail On! Sail On!”--about Columbus’ voyage to the New World on a Santa Maria with slide rules, light bulbs and a radiograph (the church, it seems, has encouraged science rather than thwarted it)--tricks experienced readers of science fiction into thinking it is one kind of story when it turns out to be quite another. Similarly, the Westerns of J. T. Edson and Ernest Haycox seem to quarrel with each other on the theatrical possibilities of the classic gunfight scene.

A science-fiction writer once observed of his genre that 90% of it is trash--but then 90% of everything is trash. Although Roberts doesn’t sufficiently acknowledge the 90% of popular fiction that is unimaginative, banal, or (worse) badly written, he writes engagingly about the fortunate 10%. You may find yourself wanting to hunt down a lot of books after reading his account of them: George V. Higgins’ “Rat on Fire,” for example, which gives us a perspective on arson we’ve never encountered before; or Benjamin Capps’ “Trail to Ogallala,” in which a schoolteacher turned cowhand carries on an imaginary feud with Melville about who’s got a tougher job, whale hunters or cattle drivers.

Roberts’ book reminds us that in art as in garage sales, one person’s junk is something another will happily pay for.