The Brooklyn Rail

With their new book, People’s Choice Literature, Tom Comitta has written what may become the definitive time capsule of our debased American literary minds. The book comprises two novels, The Most Wanted Novel, which is a thriller designed to emulate the secret sauce of airport bestsellers and The Most Unwanted Novel, a wildly angular mashup of sci-fi, tennis, and Christmas. Both novels were written with an assist from large language models (LLMs), but the latter—which we’ve chosen to excerpt here, guessing that our readership would be more interested in following all that is claimed to be undesirable in fiction—serves as a warning tale from AI about how not to write. Of course, should anyone in the future attempt to take a similar snapshot of America’s reading minds, the resolution will differ in strange and new ways, but it could never capture the precise strangeness of this moment.

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Well, the poll results are in. And they’re present whether you notice them or not. They dictate the content, form, and texture of everything that follows. Even this sentence you are reading at this very moment is directed by the poll. It’s written as a direct address—particularly a letter—to you, the reader (a mere 2.68% of Americans prefer epistolary novels); it’s written in the second person, about “you” (only 2.49% want the second person); and last, but most importantly, that sentence comments on the art of writing this novel (while experimental writing “lost out” to traditional fiction, it earned a surprising 37.64% of the vote, and of this third of the population who want experimental fiction, only 45.5% want fiction that comments on the art of writing, which means that only 17.12% of the general population will prefer that italicized sentence, the pastiche of Italo Calvino of the first few paragraphs, and similar sans-serif passages you’ll find scattered throughout this novel). Of course, you’ll see from the statistical breakdown here it’s not that no one wants these qualities in their literature. Some of our most cherished books contain similar elements. They are just, when faced with multiple options, what a representative sample of the population picked the least. Perhaps it would have been more accurate to call this book The Least Wanted Novel. Or The Novel of Bad Manners. Or The Great Un-American Novel. There could be sound arguments for all of these.

But I digress. If you read the introduction a few hundred pages back, you already know that both The Most Wanted Novel and The Most Unwanted Novel are not only guided by a public opinion poll but the findings of Jodie Archer and Mathew Jockers’s algorithmic study of what makes a novel a bestseller (and what surely does not), The Bestseller Code. You’re aware that findings from their study filled in the gaps in our poll data, informing things that a survey simply could not measure, such as diction and story structure. You also know that while writing these novels, I collaborated from time to time with a large language model (LLM), the GPT Playground, a collaborative word processor that was a precursor to ChatGPT. You know that the Playground helped me with things like character names, obstacles for characters to jump over, and even plot points, adding a level of Dungeons & Dragons-esque collaboration to the writing process. In fact, we already ran into one of these moments two paragraphs ago:

This book is the literary equivalent of a Kmart special. It was born out of the belief that there is a reader for every book, no matter how awful. It is a book of no particular merit, written by an author with no particular talent, to be read by people who want something to read, but don’t want anything better. This is the book that you didn’t know you didn’t want to read but will be glad you read anyway. Welcome to The Book That Eats Your Brain.

To write those sentences, I gave the LLM a prompt (specifically the words, “Dear Reader, Welcome to The Most Unwanted Novel, the product of a public opinion poll and this author’s creative interpretation. This book is”) and the LLM continued the thought. This is an example of one of the few passages in either book that I did not edit. Ninety-nine percent of the time, the LLM’s outputs needed a lot of help to turn its often-tinny language into something readable.

What you didn’t learn in that introductory section is that while editing this “lesser” novel, I employed yet another guide: The Turkey City Lexicon. A compendium of everything you should not do while penning a sci-fi story (or really any story), this brief glossary was compiled by the authors Lewis Shiner and Bruce Sterling from decades of discussion at the United States’ premiere sci-fi writing group, the Turkey City Writer’s Workshop. The lexicon contains everything from story types like the Rembrandt Comic Book, or “a story in which incredible craftsmanship has been lavished on a theme or idea which is basically trivial or subliterary,” to diction, such as Roget’s Disease, or the excessive accumulation of “far-fetched adjectives, piled into a festering, fungal, tenebrous, troglodytic, ichorous, leprous, synonymic heap.” The Most Unwanted Novel incorporates several moments of Roget’s Disease but relies most often on ‘Said’ Bookism, or dialogue littered with distracting verbs like “inquired” and “ejaculated” in place of the simple, economical “said.” This novel often goes even further, often pairing a ‘Said’ Bookism with a Tom Swifty, or dialogue that pairs unnecessary adverbs with the verb “said.”

Sometimes, variations on Turkey City Lexicon entries appeared in this unwanted novel without me even trying, simply because they resonated with the data from the poll or The Bestseller Code. You’ll find this in Lord Brad’s political rant, which the Lexicon would dub a “Stapledon” moment, or a scene wherein a character shows up to lecture the reader. Several other Lexicon entries appeared without additional effort:

Bathos

A sudden, alarming change in the level of diction . . .

False Humanity

An ailment endemic to genre writing, in which soap-opera elements of purported human interest are stuffed into the story willy-nilly . . .

Hand Waving

An attempt to distract the reader with dazzling prose or other verbal fireworks . . .

“I’ve suffered for my Art” (and now it’s your turn)

A form of info-dump in which the author inflicts upon the reader hard-won, but irrelevant bits of data acquired while researching the story . . .

Discovering these resonances between The Most Unwanted Novel and the Turkey City Lexicon further validated our data not unlike The Bestseller Code. Which is to say, you can rest assured this novel will either live up to its title or come pretty darn close.

And so here we are, now 1,862 words into a novel combining perhaps too much data and too many references for anyone’s good. Two novels, if you’re up for a double-header. One that has worked long and hard for you to like it. Another that, if the data is right, only a minute fraction of the population will enjoy. But enough about how these books were written. It’s time to get reading.

So what are you waiting for? Sit back, relax. Lean into the headrest of your La-Z-Boy. Rest your head on the armrest of your couch. Place your sit bones firm on the ground. If you’re home, take your shoes off. Stay a little. Adjust the smart lights—if you have smart lights—so you won’t fall asleep. Create an entirely new lighting design for this very book. Teal? Orange? Peach? Beige? Gold? (All of which are the least wanted colors from Komar and Melamid’s art poll.) If you don’t have smart lights, a lamp will do just fine. Consider additional lighting for extra support. A headlamp if your partner’s asleep. The flashlight on your phone works fine. Simply do everything you can to prepare yourself, to make sure that once you start reading, you won’t have to stop. Need a cup of water? A glass of wine? Your vape nearby? Anything else? All right, here comes The Most Unwanted Novel in 5

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The story begins in a sorrowful daze. (Only 2.01% prefer their fiction to be sad.) You’ve just awoken from a long winter’s sleep with tears in your eyes. Memories of your long-deceased grandmum and her fateful trolley accident cloud over what should otherwise be a joyous morning of hot chocolate and sugar cookies. You turn to the side, groggy eyed, whimpering, wanting tissue, would take towel, but find only the advent calendar staring back, mocking you with eellogofusciouhipoppokunurious elves and even better reindeer. You sneeze. Snoot. Your arm stretches, hand searches, touches table, cable, box. There. You pull a square from the cardboard cube and wipe at the pain. You huff. You puff. You reach for another, and there she is staring back. Grandmummy. Gran. Framed in sequins. Gray of grace. The orphic whites of her eyes, the baby blue of her pupils, her purse. Purple. Velvety. Ripe for fingers tracing shapes. You recall her fragrance. Flower by Kenzo. The kick of her laugh. That sunrise of a smile. The visions break the spell of sadness, if only for a moment. You think back to a wintry eve annums prior, the scent of sycamore cooking in the hearth, stockings strung in wait, snow cresting the windowpanes in frozen cups of light. You can almost hear her graham-cracker rasp, her Beantown wit. “Don’t judge a book by its mother . . .” she’d wink. “Can’t teach an old bog new tricks . . .” You nearly taste the Cock-a-Leekie she’d cook each winter, its meaty scent wafting through the house, twisting down hallways, up marble stairs, drifting into your room, sweeping you up in its smoky embrace. Beholding that ancient portrait, that image of loss, lost time, lifetimes lost to years, the grief returns in waves of angor. You feel fresh, hot tears rolling down your cheeks, snot bubbling from your nose. But you know you must get up. You’ve got to get a grip. It’s nearly Christmas, after all.

And so, you sit up, dab your face and sneeze, toss the soiled square to the floor. Then you help yourself up and hobble to the window. You look out, but all you see is your reflection. You fail to notice the world covered in snow, the lawns and gardens, stone walls and hedges, all tucked in snug and sweet, as if some unseen hand had draped a sleeping android babe in a thick, white coat. You ignore the lumpy fields, the colonial-style cul-de-sacs decked with holly, the clouds drifting like ravelled skeins of glossy white silk across the heavens. You miss the inflatable snowman waving from the police station and the mock Eiffel Tower peeking over the hills. You even fail to see the snowflakes drifting past your window, just inches beyond the glass. You notice nothing but your frosty face. You study the tattered, hoary wisps framing a lean, cheeky form, the aquiline nose poking out like a true baldy between two tired, florpliant eyes. You study the sprigs of wrinkles sprouting from those battered blue orbs. You trace where tears wet the wrinkles, where wrinkles branch out into freckles, where freckles meet flecks of tissue and the faint stubble of a budding beard. You trace where budding beard curves round saggy jowls and where saggy jowls meet your neck moles and where those genetic blips brush against the collar of that purple shirt housing your feeble frame. You spot yourself stooped over, gripping the sill for balance. You see the face of a sorrowful centenarian longing for his long-lost grandmum. You see yourself. You see him.

You turn from the window in disgust, shuffle back to the nightstand, and study her photograph once more. A tear rolls down your cheek before plashing the glass.

“Miss you, Gran,” you whimper.

You sneak one last look before returning the frame to its rightful home. Time to make her proud. So, you grab your racquet bag and limp down the hall.