Sarah’s Key and Those Who Save Us vs The Kindly Ones and HHhH

There are the occasional times when I wish I had a degree in English so that I could articulate what makes a book good (although maybe being a book reviewer rather than an English major would be more appropriate for the task). So I put Sarah’s Key and Those Who Save Us, both big-name bestsellers, on one side of the good books about Nazism and The Kindly Ones and HHhH on the other side.

Hint: the bestsellers are on the wrong side of being good.

How to explain why the bestsellers aren’t good: They are simplistic. They are facile. They don’t challenge anything. People are evil. People are good. People are complacent. There’s an unending string of three or four word sentences that can be applied to them. They’re about making you feel good at the end.

This is a story I tell a lot. In fact, it is my primary, just shallowly below my consciousness reason for almost all that I do. In fourth grade, my teacher came in all upset and started telling us, what I later found out, was the big choice in Sophie’s Choice. My guess is that the movie had been on the night before. So my teacher is at the front of the classroom, visibly upset, proceeding to tell us that everyone of us in the class would have fought against the Nazis. She was convinced that every single one of us would have joined the resistance and fought to the bitter end.

Would we have? No. History suggests no. Even as a ten year old, I could see that this wouldn’t have been true. I think about this scene from my life more than is necessary. I think about how sure I was in the knowledge that my teacher was wrong, that we weren’t all great people, that most of us weren’t even good people. The bestsellers are my teacher telling us what we want to believe, that we are all kind and decent people. The bestsellers are fantasy. They aren’t about truth.

Are the others about truth? Not really. As Binet, author of HHhH says, we can dismiss The Kindly Ones as “Houellebecq does Nazism”, which is the most apt description of The Kindly Ones I have ever read and the second those words floated past my vision, I put down the iPad (reading on the kobo app) and cried “Yes!” aloud. Is HHhH any better, with it’s constant digressions and discussions on whether and how and whither the truth can be represented? Not really either. But are on the awkwardness of being just outside the truth. Both are unsettling. Both are unsatisfying but in the way that if they were to satisfy with a nice ribbon tied up in a bow on top, then they would be back to making me feel good at the end. Back to lying. Back to being popular and best sellers and maybe what we want to have happened, but what didn’t happen at all.