It's too bad, because I think this is a really interesting technical question. After finishing Emma on Monday and being disappointed, I dived into Dennis Lehane's Mystic River, in part because with Martin Scorcese pursuing his obsession with Leonardo DiCaprio as a Boston cop to the point of making a mental-institutions-with-ghosts-and-bad-accents horror movie I figured I should read the Lehane stuff that got made into good movies first; in part because I spent a bunch of my childhood living outside of Boston and had to make up for this gap in my knowledge; and in part because I wanted to read about something that is as far as possible from marriage rituals and the British class system. I'm zipping through the book, and a short list of things is making it work for me. First the plot is economical, and ruthlessly efficient. I'm pretty sure I know who did the murder, but I am absolutely desperate to get there and see for sure. Second, Lehane is not necessarily the Greatest Prose Stylist of our, or his, or anybody's generation, but he manages to get in a very good paragraph, sentence, or image often enough, that I'm picking through the text for those moments like a magpie. Third, the character sketches are deft, and the characters and plot are serving each other extremely well right now.
Each of those elements opens up a range of possible questions about how we read, and what we want out of reading, and what makes us finish books. Do women really read romance novels because they like to be narcotized by the formulas of romance? Can you write a good mystery novel if you know who the killer is essentially from the beginning? How much can a novel hinge on a character without growth or substantial plot? What makes Don Delillo's descriptions of what a nun sees when she looks at graffiti in Underworld so compelling and strange? Can plot conquer frequent use of cliche so that a book emerges triumphant? Whatever your questions are, the point is that it is possible to analyze what makes a book something readers can't leave alone, and Bachner doesn't do it!
Instead, she complains a lot about why publishers pick things she doesn't think are very wonderful for publication, and why authors whose voices she likes a lot have more trouble getting published. And in doing so, she ends up sounding like a snob. She writes about people knuckling under to "doctrinal pressure," and about gorgeous and unique voices, and about sketches and various characters, and "undeniable, electric-orange additive[s]." But mostly what her essay is about is the fact that she seems annoyed that publishers don't share her tastes:
A writer friend, whose brilliant first novel was rejected by 68 agents before she learned that sending a brilliant novel to American agents is not a good way to get published, told me she is certain that if Jean Genet or Julio Cortazar were debut authors in America today, they would never get published. Fine, I can understand how those of us who like edgy, explosive, poetic, radical, plotless work are in the minority of the market...Sometimes, I wish it was all predictable. I wish that I could reliably pick out books that would be impossible to put down, but that weren't as trashy and gross as nacho cheese-flavored Doritos. And I wish that I could also reliably pick out books that could be dipped into and dipped out of, like Drift, to carry me through summer days lying around on the High Line or sleeping in the grass along the Hudson. Then again, maybe wanting that predictability is exactly the problem. Maybe some horrible, Upper East Side dwelling literary agent who tries too hard to look like Joyce Carol Oates is not the reason that Victoria Patterson had to endure "endless rejections." Maybe I'm the reason!
Perhaps! There is an interesting argument to be made here, about the conflict between plot and voice (the word "plot" appears not once in Bachner's essay, nor does "pace". "Voice" shows up 4 times. "Addictive" in various forms 4 times. Same with "Dorito" in the singular and plural.) Bachner does not make it. Instead, it seems, she likes short stories that she feels compelled to mull over, rich characterizations, stuff that's "trippy" and complex. And all of that's dandy! But maybe she has a hard time finding books she can really rip through because she prefers books that are elliptical and invite revisiting. Again, dandy! I read a lot of stuff that's just gorgeous prose, and revisit a lot of passages, because I need the palate-cleansing when I write. But none of this is an argument about what makes a book compelling, or why compelling books with certain qualities don't get published, both of which are worthy subjects for an essay. Instead, Elizabeth Bachner is annoyed because she likes books that aren't necessarily conducive to fast reading, but she wishes she could find more books that were, but she doesn't want to read trash, and she's annoyed that more publishers aren't publishing the books she likes in the first place. Which are the ones that invite contemplative reading.
Ben Yagoda wrote an entire, fantastic, book about the intangibles that make up an author's voice and make writing worth reading. It's called The Sound on the Page, and it works partly because it concludes that voice is hard to develop in a systematic way because it's nearly impossible to define and explain. I think an essay by Elizabeth Bachner on why publishers should focus more on voice than plot, maybe, would be fascinating. But this essay isn't. To swipe her metaphors, it's not Doritos, and it's not fresh bread with pecornio, or whatever. It's a very complicated, very fancy meal, that took hours to make, and a long time to eat, and ends up not tasting like anything.